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Hmmph... this junior is a good seed [Cultivation Management Quest]

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    • Mochinator said:
    Are.. Are we the baddies?

    And Bhrigu is the Hero? Mindblown SOD BROKEN :o
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    Yes.
    At least that time we were, but not anymore!
    Also, I would like to point out Old Bhrigu is STILL alive.

    Mochinator said:
    Oh Shit! This sounds like a warning that Bhrigu would be here next trial!!
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    That was a pretty common guess, after his interlude this trial though? Like, he only didn't came because he was still grounded after his fuck ups last trial.
     
    TheCount said:
    Also, I would like to point out Old Bhrigu is STILL alive.
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    We dont really know that for sure.
    While world fusion might just have enough lifespan to survive until now, we do not know if the sage bhirgu is the same as
    old bhirgu.
    He might just be a descendant.
    [X] Raise A Nascent Soul Immediately
    -[X] Kleisthenes Sarantapechos
     
    [X] Raise A Nascent Soul Immediately
    -[X] Kleisthenes Sarantapechos

    Hmmm...

    Sirrocco said:
    The Sea-Conquering Army came here to conquer, and spread civilization. They probably saw it as makign the world a better place, though the folks they conquered might not have agreed. Then then tried to change the Dao of Heaven, and were cursed for that. The change in the Dao of Heaven... I think we have reasonably strong reason to believe that it was an attempt to make the world less horrible and more just, given how horrible and unjust the world is.
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    Well. I can be wrong.

    Which leaves us with "where do we go from here?"

    First, it seems pretty clear that "Orthodox" means "Leads to World Fusion" as far as paths go. Beyond that, though... Altar Lord's view on things is not entirely false, but is deeply myopic. It's entirely possible that the Cannibals are serving as a shield to us - that the Heavens are distracted in hating us by their hatred of the Blood Path. At the same time, there is no win there. At best, he can try to endure, and be a thorn in the side of Heaven, for a bit longer. Nascent Soul is not sufficient. Spirit Severing is not sufficient. Law Creation is the bare minimum necessary to actually force the Heavens to exert themselves, let alone actually meaningfully attacking them. There's no way to get past Nascent Soul while still in the Third Sea (and this is slowly getting worse) and as soon as you break out of the Third Sea, you are surrounded by happy higher-tier cultivators who don't have folks like the Blood Path to distract them. The only way to bootstrap up to the point where actual changes might be made is to somehow manage to get a foothold in a higher sea while cloaking yourself enough from Heaven's displeasure that they don't wipe you out, and growing from there.

    I suspect that a culture of not murdering people by the millions will help, there. It also suggests that Heaven's Shadow was, in effect, a Great Project from many, many generations ago to try to limit the damage as Heaven worked to destroy us. "It entered the world, wrapped in the million strands of the web. They began to fray as it entered, but it could give to the last strand the knowledge of that moment." If we had Law Creation Elders (and even then they were apparently diminishing in number) then I imagine we must have had more than a million Nascent Souls. The fact that they instantly started dying off from the moment of the Shadow's inception is also notable.

    So... the hatred of the Heavens has waned over time. We have a single-pillar path and Heaven's Shadow, which we did not have at the beginning of this, and Heaven's Shadow has apparently learned how to work with the stuff of heaven, at least a little. There is space to achieve lasting victory down a subtler path.
     
    [X] Raise A Nascent Soul Immediately
    -[X] Kleisthenes Sarantapechos
     
    Adhoc vote count started by TehChron on Jul 9, 2021 at 6:07 AM, finished with 42 posts and 29 votes.
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    Nope seems to be working fine to me
     
    Sirrocco said:
    Hmmm...

