Xinyi announces itself through the smell of tea processing and the sight of the document seals. The red-ink seals are everywhere — on doorways, on market stalls, on the boats that operate the river delta channels, on the official notices posted at the town's administrative gates. In most of Shoing, red ink is functional; in Xinyi, it is an identity. The craftspeople who produce the vermillion ink paste and the scribes who apply it are the town's most respected professionals.

The delta geography makes the town's layout distinctive: Xinyi is built on a series of river islands and connected banks where the Yalu and Fei rivers join before continuing south, and the town's main thoroughfares follow the water channels rather than running perpendicular to them. Travel within Xinyi involves regular bridge crossings, and the bridges are the social gathering points in the way that market squares are elsewhere.

The administrative buildings are the largest structures — not because Xinyi's governance is oppressive but because the governance function is the town's most significant service export. Officials from across central Shoing come here to file documents, obtain certifications, have contracts witnessed, and receive training in the administrative procedures that the Regional Directorate requires. The main document hall is always busy.

The tea scent comes from the hillside processing yards that step up from the delta's edge — long, low wooden structures where leaves are dried, rolled, and sorted in practices that the town's tea families have been refining for two centuries.

The Yalu and Fei rivers meet several miles upstream from Xinyi's current location, and the resulting delta spreads into the flat central Shoing lowlands in a network of channels and islands that the town has organized around over three centuries of settlement. The delta provides fertile alluvial soil for the rice agriculture that feeds the town's population, good water access for the document and ink production industries, and the river transport connections that make the administrative service economy viable.

The hills rising to the north and east of the delta are where the tea cultivation occurs — a specific altitude and soil composition that the Xinyi families have identified as producing the particular astringency and floral note that the local variety is known for. The tea cannot be grown in the delta itself; the cultivation and the town center are connected by a series of switchback paths that are maintained as part of the administrative infrastructure.

Xinyi's population is predominantly human in the way that most of central Shoing's interior is, with a Gnome community that has grown over generations around the document and record-keeping industries. Gnome dexterity for fine calligraphy work and Gnome longevity for the long study periods that mastery requires have made them disproportionately prominent in the town's most prestigious profession, which has produced a social dynamic where the highest-status occupation in the town is dominated by the smaller demographic.

The examination-based advancement system means that family origin does not formally determine professional standing, though the families with the longest histories in the document tradition have advantages that the formal examination structure does not entirely counteract.

The red-ink calligraphy and document certification function is the prestige economy; the tea is the commercial volume economy; the rice agriculture is the subsistence economy. All three run simultaneously and each is genuinely dependent on the others: the tea income funds the advanced calligraphy training that maintains the document tradition's quality; the document certification function attracts the administrative traffic that gives the tea market its best customers; the rice keeps everyone fed.

The certification function is specifically valuable because the Regional Directorate has formally recognized Xinyi's document seals as the standard for central Shoing official records. This recognition was achieved through two generations of advocacy by the Administrative Directorate and is maintained through the quality that makes the recognition legitimate.

Xinyi's cuisine centers on the delta's rice and the river's fish, prepared in a style that the tea influence has shaped over generations: the cooking uses a restrained hand with spice, emphasizing the natural flavors that tea-culture values, and the meals that accompany examination periods or formal certifications are specific and traditional. The tea pairings for each course of a formal Xinyi meal are documented in their own reference texts.

The specific Xinyi tea varieties — Spring Pick, the first harvest of the year; Summer Deep, the more robust second; and the rare Autumn Mist, produced in small quantities from the highest hill plots — are available in the tea houses that serve the document trade.

The examination system shapes the social culture more than any other single institution. The annual Administrative Examination draws candidates from across central Shoing who spend months in the town preparing, and the preparation period and the results period each have their own social rhythms. The families who host examination candidates have a specific hospitality tradition that dates to the examination's establishment; the relationships formed during examination stays are often the foundation of the regional administrative network.

The calligraphy tradition is the aesthetic culture. The best work of the Red Ink Masters is preserved in the Directorate's archive and is viewed as art objects as well as functional records. The specific challenge of producing calligraphy in the vermillion paste — which dries faster and less forgivingly than standard inks — has made Xinyi's Masters technically among the most demanding in Shoing.

The annual Administrative Examination is the town's most significant event, formally opened with a ceremony in the main document hall that involves the Prefect, the senior Red Ink Masters, and the Solis temple's senior cleric. The ceremony is solemn in a way that acknowledges what the candidates are attempting. The examination itself runs three days. The results are announced on the fourth day, and the announcement ceremony — held at the main bridge, where both the successful and unsuccessful candidates are acknowledged — is a public event.

When the first tea harvest of the year is ready, the Wuzheng family and the other hill cultivation families perform the picking ceremony that marks the season. The first picked leaves are presented to the Prefect, to the senior Masters, and to the Solis temple before the commercial harvest proceeds. The ceremony has the character of a collective acknowledgment that the year's most important product is being taken from the hill with appropriate care.

