Factions

The factions of the Springs each hold something everyone needs. None of them is the good side. Each has something it wants, something it fears and someone it hates.

The Balance Bureau

天衡司. What’s left of the bunker’s administration. Holds the Gate, the central air filters and the AI core.

• Wants: order, with themselves in charge.
• Fears: collapse, and anyone reaching the AI core.
• Claims: that the old AI still speaks through them.
• Runs the Confucian Minglun Academy (明伦书院). Its officials are trained in the internal arts that are banned for everyone else.

The Iron Scale Society

铁鳞会. A syndicate that seized the water pumps during the Floor Wars. Controls water, smuggling between floors, and gambling.

• Wants: profit and power, and one day the Gate.
• Fears: losing the pumps.
• Ruthless, but they are the reason anyone has water at all.

Jishi Hall

济世堂. Rogue doctors, gene-hackers and implant surgeons. They sell medicine and implants to everyone.

• Wants: knowledge, and a cure for the Grey.
• Fears: Bureau crackdowns, and their experiments coming to light.
• Saviours who sometimes make people disappear. Their hall in the Market Square is where the story begins.

The Fist Union

拳宗. An alliance of martial-arts schools whose fighters have cybernetic bodies. Each school guards its own floor and its own style. They protect the Market Square.

• Wants: independence for their floors and their people.
• Fears: their styles being stolen and copied onto kata chips.
• Divided inside, between traditionalists and chip users. Member schools include Xuanmen Abbey (Taoist exorcists in a cave abbey), the Vajra Court (Chan fighting monks) and the Poshan Boxing Hall (the Walled City’s street watch).

The Mohists

墨者. The engineers’ guild that keeps the pumps, filters, lifts and power running, from the Works deep below.

• Wants: to keep the Springs alive, by the old Mohist ideals of care for all and no war of aggression.
• Fears: machines failing faster than they can be fixed, and being forced to pick a side.
• Poor, stubborn and respected. Everyone needs them.

The Incense Assembly

香火会. A cult that worships the digital ghosts of the dead as ancestors.

• Wants: to be led outside by the dead.
• Fears: the Bureau’s ghost purges.
• Bitter rivals of Xuanmen Abbey, whose exorcists “kill” their ancestors.