Bonus: The Ministry of Integrity

Commerce, Communication, Law, and Spiritual Affairs.

These four great institutions have been the bulwark of Imperial governance since the first dynasty. The many clerks and officials employed by the ministries have worked tirelessly throughout the millennia to maintain the Empire’s cohesion and the Imperial peace, resolving the many, many conflicts which arise between the Empire’s Great Families and provinces and ensuring the efficient execution of the Emperor’s or Empress’ will throughout their lands.

– May be too blunt. Reduce implications of fault for the nobility. Further emphasis on how the ministries assist and support.

However, under Emperor Si, a fifth ministry was founded. Headed by then-Crown Prince An, shortly after his success in the South Emerald Seas, it began as a subdivision of the Ministry of Law. The wise prince envisioned the group as agents empowered by the Imperial seal to not only simply interpret law and advise a land’s liege lords but also to punish gross violations of the Imperial will and the orderly operation of society.

In those early days, the agency’s primary focus was on matters of finance. Over the many millennia of the Empire’s rule, it is an unfortunate truth that a great many cities, towns, and villages had become lax in paying their dues to the Throne. The first task, then, was to investigate the aging infrastructure of the Ministry of Commerce and find where the rot had set in at their worst and where the troubles were caused by malicious and disloyal individuals.

Truly, it was a glad day for the Imperial Seat when their revenues doubled in a matter of decades, merely from performing simple upkeep. At last, the damage wrought in the declining days of the second dynasty were set to rights, and this accomplishment earned the Crown Prince many accolades. Indeed, this accomplishment can be credited with truly solidifying his position as Crown Prince.

– Putting it too lightly. The Imperial tax code was a barely coherent morass of incoherent language and special exceptions. It is a minor miracle that the Throne accumulated any income at all before our reforms.

— True, but irrelevant for the document. Implication of outright incompetence and malice in past and present institutions will not play well, even under current conditions. Better to allow the blame to fall upon generational rot.

When the Prince was crowned as Emperor An, the remit of the agency was expanded to include other crimes. Abuses of the mortal populace, such as barred forms of medicine and cultivation research, were rooted out. Smuggling activities and proscribed cults were curtailed and dismantled, and those disloyal nobles guilty of funding or participating in such crimes punished.

– So short a recounting given the horrors we uprooted. It seems disrespectful in a way.

— Unfortunate, but it is better for proscribed cultivation methods to die in obscurity than be given attention. We all remember how matters of the Cult of Twilight turned out when secrecy broke.

— Not one of us took our oaths for glory. Let them be forgotten.

At this point, with many thousands of agents and hundreds of managerial staff, the agency had expanded far beyond the limits of a subdivision. And yet for all that, their workload was crushing, and more personnel were required. So it was that in the thirty-fifth year of his reign, Emperor An decreed the formal formation of the Ministry of Integrity and named Sima Jiao as its first Minister. Along with this expansion came an additional duty.

– I would strike that man’s name from our records if I could.

— Traitor to the cause he may have become, his deeds still laid the foundation for all else.

Throughout the Empire’s history, it has been plagued by the rise of malcontents and spirit cults, practitioners of forms of cultivation more foul than all but the worst of barbarian practices, and other such ills. Many were the tales of whole clans and towns wiped from the map by crazed individuals of high talent who had stumbled across good fortune or the sponsorship of some malign spirit.

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– So many talents lost. I weep for what the Empire has missed.

— While many began with legitimate grievance, those talents who could not restrain themselves once they had a taste of power and revenge became beasts.