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Be The Icy Beauty! A Xianxia/Cultivation Tale

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Poor bing is just trying to get back to where to where she was when she fucked up and she keeps accidentally producing chosen ones that are trying to hold onto her coat tails. It's a good thing she doesn't wear a coat or this might become a real problem.
 
Bing has no-one else to blame for her current situation; she was the one who decided to enact the Crystal Providence Secret Art: Frozen Godly Renewal and defy not only the will of heaven but causality itself, and considering said Secret Art required sacrificing the highest possible level of non-divine cultivation it sounds like something of a brute force method to turn back time. That sort of thing almost always has unfortunate consequences; defying Heaven is one thing, defying the fundamental nature of reality is a whole 'nother kettle o' fish.

Plus, she only found herself in that situation in the first place because she stupidly trusted a Devil to not have ulterior motives when it offered to help her ascend to Paragon status.


So yeah, Bing's troubles are entirely of her own making, but in a very thematically appropriate manner for Xianxia; telling heaven, reality and the entirety of space\time to go and get fucked and succeeding is a hallmark of powerful cultivators.
 
persivle said:
Poor bing is just trying to get back to where to where she was when she fucked up and she keeps accidentally producing chosen ones that are trying to hold onto her coat tails. It's a good thing she doesn't wear a coat or this might become a real problem.
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Those waannabe MCs are stealing her job!
Neruz said:
Plus, she only found herself in that situation in the first place because she stupidly trusted a Devil to not have ulterior motives when it offered to help her ascend to Paragon status.
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She didn't, she knew he probably had motives, it just fell by the wayside when she got so impatient to advance.
 
veekie said:
Her reasoning was that she just needed to cultivate faster than the consequences I think?
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I'm pretty sure that's still her reasoning. Though to be fair, she's many trillions of years old, having lived though hundreds of Kalpa, and all of it with that personality. It's literally a feature not only older than most suns in the sky, but in fact older than all of them. All the stars in the heavens are liable to burn out, be reborn, burn out, be reborn...

hundreds and hundreds of times...

And through all of that she's likely had basically the same personality.
 
TheLastOne said:
And through all of that she's likely had basically the same personality.
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Yeah.

a), she's evidently succeeded in cultivating each and every new problem away. This might have been why she was so desperate to reach Paragon; she undoubtedly had problems she was trying to cultivate past then, too.

b), someone who didn't try to solve their every problem by cultivating faster would probably eventually die from dealing with their problems, if only because entanglements with the world eventually lead to them not cultivating fast enough to outrun old age.
 
Candesce said:
a), she's evidently succeeded in cultivating each and every new problem away. This might have been why she was so desperate to reach Paragon; she undoubtedly had problems she was trying to cultivate past then, too.
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Reminds me of protagonists who can cultivate in a short time past any enemy, now imagine if after trillions of years of that working, you suddenly can't progress anymore, you can't make the jump and your enemies catch up to you, you get desperate.
 
Hm.

Xianxia seems to have fairly fixed conventions about the names for the various 'levels' of cultivation and power. I know the first few (from a quest also on SV), but what are the names as the ladder goes up?
 
Simon_Jester said:
Hm.

Xianxia seems to have fairly fixed conventions about the names for the various 'levels' of cultivation and power. I know the first few (from a quest also on SV), but what are the names as the ladder goes up?
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The names are more consistent at the Mortal Realm, but it gets less consistent past that.

For this story, what we know is that above the Mortal Realm is the Immortal Realm, and above the Immortal Realm is the Deathless Realm.

Also, we know that Bing was in the Birthing Dao Realm, and that the peak of the Birthing Dao Realm is called Celestial. We know that the Realm past the Birthing Dao Realm is called the Paragon Realm.

So
Moral Realm
|
V
Immortal Realm
|
V
... Unknown Number of Realms ...
|
V
Birthing Dao Realm
|
V
Paragon Realm


Each of those realms is going to have a number of stages and levels, and someone at the first stage and level of a realm would be less than an ant vs a dragon to someone at the last stage of that realm, and the difference between the peak of one realm and the first stage of the first level of the next will be like a man verse a lion - vaguely doable for the most hardcore if you do everything right.
 
veekie said:
Her reasoning was that she just needed to cultivate faster than the consequences I think?
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That is the reasoning that basically everyone in Xianxia-land uses

Simon_Jester said:
Hm.

Xianxia seems to have fairly fixed conventions about the names for the various 'levels' of cultivation and power. I know the first few (from a quest also on SV), but what are the names as the ladder goes up?
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Not really, it depends on the work.

That said, because Xianxia does draw from a common set of beliefs and practices, such as the Xiuzhen Tu, there are a number of aspects that are usually consistent:

The first few stages of cultivation are almost always the same; Qi Condensation, Foundation Building and Core Formation. Sometimes there's a Body Refining stage in there as well, usually before Qi Condensation.

