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Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)

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deadcrystal said:
So we don't know much about Bai Xiao Fen.

She's from a different branch of the Bai Clan to Meizhen, Meizhen's branch being the most important. I think. Hard details on the Bai clan are hard to locate.

I'd guess from Meizhen's comments that members of the Xiao tend to get assigned into some kind of Personal Assistant/Bodyguard/Assassin role with members of Meizhen's branch. Just a guess though.

It also seems like she's a brand new first year member of the sect, and that both she and Meizhen are younger than is typical for PA assignment. I'm guesssing Meizhen winning the tournament out of nowhere and jumping into being a contender in the Bai clan has bought her quite a measure of pull with her family, which she's using with Xiao Fen here.

And despite the comments people have been making I'd say it's not just that she's uncomfortable with the situation as a whole and being part of the sect, I'd say she currently actually actively dislikes Ling Qi. She does seem to be much worse at concealing her feelings than Meizhen is, but maybe that's just that Ling Qi has had a year to pick up on how Meizhen expressed emotions and thus she's equipped to pick up on the tells that Bai clan members have. Maybe somewhere in the middle?

Anyway when it comes around to the tutoring sessions I'd defs like for them to be more than just political wrangling, and actually be helpful to Xiao Fen. Maybe get her to like Ling Qi as well.
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Remember the Bai snakepit back home. And her clan is specifically trusted to be handmaidens/bodyguards.

From a superficial assessment of the situation, this basically needs them to be raised specifically to serve ONE primary for life, and to trust no one else, not even of their own clan.

We see her hostility as stronger initially, and then mainly rising masked confusion.
Vanguard_D said:
Eight branches of the Bai, after the eight daughters of Grandma snake and Yao. Two of these daughters did not ascend to GS so two of the branches are "commoners". Cant remember the number of them, but not that important right now.

Meizhen is from the Serpent Queen head clan yes, they got her colouration etc. They are expected to lead and is one of the hang ups Meizhen got about her house, being the wannabe cultivation hikikomori that she is.

Bai Xiao Fen is from the branch clan that have the handmaiden for the main clan stick. Meizhen mentioned that clan last thread, funny enough that could have been LQ in a weird timeline. Not much known about them beside that.
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If Ling Qi DID become Meizhen's handmaiden...I suspect she'd be Enemy Number One.
BungieONI said:
You seem to have mis-interpreted the context of what that push for Wind, Wood, Darkness, Music etc is for. It is not people reaching for all the things and trying to dilute our elemental focus. It is people reaching for one art because it is for a grouping of arts, which we are likely to only train one of and very unlikely to train all of, barring the possibility that we don't like any of them and the discussion stopping there.

The main thrust against your argument is that it is unrealistic in it's desires, because your position of objection against this perceived all the things grab is connected to the position that what we get must have darkness meridians in our arts and that darkness must be our primary element solely because of our domain weapon. This is not realistically achievable because of the narrowing which comes down on workable art options because of it, when one considers all of our arts in total, particularly TRF and PLR and how we are going to be looking for a TRF successor of some form(though probably not literally TRF+).
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Dude, think. He's the Primal Shadow, of course he's upset about Darkness not taking primacy! /jk

More seriously I think the important part of this is to find out what Moon Arts look like outside of the ultra rare drops. Moon cultivators are rare, but there are ancient Moon traditions from the founders, and thus theres going to be Moon arts developed by those and stuffed into the library after those clans are gone.
AbeoLogos said:
FVM has a technique called "Starlight Elegy" and FSA is inspired by falling stars, but neither of them have the "Stellar" keyword that appears in EPC. There's potentially infinite keywords in the system, and a particular one not appearing in a particular art doesn't tell us all that much definitively.
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The Stellar keyword references Stellar Qi specifically, which is toxic primordial qi from beyond the heavens(which EPC filters through the Moon into digestable qi). I'd be pretty alarmed to see Yellow offensive arts with Stellar Qi TBH.

A Stellar Qi touched FSA is going to be basically something like a Grain weapon, and a possible
 
veekie said:
More seriously I think the important part of this is to find out what Moon Arts look like outside of the ultra rare drops. Moon cultivators are rare, but there are ancient Moon traditions from the founders, and thus theres going to be Moon arts developed by those and stuffed into the library after those clans are gone.
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Yeah, like I said, I agree wholeheartedly on that course.
 
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I think we got a look at a stellar art tech here, didn't we?
yrsillar said:
Absolute Empyreal Dictate
The burning radiance of the stars lights in the user's eyes, burning away the shields which grant their target succor from their own inadequacy, and leaving their unworthy souls bare before primordial radiance. On activation, the user initiates a dispel clash targeting a defensive art in use by an enemy with a four die bonus, on success the target suffers one point of lethal semi perfect damage and cannot activate the same art in the following turn. Regardless of success, the user receives a six die bonus on any spiritual attack made in the following turn.
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So maybe CRX had yellow stellar arts?
 
