Han Jae-Moon awoke during Planetfall to Scenario 25650 - the collapse of the Unity mission into factional warfare. The ship was on fire, the officers divided, and the captain already missing. Reacting quickly, he contacted all active Chungsu personnel and initiated contingency plans. They were dispatched to the hydroponics gardens to fetch seeds, to server rooms to download and destroy specific data, to vast equipment vaults to acquire necessary nautical supplies, and to cultural archives to secure Corean national treasures preserved by the trip. With forged orders and counterfeit passes they were accompanied by soldiers transferred to Chungsu from the 707th Special Mission Group and the Storm Corps, embedded in the voyage as security, peacekeepers, and other cover roles. These black-clad operatives neutralized Spartan, Anarchist, crew, and other threats alike, surreptitiously destroying security cameras. As the command staff's eyes and ears were plucked out and cut off, their loss of control spiraled.

The plan did not go as intended. Costly firefights broke out, casualties were higher than expected. The optimal solution would have been to sweep the necessary rooms after they were abandoned by mutineers, but Han ruled that time was too little. Before meeting with his remaining staff, he took his aide down one of the main perimeter hallways along the circumference of the vessel. These were relatively untouched, even unused, as no one had wanted to fight where a hull puncture might lead to catastrophic depressurization. At a precise calculated time, Han disabled the assistant and sent her flying over the catwalk down multiple stories, landing on a different deck. The operative was in fact a political officer assigned to the mission, and secretly Han Jae-Moon's superior and monitor, assigned to Chungsu to ensure his compliance.

The cargo bay was crowded with his people, not only Coreans but famed Korean-American physicist Steven Han, former U.S. Western Command servicewoman now newly-naturalized citizen Lt. Jennifer Jacobs, and Bulgarian cosmonaut Dara Karapetrova. Declaring that it was time for the cause to outlast Unity, Han affirmed Chungsu's true mission: not only for humanity and Corean civilization to survive and to thrive, but to unite the peoples of Planet under them. Only with their true foresight, view of the greater picture, and unbiased focus, could petty, squabbling, disunited humanity hope to prevent another catastrophe. To do so, Chungsu would have to forge its own path and work with the other factions that were forming as he spoke, living among them if necessary, until those who would be receptive to the plan could be properly installed in power. With an uncharacteristic cheer, Han exhorted them to take to the landing pod.

Han Jae-Moon and his cabal landed on the further side of Chiron, in the great Sea of Pholus. They built their first deep-sea base, a colony hidden away from all the others. Watching, waiting, growing in the oceans of Planet. Infiltrating others, understanding their societies, sparking change from within. Or at least taking their knowledge and maybe leaving some sabotaged improvements in their wake. Eventually, all would learn the ways of Chungsu. Then this vestigial organ, one so ubiquitous yet so often maligned, could find its place at the center of a new corpus built from its efforts to enlighten the world. True to its name to the last, it would write the final words in the book of man.

Meanwhile, in the Human Hive, M.I.S.S. special agent Kim Hachiya awakes in a medical bay far beneath the surface. She is debriefed by the same security enforcers who used to work for X.O. Sheng-Ji Yang, now Chairman Yang, and discloses the existence of an entire conspiracy led by that young bureaucrat judoka. If the supreme leader of the Hive is perturbed by this revelation, he does not betray so. Vast and intricate prayer wheels of thought spin within the Chairman's mind, and he nods approvingly, intent on incorporating this rogue veriform into his grand designs. And Yang is owed a rematch against an opponent at full capability. Even as Chungsu hides and bides its time, the greatest minds of the Hive make plans to start the development of submersibles, so that one day the two may meet again.

Notes: I had a lot of different ideas for Han's fate on Planet and what Chungsu would represent, and I decided to go with the most straightforward and simple approach for both. He cuts ties with his government employers, founds a faction, and they seek to take over the world. My alternate ideas had everything from Han essentially becoming Yang's Sith apprentice to him disappearing altogether, but I opted for something that could keep him a wildcard.

- I wish the C:BE lore had more info on Chungsu because the existing text describes them almost as a mix between the North Korean government, a conspiracy, and SpaceX. If I knew anything about Korean philosophy I'd like to make them influenced by it, like how the Human Hive isn't just a straightforward totalitarian state but mixes in Daoist and Buddhist overtones, and fans often say that Yang behaves like an old-school Legalist.

- On the flip side, I also imagine Chungsu/the Appendix branching out and being less tied to a specific Earth culture/nation, since that's an aspect of C:BE that wouldn't work well in ideology-based SMAC. So the faction isn't just populated by Korean people, but also those who have been initiated into their conspiracy.

- The Bulgarian cosmonaut is a reference to the fact that for some reason Bulgaria is the only country in Europe with good relations with North Korea, having had a treaty since 1970.

- Jennifer Jacobs has the names of two of the protagonists of Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, a game which takes place in North Korea, one of whom is a U.S. G.I. veteran who is half-Korean.

- The whole hydro wars bit is inspired by the novel Killing Time by Caleb Carr of The Alienist fame. It was a turn-of-the-century novel that depicts a stereotypical late '90s conception of what a dystopian future would look like, including a U.S. that somehow can't keep the peace in SoCal (but only there) due to a massive drought, with local militias and gangs fighting the National Guard all the way to federal troops. It's a novel that's written pretty poorly but the world-building is very similar to the depiction of SMAC Earth right before the Unity is launched.