Yue Empire


 * "Reason makes Might"
 * 以理, 来权

=Overview= The Yue Empire, the dominating power in wartorn Yarlung. Ruled over by the Yue Emperor, the empire is made out of countless states and provisional territories encompassing all of the continent of Nanyue and some of posterior Yarlung, mixed between willing and unwilling members. The once devastated people of Shenlong's continent forged ahead to create a new power to protect mankind, to ensure that eikons and the heretic religion they too-often come with could never threaten their era ever again.

In recent years, the forceful taking of Ulanara in 962 and the conflict between Yue and the zelkova country beginning in the 970s have drawn attention, but the gradual assimilation and loss of unique culture in Yarlung under imperial provision have muddled the situation. While many refugees have fled from areas under imperial occupation, large numbers of people have submitted or even joined Yue's ranks, whether agreeing with their stance on the denouncement of divinities, seeking money, or simply wanting to be on the "winning team". Strong, pervasive rationalist stances permeate every facet of the Yue Empire, where people are told from birth that eikons, idols, and gods are all things that result in destruction and greed, and that their worship must be suppressed at all costs.

Origin

 * See also Nanyue under Locations.

The elder dragon Shenlong, who had once risen the lands of Nanyue up from the sea on a whim, named her kin that walked its shores the Tideborn out of her grief for her failure to deliver Bahamut from madness. Stronger than man, wiser than sea-beasts, she had a brief wish for them to fend the monsters that overran the depths of Bahamut's empty seas. Then, in infinite sorrow, Shenlong laid to rest at the bottom of the ocean.

Superior to both the aulin and leviathan alike, Shenlong's tideborn possessed a sliver of the eikon's innate pride. Taken to a diverse range of emotions, innumerable and immeasurable in shade, they were unlike their patron - and it would be this unpredictability that would divide them. The tideborn began to wage wars against each other, filling the continent of Nanyue with naught but bloody war for centuries on end. Whenever progress was made, the warring tribes would break it back down again. Wherever civilization had been built, the sea beasts would lay siege.

Over time, the warriors that kept the tides began to bear resentment. It was Shenlong who had given them such power, yet sentenced them to barbarian fighting and limited them from weaving aura. The storms that raged the seas seemed they would never end. By the 900s, amidst a rapidly progressing world, the future of Nanyue seemed bleak. Shallow knowledge, narrow horizons, the lands had held low status for hundreds of years. The tideborn sought deliverance from this dead-end fate. Among the tribes, the combatants began to seek the power of the ancient relic the Heart of Yue.

But when they seized it at last, unimaginable tragedy befell the land, one by one in an event known as the Nanyue Calamity. Shenlong struck down like lightning and destroyed all of the ancient powerful relics she had left behind, changed Ulanara from a green prairie into a scorched desert; making men suffer in heat, and created a powerful pattern of reoccuring tropical storms that would transform the bottom of Nanyue into a marshland. Full of remorse that she had been taken so lightly by her children, Shenlong vowed to leave them with one last gift: never to return, in this or any other lifetime.

The exact year of this event is lost to the destroyed annals of history, but it is thought to have occurred in the early 900s.

Founding

 * "Hearken to me, what has borne from the golden age but for mankind's punishment? If the beings we once revered as gods would turn their back on their progeny, so shall we too forsake them."

Though eikons had once given rise to mankind with their own hands, it was not the eikons who had to suffer of mankind's mortality, nor their transient grievances and joys. As the eikons fell to slumber, abandoning the world they had once flown freely upon, only Terra's children could survive, in an unending cycle of life and death.

When Shenlong scarred the earth, disheveling and upturning rock and dust from where it once stood, leaving deep gouges in the lands she'd forsaken, the craters revealed the tideborn's long-sought liberation - a substance known as aurite.

The Yue tribe, once a small tribe that did not cover many territories except at the heart of the country, saw opportunity in the wake of the Nanyue Calamity that rippled outward from its center. War was suddenly declared on other territories in Nanyue, still reeling from the effects of Shenlong's terror, with advanced technology that rendered their small numbers insignificant. In the harsh climate and environment, Yue overwhelmed every other territory one by one. It was so swift that while distracted by other conflicts, the once sovereign countries around Yue fell admist the confusion. The land that had been annexed by force was quickly assimilated under one man's rule, until Yue forces dominated almost the entire continent.

Under one prospering banner, a golden age of technology was quickly entered where aurite was paramount, quickly leading to the Yue specialization in technologies the international society had never seen before, and accepted the beginning of advanced civilization that would soon dwarf its neighbours in countless regards.

Such was the founding of the Yue Empire in the year 950 A.T. - or, the year Yue 00 - and its one pioneer, or warmonger, would be known thereforth as the Yue Emperor.

Aurite
When Shenlong cratered the earth irreparably, the deep gouges exposed antimonial, aura-saturated mineral hence known as aurite, and the first men of the Yue Empire would be the first men in the world to develop technologies of harnessing it, which are closely guarded secrets to this day and something to which no other country or organization has similar access. The Yue Empire consumes vast amounts of aurite in order to power much of their society and military.

