// Faction Intel — Select File
9 Files · Signal OK
City flag · phoenix and BauhiniaNucleus Faction Registry · File XH
Xing Hong 煋妅
Independent city-state · Hellas Basin, Mars
The city nobody can take, because everybody wants it.
Mars’s largest independent settlement and the only truly neutral ground in the Sol System. Four great powers each hold a district here. None of them holds the city.
Neutrality • Survival • Independence
18+ Viewer discretion advised. This file covers the city’s faith and its sex-work economy in plain terms.
// 01 — Doctrine
How Xing Hong survives
Xing Hong does not win wars. It makes itself too expensive to attack. In 2283 Dilinur Altai played the great powers against each other until no one of them could claim the city without bringing in the rest. That deadlock is still the city’s main defence.
Inside the walls the rule is shorter. Keep rent low, keep food cheap, keep people alive. The rest can wait. Infrastructure runs at minimum compliance, security stops the catastrophic violence and ignores the lesser kind, and anyone can immigrate for the price of passage and a registration fee.
- Four-power deadlock. The Imperium, Alliance, Directorate and Covenant each hold a district. A move by one triggers the other three.
- The Phoenix Chakra. Mars’s largest public QEC Chakra. All four powers route traffic through it, and the Prefect’s seal is the valve.
- A force loyal to the city. Constables and Blackcoats recruit from every faction and suspend that allegiance for as long as they serve.
- Line discipline. Blackcoats are drilled to hold ground under pressure, not to chase.
- Open gates. No questions at the border. Talent, refugees and money arrive daily.
- No fleet. No capital ship, no air wing. One armored transport of note.
- Thin ranks. A small standing force for more than two million people.
- The tunnels. Radi-Mons infest the ground under the city. The Prefect’s office pays bounty hunters to scout them.
- The empty chair. The Imperium refuses to send a Deputy, so the Prefect runs Dragon District herself.
- The neighbour. The Fenris Horde occupies the northern hemisphere of Mars.
// 02 — Order of Battle
What they field
Two forces under one Seneschal, and a single vehicle that matters. Tiers follow the Codex class lines.
Constable — on patrol
// Unit Record 01 · Xing Hong
Constable 武警
Xing Hong’s street-level law: patrols, disputes, investigations and arrests in a city where four rival powers keep permanent presence.
- Crowded streets and corridors
- Visible authority without a firearm’s posture
- Knowing which rules apply in which district
- Anything that needs firepower. That is when they call the Blackcoats
- Radi-Mon incursions
Recruits come from all four great powers and must suspend that allegiance while they serve. The oath has them lock their Nucleus Watch in a ceremonial box for twenty-four hours: a symbolic death of old loyalties. Former Covenant zealots end up patrolling beside ex-Directorate soldiers. Some find it hard. Some find it a relief.
Neutral law means different things in different districts. Eagle expects deference to corporate security. Dragon expects a blind eye to small things. The Slum expects nothing at all.
“Keep them alive. Keep them calm. Keep walking.”— Unofficial Constable motto
Blackcoat — greatcoat and sidearms
// Unit Record 02 · Xing Hong
Blackcoat 闇衣衛
When Constables call for backup, the Blackcoats answer. Xing Hong’s dedicated defensive infantry, named for their heavy black greatcoats.
- Holding a prepared line
- Disciplined volley fire with overlapping fields
- Keeping cohesion under pressure
- Pursuit and maneuver
- Long patrols. Gauss ammunition is heavy
- Improvisation. Individual heroics are trained out
Doctrine is formation discipline. Hold the line, overlap the fields of fire, stay together. Recruits spend eight weeks on formation drill before they touch live ammunition, and the training philosophy fits in one sentence: the line holds, or everyone dies.
Blackcoats do not walk beats. They garrison what the city cannot afford to lose: the government tower in Phoenix District, the water treatment plants, the atmospheric processors.
// Elite tier
Psionic Blackcoat
The elite tier, and the backbone of the city’s governing apparatus.
They are chosen on psionic aptitude and psychological profile, and they serve as judges, executioners and advisors. Their authority comes from abilities most citizens will never have. When a formation needs them, they fall in with a rifle like everyone else.
Leadership pipeline
Nearly every Prefect and Seneschal in the city’s history served as a Blackcoat first. Dilinur Altai rose through the psionic tier. Kenji Tsudo came up through the standard ranks.
Open to outsiders
Every ethnicity may apply, and the order prefers non-Imperial candidates for leadership so that no single power can claim the city’s defenders. Most serving Psionic Blackcoats are immigrants: Valorans who left Covenant rigidity, Maridians looking past Directorate borders, Novians done with Alliance corporations.