Camellia said:
I think we got a look at a stellar art tech here, didn't we?

So maybe CRX had yellow stellar arts?
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I'd be pretty interested if that was the case, but I think it is more about going from Heaven to Light to Stellar. That technique may also not be from a Yellow art and Stellar Qi at Green is odd but not completely wonky with the extenuating circumstance of the Cai being the Cai.
 
BungieONI said:
The main thrust against your argument is that it is unrealistic in it's desires, because your position of objection against this perceived all the things grab is connected to the position that what we get must have darkness meridians in our arts and that darkness must be our primary element solely because of our domain weapon.
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You are overgeneralizing. My position is that specializing is good, and spreading out is bad. None of that is absolutely; if we pick up the best art in the world but it happens to be elementally a bad fit, we should cultivate it regardless. If we pick up a successor art to something we already cultivate that isn't the best fit in terms of elements, we should cultivate it. What we should NOT do is to specifically look for an element that widens our elemental spread in the archive instead of using the extra filtering power to look for either a core element or some other feature of interest.
 
BungieONI said:
I'd be pretty interested if that was the case, but I think it is more about going from Heaven to Light to Stellar. That technique may also not be from a Yellow art and Stellar Qi at Green is odd but not completely wonky with the extenuating circumstance of the Cai being the Cai.
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I mean WE absorb Stellar Qi via Moon since Yellow...
yrsillar said:
It remained slow going unfortunately, even perched on a high cliff under a clear sky it was incredibly difficult to sense stellar and lunar qi and parse it from the other energies from the environment, actually trying to absorb it was even more difficult, it was like trying to grasp a cloud. She hadn't entirely failed, as by the time the end of the week neared, she had felt a few precious, tiny drops of qi seeping into her dantian. With just a little more work she would master the first exercises.
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veekie said:
I mean WE absorb Stellar Qi via Moon since Yellow...
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There is that, but I'm not convinced she didn't mean Stellar Qi filtered through the heavens before it gets to EPC given that the concept of Oogie Woogie Space Juice wasn't introduced to us at that time. But if it was that is a bit odd. #MoonThings I guess.

PrimalShadow said:
You are overgeneralizing. My position is that specializing is good, and spreading out is bad. None of that is absolutely; if we pick up the best art in the world but it happens to be elementally a bad fit, we should cultivate it regardless. If we pick up a successor art to something we already cultivate that isn't the best fit in terms of elements, we should cultivate it. What we should NOT do is to specifically look for an element that widens our elemental spread in the archive instead of using the extra filtering power to look for either a core element or some other feature of interest.
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There is a balance here which you point out. Fit vs Element. I would agree that it is widening our elemental spread, potentially, because we might not pick anything to train. But stuff like Moon and Wind have bonuses to cultivation that make them fit along with the notion that the themes they bring along by way of their nature also fit so it is not a case of "Going off to widen our elemental spread and ignoring our core elements or other features of interest" like your last sentence implies. It is more looking at a feature of interest and raising it higher in prominence.

Also Yrs is going to mix these things in ways we simply cannot anticipate without asking him, and Darkness is there in the list of the top six. Your argument that we are moving away from our core elements loses ground when a primary Darkness art could be generated and it may be good enough to train.
 
BungieONI said:
Darkness is there in the list of the top six[/b]. Your argument that we are moving away from our core elements loses ground when a primary Darkness art could be generated and it may be good enough to train.
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Is it? It looks like Darkness may or may not be in the top 6, since the margin seems to be only on or two votes. If it gets through, that is nice, but for the moment there are a number of people pushing Wind over Darkness.
 
PrimalShadow said:
Is it? It looks like Darkness may or may not be in the top 6, since the margin seems to be only on or two votes. If it gets through, that is nice, but for the moment there are a number of people pushing Wind over Darkness.
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One sec.

E: Yeah it's two, but the limit isn't as hard cut as It Must Stop at six. See this thing from Yrs.

E2: Further more I'm not sure priority has that much impact. Because yrs is a human like us squishies I expect it to have some, but how much is wildly uncertain. So trying to "push" it above wind seems odd.
Adhoc vote count started by BungieONI on Dec 4, 2018 at 10:03 PM, finished with 2913 posts and 156 votes.
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[X] Darkness
[x] Moon
[x] Wind
Adhoc vote count started by Kai Merah on Dec 4, 2018 at 10:50 PM, finished with 2915 posts and 156 votes.
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I remember it being a point in last thread that Meizhen would use the fact that she won the Tournament, and her fight against Sun Liling, as currency to ask her gandpa for a Favor.
Did we get any follow up on that ?
 
