Tsubasa Haifeng, the Rising Tide Mandate

Tsubasa Haifeng was born to the salt and ledger both, in the free mercantile port of Qin-Sao, a coral-and-wood harbor town clinging to the western shores of the Inland Sea, directly opposite the Blessed Isle. Qin-Sao lived and died by the tide of Realm trade: rice barges, preserved fish, and luxury grains bound for the Isle in exchange for silver, jade, and Dragon-Blooded protection.

His family were middling merchants. Respected, solvent, but never the largest group. From childhood, Tsubasa learned every creak of a ship’s hull and every hidden clause in a contract. By fifteen he could read Realm legal codes as easily as weather charts. By twenty, he was negotiating shipping charters with dynastic factors twice his age.

Yet Tsubasa was never content to serve power. He studied it.

He cultivated the harbor-master, married a cousin into a tax assessor’s family, sponsored festivals honoring the local gods, and quietly became indispensable to the town’s economic health. He hosted Dragon-Blooded officers when their patrol ships docked, learned their rivalries, their vices, and their ambitions. He became the man who could make things happen, a mortal who exercised authority through relationships rather than titles.

And that frightened the Realm.

The Wrath of House Tepet

Qin-Sao answered to Tepet Jorun, an Air-Aspected Dragon-Blooded of House Tepet tasked with naval oversight in the region. Jorun was a waning power in a waning house, proud, embittered, and painfully aware of his shrinking influence after Tepet’s long decline. He tolerated powerful mortals so long as they knew their place.

Tsubasa did not.

When Tsubasa began negotiating independent supply contracts that bypassed Tepet’s favored factors, when he won the loyalty of junior Dragon-Blooded officers through quiet patronage, when rumors whispered that the harbor answered more readily to a merchant prince than to the Realm Jorun decided an example was needed.

On a routine grain run across the Inland Sea, Jorun invoked sorcery. The skies shattered with screaming wind and jade-charged lightning. Waves rose like mountains. The storm was meant to leave no survivors, no witnesses, just wreckage and a warning.

The Exaltation in the Storm

Tsubasa stood on the deck as the world disintegrated.

The mast snapped. The crew was swept away. The sea itself reached up to drag him under.

And then the storm answered to him instead.

Golden lightning, distinct from the jade-tainted fury of the Dragon-Blooded, tore through the black clouds. His anima banner burned into being, the image of vast solar wings riding the hurricane winds and ringed in the image of a solar eclipse. The storm faltered, confused, bent around him as if the sky itself recoiled in recognition.

In that moment, memory overwhelmed mortality.

He saw himself in palaces of white jade and orichalcum, issuing decrees that reshaped nations. He remembered presiding over ocean gods and admirals as a peer, not a supplicant. He remembered the mandate of Heaven not as doctrine, but as fact.

He remembered his true name from the First Age:

“Thrones of Winds Ascendant, Whose Lordly Wings Ride the Crowned Tempest of the Sun Lit Seas Before Whom the Gales Kneel in Gold”

The last illusion shattered:

The Shogunate was not order; it was a rotting barricade built by thieves squatting in the ruins of the Solar Age.

The storm broke.

Jorun’s sorcery failed.

Tsubasa Haifeng fell into the sea as a Solar Exalt.

The Hidden Years and the Ocean God

The Realm declared him dead.

He ensured the lie remained true.

Surging on instinct and some forgotten working of Essence, Tsubasa was drawn to an ancient sea cave far below the waves, hidden within a shattered First Age demesne. There dwelled Qao-Lin of the Sheltered Deep, an old and cautious ocean god long starved of proper worship by the Realm’s monopolization of divine tribute.

Qao-Lin once served Tsubasa’s former incarnation.

The god recognized the Mandate reborn.

For years Tsubasa lived in secret beneath the waves, rebuilding himself in isolation. Qao-Lin taught him the politics of the local spirit courts, how the Immaculate Order quietly enslaved many lesser gods, which ancient pacts still bound Creation’s oceans, and the true scope of Realm naval logistics and prayer economies.

During this time, Tsubasa became something far more dangerous than a rebel; he became a planner with a deeply ingrained knowledge of local goings.

Through bribery, carefully placed blessings, and oath-bound intermediaries, he constructed a shadow network of dock officials, shrine keepers, disgruntled customs inspectors, idealistic junior monks, and mortal accountants within the Realm’s supply apparatus.

None knew who truly commanded them, only that a hidden patron rewarded loyalty swiftly and annihilated betrayal completely.

Vengeance on House Tepet

From his hidden throne beneath the sea, Tsubasa dismantled Tepet Jorun Haifeng piece by piece.

He learned which lovers Jorun kept secret, which officers hated him, which shipments he siphoned and which minor gods he had bound in desperation.

Trade disruptions weakened his reputation. Mutinies cost him ships. Evidence of corruption surfaced in the hands of his rivals. Jorun grew isolated, paranoid, and reckless.

When at last Tsubasa struck, it was not with an army but with the perfect timing of a well-placed brush stroke.

During a political summit between Tepet and a Cynis delegation, a summoned storm—subtly twisted by Solar workings and divine intervention—collapsed the meeting hall and sank three escort vessels. Officially, it was an accident.

Only Jorun knew the truth in his final moments as the sea swallowed him.

The storm that killed him bore wings of gold.

The Return to Power

With his enemy dead and his name still officially drowned with his former ship, Tsubasa returned to the surface as a new power, a mysterious patron whose wealth, naval leverage, and spiritual alliances appeared from nowhere.

Within five years he controlled a majority share of Qin-Sao’s shipping, held economic leverage over three neighboring ports, had mortal governors and Dragon-Blooded officers quietly indebted to him and secured the loyalty of multiple coastal gods who now quietly defied Immaculate oversight under his protection.

Publicly, he is a magnate and philanthropist.

Secretly, he is forging the foundations of a Solar state-in-waiting.

His True Vision

Tsubasa does not merely want revenge on the Realm.

He wants Restoration.

Not the decadent tyranny of the First Age, but a new Solar order, one forged by merit, infrastructure, logistics, and divine cooperation rather than naked theomachy.

The Realm, in his eyes, is a parasite on Creation’s finances, a spiritual despot strangling the gods and a bureaucracy that exists only to preserve its own fear.

And the Blessed Isle is not the Dragons’ birthright.

It is his inheritance through the divine mandate of the Unconquered Sun.