Though Nanyue has been long populated by tideborn and others of the Great Races alike, the curse which Shenlong laid upon the tideborn resulted in the majority of people on the continent having no capacity to actually USE their own aura. However, the development of aurite technology would change this forever.

Aurite can fuel anything and grant it the same motive energy that living beings have, without a direct need for life or electricity. Unlike psychic utilization equipment such as the Aeon chip technology of Lasair, or the magic-electric technology found in the Ossyran RE-LIVE networks, no usage of one's aura is needed for aurite technology to function: rather than using the life energy of a vital being, the energy of the aurite mineral is used in its place as a direct source of aura independent of life. As such, it is unique in these properties. Even a tiny shard of aurite would be enough to power your whole house for years, likely decades.

Aurite is harvested from deep layers of Terra's earth where it runs through other minerals in the form of aurite veins, which are not normally exposed or accessible, and up until the advent of aurite technology, were not commonly known of. Several aurite veins were partially exposed during the Nanyue Calamity, which has lead to the development of widespread aurite mines in order to get further and further into the earth.

Large quantities of aurite are often processed, refined, and distributed at aurite plants where they are made into highly efficient sources of energy, which have become a mainstay of Yarlung territories due to imperial influence. The major aurite plants are in Zaifang, Nanyue; Yehebek, Ulanara; and Zhou, Jiusyu. Minor aurite plants can be found all over Nanyue mainland and are often part of Yue Machina facilities. In aurite plants, aurite may be turned from its crude mineral form to more refined crystals which are typically encased, canisters or elaborate engines into which liquidized aurite is placed, or several other types of aurite technology.
 * An example is aurite ignitions, designed for one-time combustions of aurite which can be used as bullets for aurite weapons commonly used by the Yue Empire, or linked together to form aurite-ignition chains which might power rapid-firing automatic weaponry, all without the need for gunpowder, electricity, or air pressure.

There are two main categories of aurite-powered or enhanced engines, classified by auxiliary or primary utilization.
 * Aurite Drives are primary aurite engines, and by far the most common application of aurite power to date. They may use aurite canisters or encased aurite, with the former being considered generally more of a sustained energy but depending on the model slightly more expensive than the latter. Encased aurite may consist of anything from a basic steel casing to a complex shell that features glass routing, over a refined or crude aurite crystal. Aurite Drives can be found within the great steel engines of maritime trains and Arms Frames and are capable of an extremely high output of power, able to power giant machinery and infrastructure, but cannot be reused, and thus require replacement. The replacement of maritime trains' Aurite Drives is exceedingly infrequent due to the size of the trains' engines, happening every couple of years or so, and is generally planned for in advance to minimize downtime.


 * Aurite-electric reactors are partially solar-electric systems which use photovoltaics to harness aurite power in a two-phase process, resulting in a much more slow and controlled burn of energy that tends to be safer and generally more widely accepted. Aurite-electric reactors wholly make up the energy grid of Zaifang, resulting in highly reliable energy throughout the entire capital. Compared to other aurite power engines, aurite-electric reactors are exceedingly cheap to make and maintain with a comparatively high output and reliability, and this efficacy has lead to widespread power in towns and villages throughout the entire continent of Nanyue, for almost all of the citizens of the Yue Empire.

Aurite powers military technology from imperial firearms, weapons, and war machines, but it also fuels the majority of Nanyue citizens' everyday lives, such as transportation, certain power grids such as the one in Zaifang, civil automation, and the Yue Empire's trademark industrial production, all relying on aurite.

In territories solely governed by the Yue Empire, aurite technology is usually within the top 3 energy sources, if not the highest.

Effects of aurite
In the Imperial Core, large swaths of the land have been stripped indiscriminately in order to reveal aurite beneath, leading to a wide landscape of scarred earth and crystallized aurite veins.

Raw aurite, as well as the forms of aurite most close to it, is known for its high antimonial toxicity and requires great care in handling. It can cause aurite poisoning, associated with general sickness and malaise, respiratory illness, and gradual physical degeneration in man. Aurite poisoning is sometimes referred to as metastasis, and it can occur in any lifeform, including plants, animals, and sections of living earth, which are common on Terra.

The high prevalence of the handling, processing, and extraction of aurite have lead to changes in the environment of Nanyue. Dark clouded skies are common all throughout the continent, and it is theorised that aurite development may be a reason behind this. The devastation that aurite extraction has wreaked upon the already-scorched land has made Nanyue harsh and inhospitable, leading to an increasing lack of agriculture and a need for other sources of food, in addition to extinction and mutation of several different species and vulnerability to vual bleeds.

Yue Machina

 * "Reach, Rapport, Rationale"

Yue Machina is a global multimodal transportation, freight, and arms manufacture firm, coming as a result of the merger between Ouyang Shipping Ltd. into the Yue Empire's proprietary transport division. This was a deal that would later lead to widespread developments of transportation spanning from Yarlung to around the world, including among other things the emergence of the now-prevalent maritime train - and making it inseparable from Yue’s strong interest in globalization. They first appeared in international publications in the 960s, though mentions and information were sparse until the development of the maritime railways and appearance of their trademark Arm Frames in the public eye.