The calligraphy is the primary art form, and in Xinyi, calligraphy is understood as music made visible — the rhythm and breath of the stroke, the weight and movement of the character, the specific decisions that the Master makes in the moment of writing. The Red Ink tradition has produced a body of theory about what the calligraphy is and how it should be evaluated that has been developing for a century and that the scholarly community at the Directorate publishes and debates.

Music exists alongside this in a more conventional form — the lute and flute traditions that are common in Shoing's interior settlements, performed at the tea houses and at the examination celebration dinners.

Solis — the deity of wisdom and light, the patron of those who pursue knowledge — is the natural faith of a town that takes the examination tradition and the calligraphy practice seriously. The Solis temple is the center of the scholarly community in Xinyi and the place where the examination candidates formally dedicate their attempts before the test begins. The light-as-knowledge symbolism runs through the calligraphy tradition in ways that the Red Ink Masters articulate explicitly.

Bethsia has a following among the tea cultivation families — the natural world's specific knowledge that sustainable farming requires has produced in these families a relationship with the forest deity that is practical rather than mystical. Thulgard is present in the domestic practice of most permanent households.

The delta confluence was a natural provisioning point for river traffic well before permanent settlement, and the first formal settlement was a waystation for the administrative caravans that served the Regional Directorate's predecessor. The document certification function was established as a response to the existing traffic rather than as a reason to create it; the traffic was already present because the geography made it necessary.

The Regional Directorate's formal recognition of Xinyi's document seals as the standard for central Shoing official records was the result of a sustained advocacy campaign by the Administrative Directorate's third generation of leadership. The recognition transformed the town's economic position from a useful waystation to an essential service hub. The Directorate's archive contains the original recognition documents, sealed in the Xinyi red ink that made the recognition both self-referential and appropriate.

A fungal infestation destroyed approximately a third of the hill cultivation plots over two seasons. The recovery involved the Wuzheng family's aggressive replanting program, assistance from the other cultivation families, and a specific biological knowledge contribution from the Bethsia practitioners that the cultivation families still acknowledge in their spring ceremony. The blight's long-term effect was a more diverse cultivation distribution across the hills, which has made the crop more resilient.

The Administrative Examination's current format — three days, specific subject areas, the acknowledgment ceremony — was established after two generations of varying formats that produced inconsistent results. The current format was designed by the senior Red Ink Masters in collaboration with the Regional Directorate and has been stable since. The pass rate hovers around twenty percent, which is considered appropriate by the Directorate and brutal by the candidates.

Xinyi is stable and functioning at the level its geography and institutions allow. The examination and certification functions continue to grow as the regional administrative network expands. The specific concern is the vermillion ink formula: the head Red Ink Master, Hao Mingzhu, has reached an age where succession planning is necessary, and the number of candidates who have completed the full apprenticeship to the level of formula-keeper is two. Both are qualified; their respective approaches to specific aspects of the formula's maintenance are not compatible, and Hao has not yet determined which is correct.

The Directorate administers through examination-based appointment at every level. The Prefect is the most senior appointment; the document certification masters, the examination administrators, and the record keepers are each appointed by examination within their specific functions. The system produces technically competent governance and a specific kind of conservatism — the people who succeed in the examination system tend to value the examination system.

Human, Male — fifties

Liang is the head of the largest tea cultivation family and the Prefect of the town, which is a conflict that the Directorate manages through formal recusal protocols whenever tea trade matters come before the governing body. His appointment was by examination, not by family connection — he passed with the highest score in the year he sat — but the overlap between his family interests and his governance function is a structural problem that his predecessors have also managed and that Liang manages with more transparency than most.

His specific governance concern is the ink formula succession, which affects the town's most significant institutional function. He has been advised that the situation is being managed; he has been advised of this four times, and the situation has not yet been managed.

Gnome, Female — age indeterminate — the Directorate's calligraphy hall

Hao has held the senior Master position for forty years and is the most respected individual in Xinyi regardless of official title. Her calligraphy work is the standard by which all other practitioners' work is evaluated. Her knowledge of the vermillion ink formula is the institutional knowledge that the town's entire document certification function depends on. The succession question is the question she is managing with the specific attention that forty years of responsibility for something irreplaceable produces.

Human, Male — forties — the examination hall and the Directorate archive
Shen manages the annual examination with a fairness and a rigor that the candidates appreciate in the years after they have passed and resented in the days before. His reputation for not being moved by family connections or administrative influence is the examination's primary institutional asset. The Directorate trusts him; the cultivation families who want exceptions to the scoring criteria have stopped asking.

Human, Female — thirties — the hill cultivation and the main tea house
Liang's cousin, who manages the Wuzheng family's tea operations while the Prefect manages governance. The arrangement is functional — Mei is better at the tea operations than Liang would be, and the formal separation of family business from official function is clearly delineated. She is also more interested in the tea operations than in the governance question, which is a useful clarification of priorities.