Wuxing
The top megacorp for magic. Notorious for hiring runners to displace a couch to screw with the feng shui of rivals, and are known specifically for their geomancers. Triad-affiliated.
The Ten Thousand Lions Triad (like their Yellow Lotus predecessors, before the Red Dragons wiped them out) has a longstanding partnership with Wuxing, being the ones who distribute Wuxing-produced better- than-life chips (the infamous “Kong chips”) in countries where Wuxing can’t or doesn’t want to be seen selling them openly. Having said that, aside from their BTL distribution, Wuxing tends to keep the Triads at arm’s length. You won’t (usually) see the Ten Thousand Lions doing Wuxing’s dirty work like the Yaks and MCT or the Vory and Evo.
Assets
They might not be as prominent as other megacorps, but in some ways, Wuxing has a longer reach than any other. Today, financial services are still one of Wuxing’s core businesses. They give loans to companies all over Asia and don’t hesitate to use those loans as leverage when it benefits them. They have a reputation for uncanny insight in the stock market, regularly being touted as financial wizards (which is more literally true for them than most, but more on that later). Wuxing is also one of the biggest insurers in both Asia and the Americas. Likewise, Wuxing has stuck to its roots as an import/ export business in becoming one of the largest shipping companies in the world (which puts them in near-constant conflict with Maersk). They’ll even use their corporate extraterritoriality to sidestep any legal issues with the contents of their shipments, if the customer’s willing to pay for it. Wuxing’s financial and shipping divisions get all the screen time, but they’re a heavy hitter in other areas. Ming Solutions is their magical consulting division, offering all the typical stuff (magical security, education, etc.) alongside Wuxing’s trademark feng shui (geomancy) services, redirecting mana lines to do everything from attract good fortune to cleanse toxic magical domains. They also have a growing medical-response business, developed since the post-CFD split with Evo, that’s quick to trumpet how good they are at treating Awakened patients without damaging their magical abilities. Lastly, Wuxing has their fingers in just about everything on the consumer goods front. Kong-Wal Mart has been their biggest competitor (and sometimes retailer) for as long as anyone can remember, but that relationship might be changing.
History
Wuxing was founded in the early 2000s, when Wu Kuan-lei consolidated a bunch of import/export firms in Hong Kong into a single corp. Even in those early years, Wuxing was marked more by its slow and steady approach to business, making others reliant on them while never drawing too much attention to them- selves. Wu Kuan-lei ran Wuxing until his death in 2039, when leadership passed to his son, Wu Lung-wei. The younger Wu guided Wuxing down the same path his father had, and the results were a consistent success, if not a spectacular one. Then Dunkelzahn croaked, and Wu Lung-wei was granted the Jade Dragon of Wind and Fire (actually a sculpture of three carp playing in a river, don’t ask why it’s named the way it is) in the Big D’s will. When Wu had the sculpture installed at Wuxing’s headquarters in Hong Kong, the results were incredible: thanks to a streak of impossibly good luck, Wuxing climbed from the middle of the megacorporate pack to the ranks of the Big Ten within a year. Soon after Wuxing’s ascent to the Corporate Court, Wu Lung-wei partnered with Yamatetsu to form the Pacific Prosperity Group—a coalition of non-Japanese corporations (and the exiled-from-Japan Yamatetsu) that worked to check the Japanacorps’ influence in the Pacific, a dream that had begun with Wu Kuan-lei but was never realized before his death. Crash 2.0 hit Wuxing hard, but it also devastated most of the smaller corps in the Pacific Prosperity Group. Wuxing and Yamatetsu (now rebranded as Evo) went on a feeding frenzy, snapping up as many of their smaller counter- parts as they could. The crown jewel for Wuxing was the Malaysian Independent Bank, which made them an even bigger player in the financial services industry (at the cost of strained relationships with its fellow PPG members).
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