Yue Machina is known for their developments in global transport, particularly their invention of high-efficiency tramways (HETs) and the maritime train, a vehicle which can travel along fixed railways at the highest speeds currently known to the global transportation industry, carrying coupled cars which may hold anything from passengers to cargo or even the occasional shop or office.
 * Maritime trains are prevalent in all of the three realms, and true to their namesake have railways stretching across the seas. They utilize aurite-powered barrier fields (ABFs) in order to shield their high-speed cars from all manners of harsh weather, including Yarlung and Ossyra's tropical storms, La Mescan dust devils, and most importantly the raging ocean, which is parted seemingly imperviously. Unlike traditional marine navigation, maritime trains can cross the distance that would take a ship hours to span in only mere minutes, immediately making it safer and more convenient. As such, they have been recognized as a highly efficient way of getting across Terra, which is notoriously large. Initially, they were invented in order to connect distant places within Nanyue, but past the 960s, they began to globalize to areas such as Jiusyu, La Mesca, and major Ossyran city-states. The shields that maritime trains are equipped with come with an automatic engagement system that is constantly manned by a handful of sentient pilots that operate in shifts to ensure full-time coverage in the event that manual engagement is needed. It is known that ABFs are not impervious to all forms of damage, but there have yet to be any major publicly reported occurrences of damage occurring as a result of the system's failure or malfunction. Maritime trains and the large amounts of cargo that they haul have become a notable target for train robbers hailing from the Outpost in La Mesca, a subject which has lead to affiliation between Yue Machina and some bodies of influence in La Mesca.

Arms Frames
A broad term used to refer to a category of mobile weapons which have seen rise in recent years in Yarlung and a handful of areas around the globe - if only in applications few in number, which separates them from forces such as the Lasairian Dragoons. They are powerful mechanized "frames", ranging from several to a several hundred metres tall, which are operated by pilots, and engineered by none other than Yue Machina's brightest, greatest minds.

Arms Frames are able to greatly surpass past innovations in the world of military vehicles such as tanks, in terms of their offensive capabilities. The exact inner workings of Arms Frames of course vary, and are not typically public knowledge by any stretch.

Nevertheless, the amount of research, resources, and logistical manpower that building and maintaining even a single Arms Frame takes makes it next to impossible for an individual to produce and use them on their own. Therefore, the use of Arms Frames, which are outrageously high-cost, high-performance machines, is mostly localized in nations with advanced technology which have the means to do so,

The implications of this class of emerging weapons have not gone unnoticed globally, despite their rare and centralized usage. Many nations have called for treatise to restrict or abolish Arms Frames, as their applications in war, however relatively localized to date, have proven immensely destructive. Yue Machina’s continuous pursuit of development of this field has lead to many of the incidents which have lead to Arms Frames becoming more infamous to begin with; including large losses of capital, evidence of possible debts, environmental harm, and even accidents of loss of civilian life during early use of their experimental, dangerous frames. Yue Machina’s global reputation is often cited by anti-Arms Frames movements as cons to development of such weapons. The threat of such an armory not only to opposing countries, but to the Yue Empire's own people and the provisional territories under its command, has raised the concern of organizations such as a couple global unions and myriad anti-war organizations including the Mohists.

Yue Machina sports a handful of different frame models and several small variations upon them, though the number of machines Yue Machina has manufactured is nowhere near encroaching the level of, for instance, the Lasairian military’s Dragoons. Based upon theories in academia, the number in active circulation is rumored to be only around ~50, many of them being license exclusive and custom-fit for each pilot, meaning there is not yet mass production.

The design and purpose of YM frames reflects imperial aims, combining weapons and engineering systems. Most fall into either one of two categories: overwhelming offensive performance, or haulers which guard the movement of goods within imperial territory lines. They focus mainly on durability and material strength.


 * Realgar System: Yue Machina has patented for the use in their frames the Realgar System. These Aurite Drives have only seen usage in YM frames, as their use outputs such a high level of power and are so expensive to stabilize that use is impractical elsewhere. Utilizing specialized and later even structurally modified aurite engineered by YM research teams, Realgar Systems are said to be capable of harnessing energy through a high-purity aurite crystal which has undergone rigorous refinement after a complex one-way infusion process which is only stable within a special chamber of the machine. Realgar Systems cannot be recharged or continuously used; they must be replaced entirely after the energy has been exhausted. The exact origins of the mechanism purported to reside within Realgar Systems is unclear, and the newly in-development "Orbiment Drivers", a new supplement to the system to be tested for use in future models, are even more questionable.

Inside of a YM frame, the pilot uses hefty, complex control columns which require physical strength and skill in order to operate. Yue Machina licenses are rigorously selective, and only top candidates from the Yue military can undertake the multiple screening processes that lead to complicated training for machines that would be unwieldy in the hands of anyone else.

It has been reported that in cases of emergency power depletion, pilots have been trained to draw their own blood in large amounts as a last resort energy source for the Realgar Systems when their frames are otherwise out of power. This has lead to the small division being referred to as Yue’s "blood knights", or xuè xiá.