History
Worldweep Opening History
When the Weep tore open the heavens and the cycle of souls was broken, Po Li chose to wait. The Oracular Council proclaimed that the Eternal Emperor had sacrificed himself to protect the world from annihilation. His spirit, they said, would one day be reborn to guide Tian Xia back into order. They sealed the Five Dragon Throne and forbade anyone to sit upon it until that rebirth came to pass.
When news arrived from the west that a mechanical immortal called Huang Shixin had united Lingshen and named himself the Eternal Emperor, the Council dismissed it as heresy. “The true Emperor’s flesh is of Heaven, not brass.” They burned all foreign reports, closed the borders, and decreed that patience itself was divine.
Age of Collapse History
For centuries, Po Li endured through ritual precision. The Oracular Council and its Bureau of Numerology measured every aspect of life: the hour of planting, the worth of marriages, even the number of steps one should take between shrine bells.
At first, the people found comfort in it. The Path of Numbers promised stability while the rest of the world lay in ruin. Families prayed together before ledgers, farmers carved lucky digits into their tools, and shopkeepers kept abaci on their altars beside the Emperor’s sigil.
But generations later, the numbers had become rote. Oracles recited equations they no longer understood; clerks copied them without reading. The candles burned not out of piety but because no one remembered who was supposed to blow them out.
Villages competed to be the most punctual in their prayers, convinced precision itself might summon salvation. Festivals grew quieter, reduced to symbolic gestures repeated out of duty. Parents taught their children not why the throne was empty, but that it always had been. By the final centuries of the Collapse, Po Li had become perfectly still, a land of quiet streets, dim lanterns, and a faith maintained like a machine. The people neither hoped nor despaired. They simply continued.
Age of Renewal History
Seventy-five years after Mathesis’s fall, Po Li is beginning to blossom.
The Oracular Council still sits in Changdo, but their decrees no longer hold tight. The borders are open; citizens travel, see the world, and return changed. Even lifelong believers now whisper that perhaps Heaven chose elsewhere.
The bureaucracy, once the heartbeat of faith, has collapsed under its own weight. The Bureau of Numerology issues contradictory decrees; its offices overflow with unread scrolls. Ministries that once calculated the will of Heaven now argue over who still signs the ledgers.
Into that vacuum rushed artists. Painters, poets, and musicians reclaimed the Path of Numbers itself as a canvas, transforming the old symbols of order into declarations of freedom. Calligraphers break symmetry deliberately, turning perfect equations into chaotic verse. Murals spread across ministry walls, vast, defiant scenes of everyday life painted over the Council’s faded sigils. Street performers improvise from temple bell tones; the rhythm of devotion becomes public music. Farmers carve jokes and protests into their harvest records, calling it “numerological graffiti.”
Sensing its power slipping, the Council has launched its own “Sanctioned Art Movement,” commissioning vast, mathematically perfect works that glorify the Eternal Emperor’s “eventual return.” State-approved artists work under the banner of Geometrical Harmony, producing sterile, beautiful propaganda.
Government
Po Li remains officially ruled by the Oracular Council, but its authority now hangs by a thread. The vast bureaucracy that once measured Heaven has fragmented into ministries that argue, duplicate, or simply ignore one another. Only one thing unites them: the desperate belief that culture can still hold the nation together.
Once the empire’s holiest institution, the Bureau of Numerology now functions as a museum-archive and propaganda office.
Its clerks catalogue obsolete equations as “sacred texts,” while a dwindling corps of officials still perform the annual Calculation of Heaven—a ceremony the public now treats as theater more than prophecy.
Funding increasingly flows to the Cultural Reclamation Initiative, which commissions “approved art” to counter the unruly street movements.
Real World Inspiration
Po Li draws from the late Qing dynasty’s cultural decline and early Republican China’s artistic awakening, when the rigid imperial bureaucracy gave way to intellectual and artistic reform. Its Renewal Era mirrors the May Fourth Movement and New Culture Movement. Visually and philosophically, it also echoes Soviet and post-Cultural Revolution propaganda art, where regimes attempted to control creativity even as genuine counterculture flourished in the cracks.