Yellow Jade

Yellow Jade is a rare and much prized variant of Creation’s most common magical material. There is no god of yellow jade, no element associated with it, no natural occurrence of it, and no known process for creating it. The most common understanding is that it must be created from other types of jade via an alchemical process or essence treatment, and indeed what yellow jade exists has nearly all emerged from the laboratories of alchemists and sorcerers, the complex secrets of its production carefully guarded.

Yellow jade is valuable not just for its rarity but because it is used to render works of artifice useable without commitment of motes by an essence user. While there are other methods to accomplish this, yellow jade is by far the most stable and most effective.

Unknown to any in Creation, there is no formula for creating yellow jade. It is the result of accidents in alchemy, mistakes and errors made by those free of any intent to create yellow jade, and which can never be repeated, for even if they could be replicated the would not produce the same result. Even the Solar Exalted shaping the raw energies of the Wyld could not produce yellow jade, and many theories as to its nature were bandied about. Shortly after the Primordial War, the accepted theory was that its origins might relate to escaped Primordials, its use restricted only to trusted Exalted, but as centuries wore on it came to be used in all manner of applications present in the lives of mortals. This tolerance began to reverse in the waning years of the First Age, when a Zenith caste artificer-tailor spearheaded a reinterpretation casting yellow jade as ‘Sunjade’, aspected to the Solar Exalted. A fashion trend of using it to create yellow jade grand daiklaves and warstriders as display pieces saw yellow jade in use for mortal-serving technologies appropriated and reforged in increasing quantities.

In the First Age, the increasing spread of alchemy and disposable income amongst the mortal populace meant the number of accidents creating yellow jade skyrocketed. The loss of the infrastructure which made this possible has meant that through the Shogunate to the present day yellow jade has become increasingly rare, a reason why the Scavenger Economy provides the only path to maintaining units of mortal Gunzosha and Ashigaru.