    Well. I can be wrong.
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    Yeah, I for one figured that they came here to do something with or about the Emperor Turtle and his Heavens, and maybe it had something to do with Cultivation paths in some way. But I figured that they didn't do shit like "I murdered 13 million people? Oh well, their leader should just have come to his death instead!" I guess we have our young-Bhrigu's and awful shit too. Guess there's some dark shit on every side.
    Sirrocco said:
    Beyond that, though... Altar Lord's view on things is not entirely false, but is deeply myopic. It's entirely possible that the Cannibals are serving as a shield to us - that the Heavens are distracted in hating us by their hatred of the Blood Path. At the same time, there is no win there. At best, he can try to endure, and be a thorn in the side of Heaven, for a bit longer. Nascent Soul is not sufficient. Spirit Severing is not sufficient. Law Creation is the bare minimum necessary to actually force the Heavens to exert themselves, let alone actually meaningfully attacking them. There's no way to get past Nascent Soul while still in the Third Sea (and this is slowly getting worse) and as soon as you break out of the Third Sea, you are surrounded by happy higher-tier cultivators who don't have folks like the Blood Path to distract them. The only way to bootstrap up to the point where actual changes might be made is to somehow manage to get a foothold in a higher sea while cloaking yourself enough from Heaven's displeasure that they don't wipe you out, and growing from there.
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    I suspect that the "only way to bootstrap out" is via the Single Path method of Cultivation. With that, you can achieve that level of power without even needing to leave the Third Sea.

    It's probably a way to get a lot of power much much faster and/or much sooner than even the original "unbounded path of ascension."

    Soup Chef killed the Turtle Child so that the Heavens could not easily exert control and power over this area. Then, he left behind the One-Pillar path in order to allow people to reach Law Creation-level power even in a dead Turtle Child. And he left behind the Path of the Blood Demon cultivation method so that people could use other people for resources. He also put in some kind of Consumption-related backdoor into the Single Pillar path; one that is meant to counter the World Fusion and Heavenly Stars that the Emperor Turtle has. Possibly the Blood Demon cultivation method is meant to be able to eat up Heavenly Stars or Emperors or World Fusion people too, and the Single Pillar has the Consumption for redundancy and security.
    Sirrocco said:
    It also suggests that Heaven's Shadow was, in effect, a Great Project from many, many generations ago to try to limit the damage as Heaven worked to destroy us. "It entered the world, wrapped in the million strands of the web. They began to fray as it entered, but it could give to the last strand the knowledge of that moment." If we had Law Creation Elders (and even then they were apparently diminishing in number) then I imagine we must have had more than a million Nascent Souls. The fact that they instantly started dying off from the moment of the Shadow's inception is also notable.

    So... the hatred of the Heavens has waned over time. We have a single-pillar path and Heaven's Shadow, which we did not have at the beginning of this, and Heaven's Shadow has apparently learned how to work with the stuff of heaven, at least a little. There is space to achieve lasting victory down a subtler path.
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    There's several things here.

    I think Heaven's Shadow was something else, before it was Heaven's Shadow.

    At the start, it was some kind of web connecting and administrating all the Optimatoi who came to the Turtle World. It was DARPAnet or something. You could view it as the Heaven Defying Demon Clan's counterpart to the Turtle World Heavens I suppose, in the sense that it was an administration system.

    And then at some point, I think part of their intended victory condition was to...

    ... Connect their Web to the Turtleworld Heavens. And they succeeded! ... And found out that it doesn't work as well as they thought it did. Instead of the Web being able to wrest away control over the Heavens, maybe the Heavens were able to directly set the Web on fire, suppressing it. Oops.

    (Maybe you needed a soul to be able to rule or command the Heavens? A soul, which is what the Web lacked. But the Heavens were commanded by the Soul of Emperor Turtle. So. yeah.)

    But even though it was isolated and surrounded by burning light... It was now no longer just the worldwide web that connected all the Optimatoi. Now, it was Heaven's Shadow. It existed partly as part of the machine. Which means it could sometimes nudge things for the Golden Devils. As we see happening in the Heaven's Shadow Interludes, when we started feeding it power.

    However, I might be wrong about the connection of the Web to the Heavens. Maybe they didn't make it part of the Heavens or connect it to the Heavens. Maybe the Web is just something that remains alive as long as there are Optimatoi, or maybe some Optimatoi treasure or infrastructure is responsible for it. It's just, the Heavens are able to target the Golden Devils and their Heaven's Shadow both; and the Heaven's Shadow was not receiving any power until just now. But then it suddenly started receiving power again, and it was able to start using it to help us out again.
     
    Mochinator said:
    Are.. Are we the baddies?
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    Far as I can tell the answer is yes and no.

