Shuli Go Stories Vol. 2: A Large Debt

Notes 'n Stuff

Continuing the long-standing (ie. month old) strategy of dropping a few notes about the world at the end of each story, here are a few tidbits to help provide some context for those who are interested.

Hope you liked this story, let me know if you did! And if you hated it feel free to tell me that too. I haven't had a good cry in a while.

Notes From The Central Empire  

Language: I decided to use English for all languages early on, with the exception of "ancient Imperial" which is supposed to be equivalent to Latin as the lingua franca of the older versions of the Central Empire, and which I based on a slightly modified pinyin Mandarin Chinese. I'm not really happy with this however, and as soon as I get the big HBO/Netflix money, I'll hire a team of internationally renowned linguists to develop an appropriately archaic sounding language to replace my bastardization of the most widely spoken language in the world (as a first language at least). Until then however, I'm muddling my way through it.

My particular foci when developing this language was twofold: make it internally consistent, and make it easy to sound out for English-only speakers (like myself). So instead of going with tones to designate different words, which can be confusing for a non-Chinese speaker (again, like myself), I replaced tones with word-epithets for Mandarin's second, third, fourth, and neutral tones.

An example I use in a few stories is the word for "fire", which in Mandarin would be: huǒ - that would be with a fall then a lift in tone over the course of the word. Instead of potentially confusing readers with tones and symbols they may not be familiar with, I added a "no" to the end of the word. So "fire" becomes "huono". If the word was "maybe" or huò with a drop in tone, it would become "huotu" and so on and so forth. This isn't always the case (some of the words I use, including Shuli Go, are just nonsense combinations of syllables that I think sound good in English), but as a baseline, I aim to use this adjusted pinyin for most everything.

This is how I justified using placenames that are often borrowed directly from existing Chinese cities (like Chongqing in this story), while also sprinkling in more generic placenames at times too: theoretically the older, more established cities would have retained their names from the "ancient" era, while the newer ones would have been named using the tongue of the people who live in them now.

I do have a backstory for how the ancient Imperial came to take on the shape it did - it may even come up in a later story.

Most of the reason it took on this form though was the same reason most generic western-based fantasy relies on something that sounds vaguely Latin-ish for its spells, sites, and sorcerer names: it sounds distinct, yet has an intrinsic connection to a real language that can be mined for material over the course of writing. Which brings me to...

Magic: Magic is an important, but fading part of the Central Empire. Magic users used to dominate the political and military world, but their techniques and expertise have slowly died out. This includes a group of beings called "demi-gods" who could control powerful magic with ease, but were unable to procreate. Shuli Go were actually built to mimic the powers and traits of these demi-gods, including their infertility, but as time has progressed, secrets have been lost and Shuli Go have become superhuman men and women with only limited magical powers.

Other magical users exist in the world, and you met two of their kind in this story: Shei Chaste, and Keepers. These are both users connected to a different religious order present in the world, and both are tightly controlled. The Chaste are more powerful, but, as their name implies, chaste (with at least one exception we know about), so they don't pass on their secrets. Shei Chaste are also often trained to serve the Emperor/Empress themselves, filling in the roles played by eunuchs in periods of Chinese history. 

The Keepers, meanwhile, are not endowed with magical powers but acquire them through meditation and connection with the world at large, and are therefore considered more dangerous. Keepers are essentially banned from the Central Empire, but pious countries around the Empire harbor and promote the order, partly as a counterweight to the Empire's use of the Shuli Go and Chaste.

Shuli Go and the Shei Chaste are both subject to a process of physical mutation by which they gain access to their magical powers, resulting in a package deal that has many benefits but several other drawbacks, most of which are related to having children, but also extend to things like alcohol consumption (which will poison a Shuli Go) and a shorter lifespan (which affects Shei Chaste who are far more prone to cancer). 

There is a deeper story about where magic comes from, how it is accessed, and its importance in the world, but we'll save that for a later batch of notes.