Overview
The Blackthorn Security Company (黑荆棘安保公司) is the public-facing private security firm that operates as a cover identity for the Nighthawks in Tingen. Officially, Blackthorn is a respectable contractor providing private security, executive protection, and asset retrieval services to wealthy clients. Unofficially, every senior Blackthorn employee is a Beyonder operative working under the Church of the Evernight Goddess.
Blackthorn is also where the live game starts. The launch build opens the player character's personal story line at the firm's Tingen office, and the studio's own launch copy invites new players to begin there. The company is named alongside Tingen itself as one of the source-material locations rebuilt for players to walk through, and the first dungeon series in the launch rotation, the Blackthorn Casebook (黑荆棘事件簿), carries the firm's name.
Role as Cover
Blackthorn lets the Nighthawks investigate, surveil, and engage Beyonder threats in Tingen without exposing the Beyonder world to mundane civilians. Police and city authorities accept Blackthorn's involvement in unusual cases as a routine private-security matter.
The Tingen city government has a quiet understanding with the Blackthorn senior partners: Blackthorn handles the supernatural angle, the Tingen Police handle the mundane angle, and joint cases are coordinated through a small backchannel.
The cover is convincing enough that low-Sequence Beyonders new to the city can spend weeks meeting Blackthorn employees as a private contractor before realising the firm is the Nighthawks' Tingen office.
Office and Operations
The Blackthorn Tingen office occupies a respectable brick building in the Golden Indus Borough. The public lobby looks like an ordinary security firm: receptionists, conference rooms, signed contracts on the wall. The operational levels above and below the lobby contain the actual Nighthawks chapter: armoury, archive, brewing chamber, ritual room, and direct access to the underground passage that leads to the Hill of the Sun cathedral.
Community accounts of the launch client describe the building as a plain two-storey commercial frontage with weathered brick, narrow windows, and a faded nameplate, staged to look deliberately unremarkable. The ground-floor reception carries a wooden front desk, old newspapers, and clerks sitting quietly at their work. A first-floor office on the right belongs to the clerk who countersigns field expense claims, an errand the game hands new recruits on their first day. The working heart of the office is a basement reached through a plated door, holding the sealed artifact lockers and the case archive.
Senior Blackthorn employees in the Tingen office include the chapter captain (the senior Nighthawks officer in the city), three squad leaders, and a small administrative staff who manage the cover. The cover staff are themselves low-Sequence Beyonders: their mundane personas are believable to clients, and they can defend themselves if a client encounter turns supernatural unexpectedly.
Joining Blackthorn
The player character's induction is the opening beat of the personal story line rather than an optional faction sign-up. Leonard Mitchell arranges the post directly, and the game is candid about how: the player walks in as a connections hire rather than an applicant, with no interview, and Leonard personally administers the potion that starts the player's Beyonder career. Official material sets this against Klein Moretti's own route, which began with ordinary clerical work and no patronage at all.
A minigame before character creation frames the whole thing as signing a fourteen-year employment contract with Blackthorn, paying out a Blackthorn-branded iron rice bowl and a gold contract prop as souvenirs of the joke.
Once hired, the player holds the title of night watcher (值夜者), the rank-and-file Nighthawks grade. Community accounts describe the rest of the induction as a captain-level background check followed by an oath before the name goes on the roll.
Working Out of Blackthorn
The office doubles as the player's hub for Nighthawks resources: the brewing chamber for potion brewing, the archive for Beyonder lore reference, and the captain's office for assigned investigations.
Community accounts describe the day-to-day loop the game builds around the firm: canvass the streets by day for rumours of anomalies, using spirit vision to pick out supernatural residue, collate the leads in the basement after dark, then confront whatever the case turns up. Sanity is under pressure throughout, and losing control is a real failure state rather than a flavour warning.
Old Neil's expense claims, a running joke in the source material, are a literal shop in the live game: the weekly exchange counter is presented as the same expense form Old Neil files.
Klein's Own Induction
The source-faithful story line retells Klein Moretti's arrival at Blackthorn as a chapter on its own separate track. It is not the same beat as the player's hire: the player's induction sits at the very start of the personal line, while the retelling sits several chapters into the source-faithful line. Both exist in the launch build, and the two story tracks run in parallel.
Backlund Equivalent
The Backlund Nighthawks operate from Saint Selena Cathedral and use a different set of cover identities, multiple smaller firms rather than a single private-security front. Blackthorn is a Tingen-specific name. Story content treats each city's Nighthawks chapter as its own organisation with shared central oversight from the Backlund regional command.