The in-vault home for ETK’s lore, and the page the Quartz site builds its landing page from. Read it inside Obsidian, where every link below is live. The detailed canon lives in the Lore/ tree, and the full writing and canon rules live in the project guide.
The world in four movements
The Creation. Before there was time, there was Giun, the Breath of All Things, a sea of spiritual energy with no shape. Five spirits rose out of it and gave the world form, then drove five stone pillars deep into the earth to hold the balance between the living world and the world of spirits. They named the land Haneul-ttang, the Sky-Earth. For a long age it held.
The Fracturing. An order of scholar-sorcerers, the Cheonmugwan, tried to take the power of the pillars for themselves. Their ritual failed. Three pillars shattered, two cracked, and the balance came apart. The boundary between the living and the dead tore open, and unfiltered Giun seeped out as Maggi, a corruption that warps animals into monsters and keeps the dead from passing on. See The Fracturing (Cheonha Bunhae).
The Age of Endurance. The old kingdoms fell. What remains are scattered towns that survive on their own strength. Seonhwa is one of the steadiest, held together by the Suhodan, an order that trains warriors, healers, scholars, and hunters to push the corruption back. See The Age of Endurance.
Where the player stands. Every player begins as a new Suhodan recruit at Seonhwa. The two surviving pillars are still failing. The work is to hold the world together a little longer, to learn what truly happened, and to decide what to do about the survivors of the order that caused it. At the far end of that road waits Transcendence.
Key facts
Giun and Maggi.Giun is the living spiritual energy of the world. Maggi is its corruption, loosed by the Fracturing, and it gathers where there is grief and suffering.
The pillars. Five Celestial Pillars held the Great Balance. Three are shattered, two are cracked and failing.
Seonhwa and the Suhodan. The surviving city is held by the Suhodan, the order of the five paths, governed by a council that does not agree.
The grey zone. The corrupted are victims as much as threats. Putting them down is a mercy. See Maggi and Bestiary Overview.
The dead. With the boundary torn, spirits held by Han are trapped here. The Necromancers work with them.
The endgame. Past level 99, a player takes a shard of a broken pillar and becomes an avatar of their spirit. See Transcendence (Beyond Level 99).
The antagonists. The Cheonmugwan survived as immortal, disfigured beings, split into the Eclipse Court and the repentant Ashen Archivists.
Canon note. The Cheongan path is the Hunter, never the Ranger.
Guardian follows Cheolbyeok, the Iron Wall. “The shield does not choose what it protects.”
Cleric follows Jeonghwa, Purification. “To heal is to restore what the Fracturing stole.”
Monk follows Noeho, the Thunder Tiger. “The body is the weapon; the spirit is its edge.”
Hunter follows Cheongan, the Sky Eye. “See everything. Miss nothing.”
Wizard follows Yeonghwa, the Spirit Flame. “Knowledge is the fire that burns back the dark.”
Writing ETK lore
Two rules carry everything. Write so it never reads as machine-written (no em dashes, no model filler, no “it’s not X, it’s Y” reversals), and never invent canon (if it is not in a committed document it does not exist, mark proposals as you go, and check the Glossary before coining a name). The full ruleset is in the project guide.
The Library
This index builds itself. Each note carries a type in its frontmatter, and the queries below list them, so a new document shows up here on its own once it has frontmatter. Edit the notes, not this list.
The Soulsenders’ temple in Seonhwa, the Anhon-jeon, with a cleansing room where the Sending is danced in safety and where the recovered dead wait for their rite.
The catastrophe that broke the Celestial Pillars, collapsed the Great Balance, and tore the boundary between worlds, releasing Maggi into Haneul-ttang.
The endgame progression where a player takes a shard of a broken Celestial Pillar into themselves, gives up their humanity, and becomes an avatar of their chosen spirit.
The introductory storyline that carries a player from their first quest as a Suhodan recruit to the cleansing ritual that restores the corrupted scholar Han-Gyeol.
