[ ] Ask why not all of their people seem to be sentient
Something I wanna know. Will try to think of more questions once I'm off the road.
I mean, Occam's Razor says to me that it would just be "down," where the impurities are thicker and they are further away from the toxic environment of the surface.
here's a quote:
"The blood of the World Corpse flows sluggish from her wounds there."
World Corpse is the Unnamed Mother, that's obvious. If the important thing for them is that blood of the Mother flows freely, then the most obvious Holy Land would probably be The Grave of the Sun.
My question is thus, which Imperial Province are the Holy Lands beneath, or are the Holy Lands deeper into Mother and related to wounds much older than the Empire was involved in.
We know of an everliving "god" of the "Corpse World". The Sunflower Demon was made of mass sacrifice into a . . . something. That something, and it's creation, remind me of the katamari balls of "fuck you" that the undergrounders roll themselves into when pressed hard enough. I could see the Jungle of ever present conflict and life being the Holy Land of these undergrounders. Constant cultivator conflict from all the way back to the time of the Sage Emperor, it's probably really nice for them down there.
I could see the Holy Lands being beneath Heavenly Peaks. The Peaks are artificial constructs built by the Dragons, and the wounds made in Mother during their construction would run deeper and older than just about any area of the modern Empire. There were deeply terrible things done in those places by both dragons and humans during the dynastic wars. Could be a holy land.
But I think that these things that are anathema to our kind, who the overworld is anathema to in turn, I think their holy land is almost certainly the land in which the transgressive cult of taboo violation made their impact most felt. Golden Fields.
We know that Ebon Rivers is familiar with the undergrounders. Jiao was seemingly ignorant of them, which seems about right given that the Peaks aren't a piece of Mother and thus any undergrounder civilization would have to be beneath and around the foundations of the Peaks. The Roots of Xiangmen have some set of them. If their Cities are equivalent to Counties, then there are probably three Counties worth of undergrounder feeding from the wounds in Mother dug by Xiangmen. That's a lot. Then we go to how badly the Jungle was wounded, and how torn up the Bai can get, and the pre-Twilight GF was incredibly warlike both before and after becoming Imperial.
I think the Twilight King was involved with the undergrounders. The way he Katamari Ball'd his way across the province, the terribly transgressive and creation-violating nature of the Eclipse Cult that seduced him, the way that GF used to be one of the most productive and lively areas of the Imperial overworld and is now near completely anathema to overworlder survival. Yeah. I think it would make sense for GF to have been made a paradise for the undergrounder through the "incredibly holy" acts of one of their gods getting an Overworlder to carve such a mighty wound in Mother. An inversion of Imperial history, in which times of peace and prosperity are times of woe in the underground and our suffering and calamity brings prosperity to them.
That's why I want to confirm or deny the theory that their Holy Land is the GF post-Twilight. It ties the prosperity of their rulers to the conflict and suffering of ours.
It also gives us a speculative timeline for the undergrounders, which we can create by mirroring the Imperial timeline.
In any case: this is the sort of question I expect Imperial Arrogance to not ask, or at least not understand the ramifications of. We're all about the footfalls that echo beyond hearing, and what would their culture be if not the echoes of our own inverted in this theory of their cultivation? Grand cultivator wars within the Empire would bring prosperity to the underground indirectly, and the underground would indirectly suffer whenever Imperial provinces began healing and stabilizing. How the Empire acts then has ramifications on how the undergrounders reacted, which is Yang and Yin yes? The Active and Reactive civilizations.
if an undergrounder
acted in the Cult of the Eclipse and the Twilight Emperor
reacted to undergrounder maneuvers, that's an additional layer of violation and transgression involved in the story of the Twilight Emperor.
There's also a
much more serious threat if they view this transgressive event as one of the most holy events in their people's histories. How much could they profit from an Imperial Civil War. How much would they despise a stabilizing or peace-making force. The Empire would
never think to ask if it was possible for this mirror civilization could be preying on them in their weakest moments, but
I think that there's a strong possibility that these issues echo far past the borders of Emerald Seas.
