The Hollow Sky
The sky is still there. It has been empty since the Sky Furnace broke, and heaven no longer answers anyone.
Once, a celestial engine called the Sky Furnace held the world in order. Heaven confirmed what was true and who had the right to rule. Then the Furnace broke.
What it left behind is qi that remembers. Old battlefields keep the pressure of the fighting done on them. Shrines and archives hold witness to what happened inside them. A technique can carry something of the person who made it. Truths can be buried, but not always cleanly.
With heaven silent, the martial world rebuilt its order by hand: archives, oaths, sect law, witness and debt. Legitimacy is no longer granted from above. It is argued for, recorded, and sometimes forged.
You start as nobody on the frontier, and you rise through training, fighting and breakthrough until the world can no longer pretend you are small.
The Fractured Marches
A frontier under strain. Caravans are being hit, beasts are acting wrong, and the sects and the city cooperate badly. It sits between sect power, civic authority, merchants, smugglers and people who prefer not to be seen.
This is where you learn to move, to fight and to survive: Greywillow City, the Azure Cloud Sect, Moonwell Forest, the Red Gravel Pass, and the ruin called the Shattered Archive.
The Jade Basin
The ceremonial heart of the martial world: lake cities, jade pavilions and archive towers, where grace, medicine, scholarship and public ranking are all instruments of power.
If the Marches teach survival, the Basin teaches appearance.