Doctrine on intimacy
Other martial orders in the Seven Realms demand celibacy. Generations of Prefects decided repression breeds weakness. Blackcoats may indulge their desires, sexual ones included, as often as they like, on one condition: only through legally sponsored Leased Lilies. Senior Blackcoats receive officially sanctioned discount coupons.
The Genbu on the Hellas Basin, Mars
// Unit Record 03 · Xing Hong
Genbu 玄武
The Black Tortoise. Xing Hong’s one-of-a-kind armored transport, and as much a symbol of independence as the phoenix on the flag.
- Surviving. Protection comes before speed
- Extraction under fire
- Breaking a blockade. It did in 2283
- Speed. An Alliance rover outruns it
- Firepower. An Imperial siege engine outguns it
- There is only one
The Genbu broke the Imperium’s blockades in the Independence War, and veterans of that war still talk about it with something close to reverence. Where it came from is a matter of rumour and official denial. The hull resembles both Alliance Space Rover mobility systems and Imperium Draconic Engine armor. Prefect Dilinur calls that “convergent engineering principles.”
“He flies like a brick. But that brick gets you home.”— Sergeant Haylen Shih, to new recruits
The turret housing has sealed compartments and dormant power conduits that connect to nothing. Maintenance logs from 2283 mention a “primary weapons integration system” that appears in no current schematic. Seneschal Kenji says the Directorate lent certain technologies during the war, and that they were “returned as part of diplomatic agreements.” Only the Prefect knows for certain.
// 03 — Command
Who gives the orders
Four names worth knowing. Full dossiers are in the Characters registry.
PrefectDilinur AltaiLed the Blackcoats and secured independence in 2283. Runs Dragon District herself.
SeneschalKenji TsudoCommands the Constables and the Blackcoats. A former Blackcoat.
Senior Blackcoat SergeantHaylen ShihHonghuang Palace. Breaks in the new recruits.
Local fixtureIron RoachBarkeeper and enforcer at the Slumbering Mantis Inn, Dragon District.
// 04 — Territory
Six districts, four flags
Each great power holds influence over one district through an appointed Deputy. The balance is deliberate.
- Deputy
- Seated
- Security
- Medium
- Rent
- $$$$
Corporate security expects deference. Home to Prairie Commons and Clinic Chakraborty.
- Deputy
- Vacant
- Security
- Low
- Rent
- $$
The Imperium sends no Deputy, so the Prefect runs it. Home to the Slumbering Mantis Inn and Bounty Board #7.
- Deputy
- Seated
- Security
- Medium
- Rent
- $$$
Where the Kowloon-7 Gauss Rifle is made.
- Deputy
- Seated
- Security
- High
- Rent
- $$$
The Covenant’s district. Tight security, affordable living. All residents encouraged to join the Zorian faith.
- Deputy
- Prefect direct
- Security
- High
- Rent
- $$$$$
The Prefect’s offices, the Phoenix Chakra, the Museum of Xing Hong Origins. A dormant Tether Arch lies somewhere beneath.
- Deputy
- None
- Security
- Minimal
- Rent
- $
Unofficial, and beyond formal governance.
Security and rent are Municipal Registry estimates for fiscal year 2295.
- Imperial 55%
- Maridian 15%
- Valoran 13%
- Nordling 10%
- Djinno 4%
- Novian 2%
The Nordlings are refugees. They came to Mars after the Fenris Horde took the Nordic Commonwealth’s moons.
// 05 — Strategic Assets
What is worth taking
What makes the city worth holding goes beyond its population and its trade.
A dormant star gate found beneath what is now Phoenix District. Independence hinged on it. Its location is known only to senior officials.
The largest public QEC Chakra on Mars, run by the Prefect’s office. Whoever holds the Prefect’s seal holds a valve on Mars’s conversation with the Inner Sol.
The transport that broke the 2283 blockades. Unique, and still rolling.
Houses the administration and Seed Dumu’s greatest shrine: a five-story statue of unexplained white-gold.
The sole contract-engineering platform in the Seven Realms. Its board fled an Alliance nationalization vote in the 2260s and reincorporated here under a Prefect-granted charter.
High-value bounties draw hunters into the Radi-Mon tunnels below. It is cheap reconnaissance, and it thins the city’s surplus population.
// 06 — Diplomacy
Where they stand
Xing Hong has no allies. It has four landlords who watch each other.
// 07 — Faith
The city’s two gods
The city was built on sex work, defended by war, and held together by loyalties that outlast contracts. Its goddess is the patron of all three.
Seed Dumu — canonical iconography
// Deity Record 01 · Thousand Gods, Imperial Domain
Seed Dumu 精度母
Goddess of sex, love and war. Most of humanity has forgotten her. The ones who remember tend to be dangerous.
Her greatest shrine stands in the Honghuang Administrative Palace: a five-story statue said to be carved from the crystallized semen of the 108 men who founded Xing Hong. Its white-gold composition has never been explained. Devotees believe she blessed the Independence War, and the city did win its sovereignty against odds no strategic analysis accounts for.
