You know who probably knows a TON about cultivation and appears entirely willing to share?
Zhuan.
We should ask him to expound on what drawbacks and flaws he had been cautioned to avoid on our next travel section. It's likely to take a bit longer from here out, since we will be traveling with a seated official.
Otherwise- apologies for hauling these things up from like 50 pages ago, but it seemed still relevant to current discussions:
Working a bit on elevating Hummingbird's Dance (maybe by finding a hammer technique that can work well with it and then taking some time to integrate the two) will make us a powerhouse in the department of martial techniques.
I read this and it occurred to me that the people who probably have experience with heavy strikes mixed with the sort of dance that we've learned would be drumming performers from Star's old company. Mei might be able to introduce us to one?
My assumption is that there were dancers carrying and playing drums in their performances.
Something to increase our endurance, ability to take damage, and ability to hold more anam.
Ok, so having read a bunch of proposed charms for this, none of them really address the needs listed here completely?
My idea would basically be a suit of ablative armor that can be fed anam to grow out from a central token into a network of vines covering us. Like, a battery made into armor that loses stored anam to restore physical damage inflicted on it. Build it with the deception antlers to make the armor itself invisible and unnoticed until it soaks a hit.
We know it's a powerplay at least, power means sect points absolutely. To monopolize an industrial sector is big.
Oh. Ooooooohhhhhh. Ok: I get what Mo was doing and expecting now.
Mo wanted control of production, to give her a power base. So the first thing she does upon arrival is look up the most prominent crafter house scion and get them on board, with the assumption that she can fit everyone else underneath them in a pyramid that she stands at the top of. So she went to the Jin, and commissioned a thing early.
But then we sabatoge him, before stepping in to help her win her duel. So she changes the horse she is backing as the head charmcrafter to us. We play into this, being friendly with her as a person and lending her our reputation for her tourney.
However, as she isn't having much luck getting us to commit to being "her" asset, so she developed backups in the form of Zhao, who did understand that he was to be her instrument before he was to be a charm crafter. As we show very little interest in interacting with, much less managing, she knows she is going to need a day-to-day agent even if she gets us. So Zhao picks up coverage of those needs.
So this is the background of her challenge: it is designed to scoop up all the unaffiliated crafters, rank them, and get them working together under her control. Her desired outcome looks to be influence at least and control at best over who can commission charms? Political power to be leveraged against her rivals by keeping them weak without her hand appearing.
So when she sat us down and said "this dude should win", she was doing a few things.
First, she was forcing us to make a choice, in a situation constructed to be high-pressure and time constrained. Are we willing to be her agent and control "her" charmcrafter on her behalf?
The dude she wanted to win showed her he could direct projects built largely by subordinates, in a way that produced useful bulk items. He understood that he was auditioning to lead a team and a workshop, not just be an individual artist.
But when Zhi proves to dense to read the underneath the underneath going on here, she understands that he isn't willing to help her as a manager or political actor.
So she backs off the relationship. Slightly. We are still at rank +1 with her, same as we currently are with Zhuan, regardless of how much the rift was exaggerated. We've become a resource rather than an ally.
My bet is that she does NOT instruct her family to penalize our family; unlike the geng she is very sensitive to setting up the battlefield for the next fight, not settling grudges. So she's got a stick and a carrot for us if she needs us again, but until then we aren't worth investing in because we don't understand how to pay off that investment.
I suspect what she's been doing off-screen is trying to salvage the results of her tourney pushing one of the most talented into Zhuan's camp and losing her most reputable crafter to his own sense of integrity.
So, everything she did makes perfect sense from the perspective of "I want to control charm creation via a trusted subordinate."
We should be happy, I guess, that we were socially slippery enough to force her to force us to commit or walk away?