    The Legions were always an invading force, at this point they went full cultivator nut on retrtibution levels. To be fair the resistance they faced was extreme, and the Legions were unwilling to accept rebels. But there was mercy, sorta, in an "choose one person to die, or your whole clan", way. Which is not unuusal in this world by the "present", and may have always been a thing. What we saw was the end of the story, not the middle, or the beginning. This is after the Automatoi suceeded to infuriate the Heaven's, after the Legions invaded, after the Imperator sent the Automatoi to do something, which could be anything. Conquer the planet doesn't seem to fit the something though. The Automatoi did take over all of the seas, and something else.
     
    Garlak said:
    Yeah, I for one figured that they came here to do something with or about the Emperor Turtle and his Heavens, and maybe it had something to do with Cultivation paths in some way. But I figured that they didn't do shit like "I murdered 13 million people? Oh well, their leader should just have come to his death instead!" I guess we have our young-Bhrigu's and awful shit too. Guess there's some dark shit on every side.
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    I mean.

    At the level the Elders of that era fought at...

    Imagine two Core Formation Elders, commanding armies of Foundation Establishment and Qi Condensation juniors.

    Elder A in charge of Army A steps out in front and bellows a challenge to settle this with a duel, one-on-one, so that nobody else has to die today.

    Elder B in charge of Army B refuses, and stays in the rear behind their troops.

    Battle ensues. A lot of soldiers die. Most of them are soldiers belonging to Army B.

    At the end of it, Elder A can reasonably say to Elder B, "well, if you'd come out and fought me like a proper badass, then I wouldn't have had to kill like 500 Qi Condensation cultivators who tried to throw themselves in my path."

    ...

    Now imagine the same fight on the scale of Nascent Souls or Spirit Severing cultivators, or the levels beyond even that. The collateral damage of such a battle could easily reach far beyond the immediate target. Millions could be killed even though the attacking side was trying to be restrained, simply because the defender's leader refused to come out and fight in a location where damage could be kept to a minimum.
     
    [X] Raise A Nascent Soul Immediately
    -[X] Kleisthenes Sarantapechos

    Well, it's not like that was unexpected though. Any kind of 'Conquering Army' is almost certainly not made of good guys.

    I'm also not sure where people are getting the idea that Law Creation has to do with the Single Pillar Path?

    As a last note, crazy guess time: World Fusion Bhrigu was/is Buddha.
     
    occipitallobe said:
    [ ] Sever the Bright Strands of Fate

    Absoluteness. All things in the world were connected by Fate, all things moved and chided towards their proper end. Space and time rippled as they gave way to the will of the other. The burning one. The first droplet would sever the future of any of similar power to the user. A single blow that no ordinary treasure, no great technique, nothing could deny. With the severance of Fate the chosen foe would cease to exist, both in the future and to some degree the past.
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    Fun idea: imagine what might happen if we had taken this Boon...

    ... And used it on Bhrigu in the Trials.

    We don't know if it would have been enough to delete the guy bearing a Heavenly Star and Keyblade, but... If it were, then. The Heavens would probably have been scared or angry or annoyed.

    Also, since it undoes them slightly in the past too... If it worked, it would have undone that entire Trial. Because Bhrigu is the one that activates the Trials via the Iron Pillar.
    Simon_Jester said:
    At the level the Elders of that era fought at...

    Imagine two Core Formation Elders, commanding armies of Foundation Establishment and Qi Condensation juniors.

    Elder A in charge of Army A steps out in front and bellows a challenge to settle this with a duel, one-on-one, so that nobody else has to die today.

    Elder B in charge of Army B refuses, and stays in the rear behind their troops.

    Battle ensues. A lot of soldiers die. Most of them are soldiers belonging to Army B.
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    Bhrigu was Spirit-Severing and hiding and trying to reach World Fusion in safety, while the Optimatoi were Law Creation, the Realm above that one.

    So this was a Core Formation Elder telling a bunch of Foundation Building, and even lesser, folk "Bring out your one special Foundation Building guy, or I kill all of you." And then when the guy refused to show up, the Core Formation guy rampages through all of the Foundation Building, Qi Condensation, and possibly the mortals too.

    Hmm. Though, no, probably not the mortals.