The reason a Suhodan recruit keeps going out into the corruption, told across four stages: a Local Threat near Seonhwa, the Spreading Darkness deeper in the wilds, the Pillar War at the broken-pillar sites, and Transcendence past mortal limits at level 99.
A respawning mini-boss in the rat area of the crypt, grown strong by feasting on its own kind, and the source of the relic fragment that opens the path toward Gloth.
A devout Seonhwa scholar who entered the crypts to find the source of a worsening corruption, was struck by it when he reached for a pillar fragment, and became the boss now known as Gloth.
The Wizard-Hunter subpath who inscribe the Talismans that hold Seonhwa’s wards; a proud, methodical order, sure they are the cleverest in the city, who keep the line no one sees them keep.
The Cleric-Wizard subpath of the Suhodan, who commune with the dead through Gut ritual, resolve the Han that traps them, and call on the bonds that form in return.
The Hunter-Monk subpath who commune with the Spirits of the Earth to tend a sickening land and read where the Maggi will rise; half-wild, disciplined, and always called home.
The Guardian-Cleric subpath who recover the fallen from Maggi-rich ground and dance them to rest so the dead cannot rise; they keep the promise that no one is left, and they die keeping it.
A shared subpath of the Suhodan between Monk and Guardian: warrior-poets who hold martial skill and artistic discipline as one practice, and who keep the forms of an art whose power died with the old world.
Repentant Cheonmugwan survivors who preserve knowledge for humanity and seek to end their own immortality, operating through intermediaries because they know they are hated.
A faction of Cheonmugwan survivors who hold that the Fracturing ritual succeeded as a first step, that Maggi is the evolution of Giun, and that the world must be remade.
The civic, military, and spiritual order that holds Seonhwa together, training the five paths to push back corruption, protect trade, and recover lost knowledge.
A damaged, partial record of a Sending that failed in the field, when a soul too anguished for the dance turned on the Song around it; the order keeps it as a warning.
The Danja sense for reading the emotional signature of spirits, corrupted creatures, and places of death, used both to know what you are walking into and to judge how deep a corruption runs.
Paper talismans inscribed with Giun patterns that store elemental effects, made and maintained by the Inscribers and drawing on Korean folk talisman practice.
The current First Sender of the Songhondan, a Cleric whose uncommon bravery won the trust of an order founded by a Guardian; she leads the worst recoveries from the front.
The Guardian who founded the Songhondan after the first rising, and kept the promise that no one is left until it killed her; remembered as the Unturned.
Leader of the Eclipse Court (Sig Beob-won), a surviving Cheonmugwan scholar who believes the Fracturing was a beginning rather than a disaster, and the long-term antagonist of the world.
Head Monk of the Suhodan in Seonhwa, the embodiment of “perfecting self,” who teaches that only self-reliance can carry the city through the horrors of the Maggi.
The Seonhwa scholar who fell to the crypts and became Gloth, returned to himself by the Ssitgim-gut and found afterward in a room where he records what he learned.
Head Cleric of Seonhwa, an old woman who holds compassion and mercy as the highest goal of the city and seeks a way to cure the Maggi-corrupted rather than destroy them.
Head of the Hunter path on the Council of Seonhwa, an outsider who treats the Maggi-corrupted as a rotted limb to be excised for the sake of the world’s balance.
The most accomplished living sender of the Songhondan, who has quietly failed to send the one soul he loved and is unraveling under the secret; the order’s deepest scar made flesh.
Founder of the Ridgewalkers and the first of them to fall to the communion; he wrote the order’s only early record of the Spirits of the Earth, then walked into the land one day and did not return.
The Monk tutor of Seonhwa, loud and warm where Grandmaster Tae-Sung is silent and severe, but pointed at the same goal of pushing young monks to better themselves.
The Wizard tutor of Seonhwa, highly organized and pedantic to a fault, who explains the elemental interactions of Giun weaves better than anyone and resents being stuck doing it.