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About Nancheng
Nancheng is a traditional Wulin city in the watery southeast of the Phantom World, threaded with canals and rivers, and the home town of Soul and Zuo Shang. It sits in a stretch of country where no authority bothers to reach: the magistrate’s reach is thin, gangs of the Wulin are everywhere, and the town is a mix of everything and everyone.
Nancheng is not the centre of the Wulin, but it produced fighters of the first order in Soul and Zuo Shang. Its street life and its Wulin air left a deep mark on the character of both.
Geography
Nancheng sits in the watery southeast of the Phantom World, cut through by rivers and canals. The south of the city runs down to the sea, the north of it opens onto the Wulin of the central plains, and it is a junction for both water and land traffic.
Nancheng belongs to no jurisdiction: the magistrate’s power is thin and gangs of the Wulin are everywhere. It is far from the centre of the Wulin and outside the reach of the great orthodox houses, which makes it free and chaotic at once.
The look of the city
Nancheng is a canal town of the classic kind, with waterways and bridges everywhere. The buildings are traditional Chinese in style, white walls and dark tiles, built along the water.
Street life in Nancheng is loud and busy: wharves, markets, drinking houses and tea shops one after another. Ordinary people go about their ordinary days here, and people of the Wulin settle things with blades in the same streets.
Nancheng at night has a character of its own — the lanterns on the fishing boats and the lanterns on the drinking houses answer each other across the water, and the whole canal becomes a picture.
The Nancheng docks
The city’s most important transport junction, crowded with merchant ships, fishing boats and passenger boats. It is where goods coming and going through Nancheng are gathered and spread, and the main way people of the Wulin get in and out of the city.
The Nancheng market
The busiest place in Nancheng, with goods of every kind on display. Household wares are sold here, and so are the things people of the Wulin need: weapons, medicine, and information.
the Nancheng Abandoned Market
The old market of Nancheng, once the busiest place in the city, abandoned long ago for reasons nobody states. It is nearly empty now, and people of the Wulin use it for meetings they do not want seen.
Soul’s old home
Where Soul lived as a child, down one of the alleys of Nancheng. His childhood memories are here, and it is where he and Zuo Shang met.
Related characters
| Character | Connection to Nancheng | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Soul | home town | grew up in Nancheng; Zuo Shang is his closest friend |
| Zuo Shang | home town | grew up in Nancheng; Soul is his closest friend |
| Soul’s foster mother | resident | an unmarried woman of Nancheng who raised him |
| the people of Nancheng | residents | ordinary people, and the whole of the town’s street life |
Childhood
Soul and Zuo Shang grew up in Nancheng and were the closest of friends. Day to day they stole and scrapped and did work nobody says out loud. After Soul’s foster mother died, the two of them took to the road together.
The Qingfeng affair
In a quarrel with the Wulin notable Qingfeng the Clear-Wind Swordsman, Zuo Shang killed him by accident, and the orthodox side came after them. After that Soul and Zuo Shang left Nancheng and began their years of drifting.
Joining The Order
On the road, Soul and Zuo Shang were taken in by The Order. They left Nancheng for good and became its killers. Nancheng stayed in both of them as home.