For the governing class she is statecraft, not superstition. Prefect Dilinur Altai maintains the shrine herself.
“Make War as you would Make Love.”汝當行戰如行愛。— The Decree of Seed Dumu, origin unknown
Origin
She emerged during the collapse of Communist China and stood for everything that regime suppressed: individual desire, physical intimacy, the courage to fight for something personal. Refugees, merchant fleets and soldiers carried her out. There are shrines now on Mars, Venus, the Uranus moons and Proxima Centauri.
The decline
By the 23rd century the middle class has dropped her. Sex is accessible and transactional. War is a resource game between politicians and megacorps. Love is treated as economic leverage. A goddess of all three has little to offer people who have reduced them to systems, so she has become a luxury religion, kept by those with enough power to understand her or enough wildness to still live her.
How she is asked
Through divination blocks (擲筊). One curved face up and one flat means approval. Both flat means laughter, or an unclear question. Both curved means no. A devotee may ask three times. After that, her silence is the answer. She is famously unpredictable: she has refused powerful officials and favoured outsiders.
Couples who mean to marry in Xing Hong visit her shrine first, to let the goddess see them together. The woman holds the blocks. Her three questions stay between herself and the goddess.
The Wild Fangs
Her worship is widespread among Wild Fangs, including those in Proxima Centauri with no tie to Chinese culture. Many carry a small phoenix totem. Some carve white blocks from local wood and toss them on a flat rock before taking a contract or choosing a mate. Nobody has explained it. The Wild Fangs don’t either.
What the powers think
The Imperium files her as a “lesser divine second to the Crimson Dragon”: patronized, not persecuted. The Covenant discourages her worship and treats her shrines on its territory as unlicensed installations. The Alliance and the Directorate are indifferent. Most of their citizens have never heard of her.
Vinh Tra in his last mortal years
// Deity Record 02 · Lord of Flourishing Tea
Vinh Tra Gong 榮茶公
Patron of men who show up, stay present and do the work. He began as a teahouse keeper in Dragon District.
Nobody disputes that a man named Vinh Tra ran a teahouse in Dragon District. Whether the rest is history or hagiography is a matter of honest debate. The legend says he was a Vietnamese-Chinese man in his fifties, bereaved, newly arrived and unhappy, who kept his doors open from eleven to eleven and privately collected pornography and old Earth sexual cultivation texts.
- Second Tuesday of 2095A woman named Du orders hot black bean tea in Booth 2 at 22:22. She does the same every Tuesday after.
- 5th visitHe finally asks about the tea. She says she likes his beans and his tea.
- 22nd visitShe finds his cultivation tomes while he is brewing. He braces for disgust. She asks if he wants to practice. From then on: tea, then talk, then sex.
- 37th visitThey start writing down what they learn. Withholding ejaculation harms the body. Aether flows through sweat and release, not restraint. Scholars trace the Principium’s earliest empirical foundation to these notebooks.
- 49th visitDu falls ill. He walks her home and stays five days. The Tuesdays move to her house.
- 55th dateHe proposes. She says marriage is a poor container for what they already have. He accepts that.
- 69th dateDu lactates, unprompted, during sex. He drinks. She lets him.
- 108th dateThe last. She is leaving Xing Hong, and he asks for something to remember her by. She bathes and fills his teapot with the bathwater. He brews the black bean tea in it, then milks her into the pot, and they drink together. He inscribes the lid and falls asleep against her. He does not wake in the mortal world.
“The man’s tea asks. The woman’s body answers. Together we brew what neither could make alone.”— Inscription on the lid, 2097
Du was Seed Dumu, who had wandered the six mortal realms looking for a soulmate. She took him home to the Yinmu, the Seventh Realm, and the Thousand Gods named him Vinh Tra Gong. What the two of them did that last night became the ritual called Her Tea Service.
His three domains
Patience. Showing up every Tuesday. Brewing the tea properly every time. Waiting until the fifth visit to speak.
Diligence. The early hours, the disciplined study, the craft. Men who want to become worthy of what they desire take him as the model.
Devotion. The quiet, specific care of someone who stays five days when the other is sick, then carries his tea equipment to her house every week.
The historical record
The Museum of Xing Hong Origins in Phoenix District lists his teapot among the city’s founding relics. The ceramic dates to the late 21st century, and the inscription matches the handwriting in the surviving notebooks.
Numerous early Nucleus Cultivation texts carry the author name Vinh Tra. Every one opens the same way: “To my eternal love, Lady Du.”
“Where all streams run dry, a single spring becomes sacred. Where all hearts close, two that remain open become a temple unto themselves.”— Lotus Sutra, Martian Recension