Chu Ye

The healers of Chu Ye were particularly well known during the rule of Imperial Lung Wa. Even though they were not generally trusted by Lung Wa’s aristocracy (who often derided the notion of seeking out a “farmer’s doctor”), the healers of Chu Ye pioneered many methods of nonmagical healing and relaxation, from acupuncture to massage. Yet despite this history of healing, Chu Ye harboured a hideous secret — it was infected by oni.

Capable of assuming humanoid form, the evil spirits known as oni delight in hiding among unsuspecting societies, using the inhabitants to sate their sinister hungers and pleasures. When Lung Wa collapsed, Chu Ye was relatively isolated and protected from direct repercussions of the government’s self-destruction, yet it was beset by an even greater evil — the oni that lurked among the populace saw their chance and revealed their true forms. It may have seemed as if every other man, woman, and child threw off their human masks to reveal a demon, but in fact less than 5 percent of Chu Ye’s populace were oni. Still, it was enough. The oni seized power, and in the course of a week of bloody horror, the nation went from a kingdom of healing to a kingdom of pain.

For a year, the oni treated Chu Ye as their personal playground, and the nation suffered greatly. Word of the oni’s cruelty soon spread, but with chaos and atrocities overwhelming the rest of the continent, none came to save Chu Ye. After a year, a great and powerful oni — a void yai voidlord named Tsuneni — proclaimed himself Shogun of Chu Ye. The nation’s violence settled somewhat after that, with giants from the Nightford Mountains and the wildlands of neighbouring Zi Ha coming to serve the oni as an army. Although humans still make up a significant a portion of Chu Ye’s population, they now form a slave class bound to an oni-scribed doctrine known as the Steel Dictate, a decree that no human may wield a weapon—weapons are for giants and oni alone.