Factions

The factions of Nine Springs are the groups that run the sealed bunker-city, and each holds something everyone needs: air, water, medicine, the machines or the dead. None of them is the good side. Each has something it wants, something it fears and someone it hates, and the player’s reputation with each one changes how the game goes.

The Balance Bureau

天衡司 (Tiānhéng Sī). What’s left of the bunker’s administration. Holds the Gate, the air filters, the AI core and the seed foundry, and licenses who may consult the dead.

• Wants: order, with themselves in charge.
• Fears: collapse, and anyone reaching the AI core.
• Hates: the Incense Assembly (heretics) and the Iron Scale Society (rival power).
• Claims: that the old AI still speaks through them.
• Runs the Confucian Minglun Academy (明伦书院). Its officials are seeded and trained in the internal arts, while commoners need a licence that almost nobody gets. See Force.

The Iron Scale Society

铁鳞会 (Tiělín Huì). A syndicate that seized the water pumps during the Floor Wars, now run like a company with grades, reviews and quotas. Controls water, smuggling between floors, and gambling.

• Wants: profit and power, and one day the Gate.
• Fears: losing the pumps.
• Hates: the Balance Bureau and the Fist Union.
• Fights with guns from cover, and sends machines in first. Ruthless, but they are the reason anyone has water at all.

Jishi Hall

济世堂 (Jìshì Táng). Rogue doctors, gene-hackers and implant surgeons. They sell medicine, implants and back-alley seeding to everyone.

• Wants: knowledge, and a cure for the White Bloom.
• Fears: Bureau crackdowns, and their experiments coming to light.
• Hates: nobody openly.
• Saviours who sometimes make people disappear. Their hall in the Market Square is where the story begins.

The Fist Union

拳宗 (Quán Zōng). 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.
• Hates: the Iron Scale Society.
• Fights with Force and old weapons, and thinks guns are dishonourable in a duel. 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 (Mòzhě). The engineers’ guild that keeps the pumps, filters, lifts and power running, from the Works deep below. They seed their own engineers openly, and the Bureau can’t afford to stop them.

• 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.
• Hates: nobody openly, though they resent the Iron Scale for hoarding parts and the Bureau for taking credit.
• Poor, stubborn and respected. Everyone needs them.

The Incense Assembly

香火会 (Xiānghuǒ Huì). 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.
• Hates: the Balance Bureau, and Xuanmen Abbey, whose exorcists “kill” their ancestors.
• Crazy, comforting or dangerous, depending on who you ask.

Chinese names and other terms are collected in the glossary.