    13 million is "small" enough that it sounds like you can get that much very easily from Qi Condensation alone. For example, our own QC max numbers (which we haven't reached yet) are about 1 million. And we have shitty land and are in a dead sea. So. Yeah. 13 million? Probably these could have been Foundation Building or Core Formation numbers.

    That still means the equivalent of a Core Formation killing off Qi Condensation tho', while unopposed by another Core Formation.
    Simon_Jester said:
    Now imagine the same fight on the scale of Nascent Souls or Spirit Severing cultivators, or the levels beyond even that. The collateral damage of such a battle could easily reach far beyond the immediate target. Millions could be killed even though the attacking side was trying to be restrained, simply because the defender's leader refused to come out and fight in a location where damage could be kept to a minimum.
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    Yeah but that could be what happened, but in this case I don't think it was.

    I'm pretty sure that the situation you described happened pretty damn often -- in fact I'm sure it did -- but I believe the 5th Sea massacres were unusually and over the top large in terms of numbers and circumstances.

    I think it was a matter of "Duel me 1v1, or else I kill everyone here" rather than "Duel me 1v1, or else we fight and our armies fight, and your's are going to lose massively and get collateral'd too."
     
    Garlak said:
    Fun idea: imagine what might happen if we had taken this Boon...

    ... And used it on Bhrigu in the Trials.

    We don't know if it would have been enough to delete the guy bearing a Heavenly Star and Keyblade, but... If it were, then. The Heavens would probably have been scared or angry or annoyed.

    Also, since it undoes them slightly in the past too... If it worked, it would have undone that entire Trial. Because Bhrigu is the one that activates the Trials via the Iron Pillar.
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    Hm. Interesting. Not sure it'd work, but interesting.

    Could we then have fed the Heavenly Star to someone (Manuel, Rina, ???) at our leisure?

    Bhrigu was Spirit-Severing and hiding and trying to reach World Fusion in safety, while the Optimatoi were Law Creation, the Realm above that one.

    So this was a Core Formation Elder telling a bunch of Foundation Building, and even lesser, folk "Bring out your one special Foundation Building guy, or I kill all of you." And then when the guy refused to show up, the Core Formation guy rampages through all of the Foundation Building, Qi Condensation, and possibly the mortals too.

    Hmm. Though, no, probably not the mortals.

    13 million is "small" enough that it sounds like you can get that much very easily from Qi Condensation alone. For example, our own QC max numbers (which we haven't reached yet) are about 1 million. And we have shitty land and are in a dead sea. So. Yeah. 13 million? Probably these could have been Foundation Building or Core Formation numbers.
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    Then again, this may have been happening in a high energy sea where everyone reaches Qi Condensation by default just by breathing, so killing a bunch of Qi Condensation people there may be equivalent to killing a bunch of mortals here.

    Yeah but that could be what happened, but in this case I don't think it was.

    I'm pretty sure that the situation you described happened pretty damn often -- in fact I'm sure it did -- but I believe the 5th Sea massacres were unusually and over the top large in terms of numbers and circumstances.

    I think it was a matter of "Duel me 1v1, or else I kill everyone here" rather than "Duel me 1v1, or else we fight and our armies fight, and your's are going to lose massively and get collateral'd too."
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    Maybe, but there's not a lot of practical difference.

    Remember what Manuel did to draw out Old Cannibal for battle, for instance. Slaughtered one of his armies. Now, because those guys were Blood Path, we can rightly say they had it coming... but there are other ways to be a valid target in wartime than just "be Blood Path."
     
    Garlak said:
    So this was a Core Formation Elder telling a bunch of Foundation Building, and even lesser, folk "Bring out your one special Foundation Building guy, or I kill all of you." And then when the guy refused to show up, the Core Formation guy rampages through all of the Foundation Building, Qi Condensation, and possibly the mortals too.
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    Doesn't that sound familiar? *Glances at 9th Prince*
     
    occipitallobe said:
    There are far too many Bhrigus, sorry.

    Bhrigu our enemy is a Nascent Soul.

    Old Bhrigu is a Spirit Severing elder.

    Sage Bhrigu was the World Fusion elder who ended the tyrannical reign of the Sea-Conquering Army in the Fifth Sea.
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    Could we issue a mandate that every Bronze Devil must tell outsiders that their name is "Manuel" (while keeping their original names for internal communications), and confuse our enemies that way?
     
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