The Eight Houses — Harbor, Market, Mountain, Sky, Threshold, Memory, Coin, Stranger — are the entities that have signed the Open Compact’s registration terms. They have legal personhood, they can hold property, they can be sued in Domain Court, and they can sue. Their priestly boards manage their day-to-day affairs.
Unregistered entities
Entities that exist but have not — or will not — sign the Compact. They are not subordinate to the Eight. They are not constrained by the Open Compact’s contract law. Operating with an unregistered entity is technically legal for individuals but illegal for corporations.
The crews call them Ninths. To follow a Ninth is to be in trouble.
The Tenth
There is one specific unregistered entity that the Sham Shui Po underground refers to as the Tenth — a presence under the streets of the old district, neither one of the Eight nor a generic Ninth. Memory House officially does not acknowledge it. Threshold’s records note its existence and decline to characterize it. Pre-Compact authorities treat its existence as serious and refuse to discuss it casually.
Pre-Compact ground
Buddhist temple networks, Catholic and Protestant church bodies, Islamic associations, the Tin Hau temple system, Wong Tai Sin and the other major folk-religious sites — these are pre-Compact, with constitutionally protected status. They are not unregistered (that’s a different category) — they are older than the framework, and they are not subordinate to the Eight. Characters can take refuge there. They cannot take refuge there indefinitely; pre-Compact authorities have their own rules.