>>5532053As the two of you decipher the words, the luster of the empire's capital is revealed to you. The Royal City, open only to those of great import, and with extremely dense spiritual energy. The sprawling outer city that lay beyond it, seemingly endless at first glance. Filled with the cramped hustle and bustle of lives on the surface, and sparse spires piercing into the heavens up above.
To the north, across a choppy sea, a half-frozen isle that constantly flips between open hostility and a reluctant peace towards the empire. On that isle, a massive shrine towards the one of the disciples, carved into a mountainside. Hundreds, thousands of stairs reaching upwards, a path to be walked while reaching one's own personal enlightenment. The words of many other visitors recorded on the cliffside adjacent to the stairway, their own musings on the world. At the top, a small cottage, supposedly the home of that disciple.
From there Jun Rei sailed east, trekking through dense, cold forests in what you and Kinzou believe are now the tributary states to the north. While there he visited the shrine of the third "god's disciple", before heading south, towards the empire's frontier - your present location - where the empire's wars of conquest were only just coming to a close after a century.
The text continues to record a great many sceneries. Floating along the mighty Yuanyin river and admiring the breadbasket of the empire. Heading south, and then to the west, passing through arid desert and dense jungle. Making his way northwest through The Great Flats, and crossing the colossal peaks at their edge.
After 20 years of journeying, the man finally settles down in the distant west, far beyond the reaches of the empire, and beyond even the five shrines he had initially planned to visit. In the end very little about the religion is actually recorded, besides a personal theory of Jun Rei's that perhaps the most recent of the five disciples was actually just the founder of the empire, whose story had been warped and integrated into preexisting folklore. What's more important are the lands he explored along the way.
With the text not quite fully read, but understood well enough, Kinzou takes to visiting the inn whenever travelers or merchants pass through, attempting to get a story out of them. These pale greatly in comparison to the travels of Jun Rei, but are interesting nonetheless. Kinzou hears of the magnificent palace in the kingdom's capital, as well as of other rural communities which still follow the traditions of what came before the empire, the nation-states over a hundred years gone in this region.
