).
I have to wonder how these bones got here. Were there terrible battles underneath the earth at this level that the bones basically solidified into a form of bedrock? Did these bones come from somewhere else and somehow percolated to this level? Are these bones from the time when the Mother and Father were fighting off all the other spirits who wanted to stop this world from forming? So many questions and possibilities, so little time.
Expected Zhengui to acquire rival....Hanyi does instead.
Shonen Protagonist: "Fight me, rival!"
IIRC, the practice of gifting rings as something with its own significance came from Egypt->Greece->Rome and then merged into the medieval practice of ring gifting as a symbol of fealty.
A bunch of great interludes.
Also a bunch of the weird quest format induced sequencing stuff got coherentified.
I mean, I do think that ultimately we failed a long time ago to actually connect to Xuan Shi, so the whole thing that happened just before leaving where we promised each others to talk and help each others in the mission was the weird outlier there
Was Ji Rong being polite? I don't think he was.
He was being polite. He was also under estimating himself for some reason, which is a bit awkward and makes one wonder. There is a difference between 'I think I'll win', 'I think this will be a tough fight' and 'I think I'll lose and I wonder by how much'. That he said the latest is... strange.
This is a miserable time and Ji Rong is seeing something in Ling Qi that makes him polite... but Ling Qi has her own bias about Ji Rong being constantly aggressive, and him not being aggressive probably throws her off.
Just... nothing from Ling Qi.
He was actually giving a lot of face if you think from the perspective of a Jianghu thug.
Show of concern for your in-group.
Acknowledgement of your bonds and their value to you and to him.
And the biggest one, admission of weakness and a request to well...exchange pointers. You don't normally admit weakness even to a superior unless offering respect.
Given the only agreement was that Xuan Shi would check over the wards and defenses of her mother's home sometime in the near future, I don't see where exactly it was indicated that he should feature so prominently in this arc, especially when we decided not to vote for options that include him.
He was definitely the most polite person in that conversation.
He was pretty polite in light of how prickly Ling Qi was being. More polite than she was being, anyway.
It's less complicated than that. Xuan Shi's reintroduction specifically related to the mission. That planted character hooks all over the narrative of the mission. We already had ones related to Su Ling, and to our spirits. There's established narrative relevance related to various character and the mission, including Xuan Shi. That stuff should get developed. It's bad for pacing when things don't, so not everything should be based on voting given the narrow nature of the vote options we had. Not in terms of options, we had tons of those, but in terms of how much space we had to accommodate things.
As bars go, that's positively subterranean.
Ling Qi had the excuse of her buy being hurt and some asshole coming to question his fitness.
