The Spirits of the Earth, the Sansin, are the old mountain and nature spirits that survived the Fracturing uncorrupted. The Ridgewalkers keep communion with them.
What they are
The Sansin are the old mountain and nature spirits. When the pillars broke and Maggi spread, these spirits came through it uncorrupted. The land beyond Seonhwa’s walls is not only Maggi and danger. In the deep places, the high ridges, and the old forests the corruption has not fully reached, there are presences that remember the world as it was. Those presences are the Sansin.
The spirits of the living land, the Sansin sit apart from the human dead. (The Danja deal with the spirits of the human dead; see Han below.)
Communion: the Seon
The Seon are the ones who keep the connections to the Sansin alive. Their practice predates the Suhodan’s formal structure, rooted in the folk traditions of settlements outside Seonhwa where communion with mountain spirits was a normal part of life.
Building a relationship with the Sansin takes time. The Seon spend long stretches in the wilderness earning the spirits’ trust. When they return to Seonhwa, they bring back knowledge that ordinary scouting could not produce: where the Maggi is shifting, which paths are safe this season, where new corruption is taking root. The spirits tell them because the Seon have earned it.
Seon-Woo, the Seon subpath’s founding figure, came from one of those outlying settlements. His village practiced a form of Sansin communion that predates the Suhodan, and he brought the practice into the Suhodan after his village was overrun by corrupted wildlife.
See also
- Ridgewalkers (Seon)
- Seon-Woo
- Maggi
- Han (Unresolved Grief)
- Giun
- The Fracturing (Cheonha Bunhae)
- Hunter
- Monk
- Necromancers (Danja)
Source: ETK Lore Bible, “The Circle of Balance, Shared Subpaths” (Seon section) and “Key NPCs (Subpath)” (Seon-Woo). Foundation doc for Fracturing/Maggi/Giun context.