Ayashi said:
I remember it being a point in last thread that Meizhen would use the fact that she won the Tournament, and her fight against Sun Liling, as currency to ask her gandpa for a Favor.
Did we get any follow up on that ?
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A private favor. On the basis that Meizhen seems chiller than she had ever been seen, it was approved
 
Ayashi said:
I remember it being a point in last thread that Meizhen would use the fact that she won the Tournament, and her fight against Sun Liling, as currency to ask her gandpa for a Favor.
Did we get any follow up on that ?
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I was under the assumption she used her favor to get assigned to the Cai court like she said she might so she can still hang out with her two only friends in the world. But that is a guess, not something verified.
 
As far as 'condensing' our Elements is concerned, we're already going to be shedding at least the following 'first tier' elements, sooner or later:

Heaven, Earth, Thunder, Fire, Mountain, Lake, freeing up nine Meridians in the process and dropping us to Wind and Water out of the Imperial Eight - I don't think we'll end up dropping either of those, given the strong favor Wind has in the playerbase and how prevalent Water is in our primary offensive Arts.

There's an outside chance we drop Wood, as well, which would leave us with Wind/Water as our 'basic' elements. I don't think we will, but we might.

Our Exotic/Rare/Combination elements are Darkness, Moon, and Music. I don't expect us to drop any of those. We aren't likely to pick up Light, Life, Death, or Sun, or stuff like 'snakes', so that's three.

Given the nature of the rarer and more exotic elements, and the way we advocated to Xiulan to pick up a third element even though we know her family Arts pick up Sun in Green, that tells me that keeping three 'basic' Elements is a solid grounding.

So our elemental spread is going to go from all of the Imperial Eight and four of the Traditional Five to two of each, with overlap in Water, for a total of three: Water, Wind, and Wood.

We're highly unlikely to drop our more exotic elements, so I expect us to retain all of Darkness/Moon/Music, and perhaps even expand that to include Cold as a proper Meridian type.

Still puts us at six meridian types in total, but that's far more coherent than the current twelve different elements that are in our meridians.

So unless there's a sudden surge for random elements, I think our elemental spread will be pretty much fully condensed to that point by the time we reach Green Four; Green Five at the latest.
 
veekie said:
The Stellar keyword references Stellar Qi specifically, which is toxic primordial qi from beyond the heavens(which EPC filters through the Moon into digestable qi). I'd be pretty alarmed to see Yellow offensive arts with Stellar Qi TBH.

A Stellar Qi touched FSA is going to be basically something like a Grain weapon, and a possible
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I am not convinced the keyword applies that narrowly. The heavens act as a filter such that stellar light that reaches the earth is already filtered. It would be beyond strange for a "stellar" keyword to principally refer to a state of stellar energies that does not even natively exist anywhere that 99%+ of cultivators would ever encounter it. Again, stellar energy isn't totally blocked by the heavens, it is explicitly filtered. There's usable stellar energy floating around at night regardless of lunar intervention.

There's even a great spirit called the Stars of Mercy, which would be somewhat strange nomenclature for an entity fundamentally composed of toxic primordial icky sky poison. The primary experience of starlight/stellar energies in the material realm hasn't been horrible poison since before the ascent of the defunct dragon empire, so I strongly disagree that the Stellar keyword specifically or primarily refers to stellar energies as they exist beyond the heavens. It just doesn't make much sense. Is that within the keyword's plausible reach? Absolutely, yeah, but not as the first or sole aspect.
 
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Raising Kittens said:
As far as 'condensing' our Elements is concerned, we're already going to be shedding at least the following 'first tier' elements, sooner or later:

Heaven, Earth, Thunder, Fire, Mountain, Lake, freeing up nine Meridians in the process and dropping us to Wind and Water out of the Imperial Eight - I don't think we'll end up dropping either of those, given the strong favor Wind has in the playerbase and how prevalent Water is in our primary offensive Arts.

There's an outside chance we drop Wood, as well, which would leave us with Wind/Water as our 'basic' elements. I don't think we will, but we might.

Our Exotic/Rare/Combination elements are Darkness, Moon, and Music. I don't expect us to drop any of those. We aren't likely to pick up Light, Life, Death, or Sun, or stuff like 'snakes', so that's three.

Given the nature of the rarer and more exotic elements, and the way we advocated to Xiulan to pick up a third element even though we know her family Arts pick up Sun in Green, that tells me that keeping three 'basic' Elements is a solid grounding.

So our elemental spread is going to go from all of the Imperial Eight and four of the Traditional Five to two of each, with overlap in Water, for a total of three: Water, Wind, and Wood.

We're highly unlikely to drop our more exotic elements, so I expect us to retain all of Darkness/Moon/Music, and perhaps even expand that to include Cold as a proper Meridian type.

Still puts us at six meridian types in total, but that's far more coherent than the current twelve different elements that are in our meridians.

So unless there's a sudden surge for random elements, I think our elemental spread will be pretty much fully condensed to that point by the time we reach Green Four; Green Five at the latest.
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I think Darkness is too prevalent to really be marked as a rare and exotic element on the level of Moon and Music, even if it isn't part of the Imperial Eight or Traditional Five.
 
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