The Heavenly Bridge of Xiangyu

At a distance from the huddled, ramshackle dwellings of Crayfish Village, this cheery edifice rings with music and laughter at all hours. There is no sign out front, but rising from the ground just before the front door stands a curious white pillar as high as a man’s waist. Its top is jagged, and it plunges downward to the ground in a smooth curve, narrowing as it nears the ground.

It is a gigantic fang — or at least, so claims the owner of this inn, Cedric Bowlans. The nearby forest known as Serpent Wood was once (or perhaps is still) home to an immense creature, from whose jaws this fearsome tooth was wrenched by parties unknown.

The Serpent’s Tooth serves as town hall, rest house, entertainment and meeting place for the wealthy and desperate alike of Crayfish village. Yu householders are often found here, usually masked to keep their identities secret, but no other place near the Heavenly Bridge can offer the amusements found at the Tooth.

Half Imperial tea house, half bawdy pirate tavern, the Tooth is a sprawling collection of buildings within a walled enclosure, shrouded by spreading banyan trees and separated by well-tended gardens, with pools and streams and ornamental shrines found throughout. The main building, right in front, is broad and mostly taken up by a boisterous common room ringed with two levels of balconies. Many infamous duels have been fought here, to the great amusement of the attendants. There are dancing stages and music always playing, and the back of the room looks out onto a wide pool, with the other buildings ringed around.

Other buildings include more private rooms for large or intimate gatherings, suites and rooms for rent by the night or the week (or the hour), and a couple of specialized buildings for music or dance performances.

Cedric Bowlans claims to have been an admiral in the Imperial Navy, to be one of the few survivors of the Battle of Luyon Bay. He arrived here a couple of decades ago, and has been building and expanding his infamous pleasure house ever since.

Twenty-five years ago, led by Master Yu Chen-Pao, the Yu family and their householders came to Crayfish Village and set up camp on the long-shunned island known as the Bridge. The family itself numbered about forty, and their household retainers another several hundred. Over the years, the number of retainers has grown to nearly a thousand, while the family has added another couple dozen to its ranks.

The Yu Family had been famed throughout the Empire for their knowledge and wisdom, especially as pertained to matters of Heavenly Medicine and they were often sought out as advisors and physicians to the great nobles of the Empire. Their legendary fortress home had once housed many ancient scrolls of healing wisdom and secret power, now almost all destroyed in the battle that cost the family their home and their position in the Empire.

They restablished themselves on the Crayfish River and built a new Heavenly Bridge of Xiangyu here with what little they could salvage from the battle. Their wisdom and power is now available, for a price, to those who seek it, but the family is difficult to deal with and suspicious of all outsiders. Negotiations are handled through assorted functionaries, and most services require steep payments — usually in the form of lost scrolls or artifacts once sacred to the family and their ancestors.

Those who balk at the prices are many, but those who attempt to cheat the family are few — and those few always suffer unpleasant fates. The Yu family possesses many terrible secrets, and they have inhuman servants to take revenge upon those who displease them.

Since coming to Crayfish, and re-establishing this haunted place as the new home of the Heavenly Bridge of Xiangyu, things seem to have improved for the family. The younger family members have no memory of their ancestral home, and have little of their elders’ burning fire for vengeance against the eunuch sorcerers now ruling the Empire. This is not the only divide between the young and the old in this family, however. The children born here are strangely touched, in ways that no one in the family dares to speak of. Their eyes shine with too much wisdom, and their tastes run to unseemly pleasures. They spend much time clustered silently on the walls of the family fortress, or hovering in the endless lanes of temples and shrines that fill the castle walls. The dark voices of the local spirits speak to them, or so it seems, and their parents fear what these voices are saying.

Patriarch of the Yu family, the elderly Master Yu Chen-Pao dresses in pale blue robes and keeps his long white hair in beautifully brushed straight locks, hanging down past his knees. His thin moustache hangs long as well, blending into his long beard. Bright eyes flash fiercely in his lined face and even at his age, the Master is alert and spry.

Master Yu Chen-Pao spends his days in ritual observance, carrying as he does the weight of the Yu family’s ancestors, and the shame of having fled their ancient home in the mountains of the Empire. He travels between the dozens of tiny shrines and temples that fill the newly-raised Heavenly Bridge of Xiangyu , performing the rituals that propitiate the spirits, and that perpetuate the eternal rounds of glory that are the Yu family’s share of history.

It was Chen-Pao who chose this site as the new home of the Yu family. Hearing rumours of ancient spirits, he investigate, cast many auguries, and determined that if he could forge an alliance with the strange powers gathered here, his family’s future would be assured. He embarked with his entire household for Crayfish village.

Those first nights spent on the Bridge were wild ones, as terrifying spirit creatures did their best to dissuade and even destroy the interlopers. This island had once been sacred to a terrible people, and unholy sacrifices performed here had soaked the earth with dark energies.

Exactly how Master Yu Chen-Pao reached an accord with these inhuman powers is a mystery to all, even to his closest family members.

There are no mountains anywhere near the sturdy fortress called Three Mountains Fortress. This castle is named for the ninja clan that resides here — the Three Mountains Clan who have always served the Yu family and defended the original Heavenly Bridge of Xiangyu . They are a rough-and-tumble clan of hard-drinking, hard-fighting ninjas who are considered crude bumpkins by many of the more sophisticated clans. Drawn mostly from the mountain tribes, they dress in colourful furs and do not resemble most people’s ideas of ninja at all.

Master Lamsung is known as a brutal teacher, who even in his old age is feared by his students. It is said he spends an hour every morning punching the stone walls of the fortress, and that he has to move from one location to another, or else his blows will eventually crack the massive rocks.

Three Mountains ninjas fight with simple staves, or just their fists — Master Lamsung spurns expensive, fancy weapons, and seeks to train his students to be lethal no matter what resources they find at hand. The people of Xiangyu have learned to leave the unkempt warriors of the Three Mountains Clan alone.