After that things get fuzzier; Nascent Soul and Spirit Severing are usually the next stages, but sometimes there are additional stages between them like Houtian and Xiantian, which do not translate well. Spirit Severing is usually the third-last mortal stage, with the final two stages usually being something along the lines of Dao Formation and then Immortal, which may be False\True Immortal indicating whether further cultivation\divine ascension is possible or not.

Once you hit 'immortal\divine' cultivation everything after that varies wildly from author to author. 'Bronze\Silver\Gold Immortal', 'Ancient', 'Dao Source', 'Ancestor', 'Sovereign', 'Heaven Defying\Seizing\Etc', 'Boundless', 'Transcendent', 'Paragon' and 'Nirvana' are some common terms that get thrown around in this stage.



Strictly speaking, if your cultivation doesn't at least pretend to follow Daoist Neidan practices, then the setting is Xuanhuan rather than Xianxia. This is one of those apples\fruit situations; all Xianxia is Xuanhuan, but not all Xuanhuan is Xianxia, as Xianxia refers to a specific subset of Xuanhuan based on Daoist Neidan. This adds further complication, as you get stuff like Coiling Dragon which looks like a Xianxia on the surface, but doesn't actually count as one because its cultivation is not based on Daoist Neidan.
 
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I'm pretty sure that the "just cultivate faster than your problems can catch up with you" approach would tend to break down by the time you hit some kind of wacky immortal level whose advancement to the tier beyond is measured in millions of years.

Because by that point, relying on faster cultivation to escape the consequences of an unwise action is a bit like trying to rely on continental drift as a getaway vehicle. :p

This may be one of the reasons that there are apparently a much greater number of 'immortals' than there are of true, genuine gods in a setting like this. Most of the immortals are dumbass enough to get themselves killed by creating a problem that hits them a million years later, because that level of 'dumbassery' is a pretty high bar to clear.

The requisite mastery of the Zen of Not Fucking Up required to just survive a multi-million year lifespan, in a cosmos where anything is capable of killing you, is incredible.
 
TheLastOne said:
The names are more consistent at the Mortal Realm, but it gets less consistent past that.

For this story, what we know is that above the Mortal Realm is the Immortal Realm, and above the Immortal Realm is the Deathless Realm.

Also, we know that Bing was in the Birthing Dao Realm, and that the peak of the Birthing Dao Realm is called Celestial. We know that the Realm past the Birthing Dao Realm is called the Paragon Realm.

So
Moral Realm
|
V
Immortal Realm
|
V
... Unknown Number of Realms ...
|
V
Birthing Dao Realm
|
V
Paragon Realm

Each of those realms is going to have a number of stages and levels, and someone at the first stage and level of a realm would be less than an ant vs a dragon to someone at the last stage of that realm, and the difference between the peak of one realm and the first stage of the first level of the next will be like a man verse a lion - vaguely doable for the most hardcore if you do everything right.
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It's the other way around. Birthing Dao is the peak of the Celestial Realm. Celestial is also directly after Deathless, so it goes like this:

Mortal Realm
|
V
Immortal Realm
|
V
Deathless Realm
|
V
Celestial Realm
|
V
Paragon Realm

After that are the divine realms, of which Bing Meilu knows little.
 
Simon_Jester said:
I'm pretty sure that the "just cultivate faster than your problems can catch up with you" approach would tend to break down by the time you hit some kind of wacky immortal level whose advancement to the tier beyond is measured in millions of years.

Because by that point, relying on faster cultivation to escape the consequences of an unwise action is a bit like trying to rely on continental drift as a getaway vehicle. :p
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By the time you reach that point you've either already gotten powerful enough that your problems no longer want to catch up with you, or you've been caught by your problems and got dead.

Either way it is no longer a concern.


That said:
Simon_Jester said:
This may be one of the reasons that there are apparently a much greater number of 'immortals' than there are of true, genuine gods in a setting like this. Most of the immortals are dumbass enough to get themselves killed by creating a problem that hits them a million years later, because that level of 'dumbassery' is a pretty high bar to clear.

The requisite mastery of the Zen of Not Fucking Up required to just survive a multi-million year lifespan, in a cosmos where anything is capable of killing you, is incredible.
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This is also not untrue.
 
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I can never understand the size of the worlds in Xianxia.

The quoted distance between her hometown and her sect is more than 4 times the diameter of the Earth, and is still on the same continent. That wasn't the most egregious example by far.

Then there's population numbers, often quoted as trillions on a single non-ecumenopolis world.
 
AltumCurio said:
I can never understand the size of the worlds in Xianxia.

The quoted distance between her hometown and her sect is more than 4 times the diameter of the Earth, and is still on the same continent. That wasn't the most egregious example by far.

Then there's population numbers, often quoted as trillions on a single non-ecumenopolis world
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It's part of the fun of the genre. Laugh at it and move on.
 
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