There is just a questions who is worse - Mehrunes or Hist. Jury is still out considering that unlike Dagon, who is a very honest guy, Hist is very much fond of their opsec.
Cultivating Magic
- Thread starter SpiraSpira
- Start date
- Original
Neruz
Rogue Spiderbanana
- Location
- The Land of Fire and Poison
Point is that while they may claim to be omnipotent and omniscient and generally without limits, there is pretty strong evidence that those claims are not entirely true.
She has fairly positive karma at the present time, although not enough to have a visible merit halo that regular people can see if she wants them to, which is possible for people sufficiently "good." When she killed a bunch of evil people and gave their souls to Judge Wu, she still has all the karmic virtue from stopping those people in the first place.
He farms not the virtue one receives from stopping them but from punishing them after they've already been stopped by other people, the universe, or old age, etc.
- Location
- United States
It is probably just a Draugr lord, I think some of them can use magic, but they can shout which seems like it was what got them to try to di-vivisect it
xbox432
Lover of Editing
I can't help but wonder, could she use her Polymorph formation as a sort of... Cultural impetus tool? An empathy cultivator? Ya know, a literal use of the phrase "You can't understand someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes". As in, she could offer to let humans see what it is like to be a Dire Monster for a brief period of time, as well as let Dire Monsters see what it's like to be human. It could be an amazing way to help bridge gaps between people in the school, help alleviate some of the tension some humans might have towards Dire Monsters.
Hell, it might actually help with their Cultivation too. After all, a lot of the underlying impetus of Cultivating is gaining new understanding of the world around you and a better understanding of the Dao. Being given the chance to literally see the world from a new angle could be invaluable for them. Doing the same with "Alter Self" could even let men and women see things from the other's perspective. And we KNOW that this could be effective simply due to how Mei Wen's personality shifts during her own transformation.
Mei Wen could easily set those two formations up in the training hall and make absolute bank. But maybe offer them to her own girls first as a sort of test bed?
I gotta say, this had me giggling. I immediately had the image of two Cultivators meeting and initiating the old joke of "Hey, can you let me copy your homework about the Outer Sect Disciple in Teepee #12?" "Sure, just change it a bit so it doesn't look like you copied."
Obviously, MY PET GOAT is just watching out for HER KID. Like every good MOTHER does.
Aye, I'll agree. This is the reason when I find a new story on SB I immediately check to see if it's on a different site. I'll only follow over there if I can't do so elsewhere. The politics on that site are so damned toxic, with Moderators setting up their own little fiefdoms. Thank god SV does a better job of policing and enforcing their rules, as well as taking community feedback into consideration.
I think I saw something similar to this before... Was it in a Xanth or Discworld novel? Where Hell came under new demonic management and they switched out all the "old and outdated" torture techniques and instead installed bureaucracy.
They had the demons start giving the Damned Souls Power Point presentations, and reading off tax legislation. By the end of the book the Damned AND the demons were begging to go back to the good ol' days. And even staged a coup against the current ruler of Hell by promoting them to "Lead Executive President in Perpetuity", thus locking them in a room doing busy-work for the rest of eternity.
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- Location
- miami
Then, let's us commence in jolly cooperation!!! Hahahahahahah.
I wish cultivation story's like this were more common in almost any other story you would see a half dozen young masters or sect factions trying to steal the knowledge, kidnap her or just kill her and loot her corpse. Instead of just asking what do you want for the knowledge? Granted if she had said no outright I'm sure something would have been attempted but I really liked this, nice chapter.
Eldritch being is playing Skyrim on one monitor while tabbing across to a xianxia fic on the other.
Wait... are we the eldritch being all along?
Neruz
Rogue Spiderbanana
- Location
- The Land of Fire and Poison
Some interpretations of Vivec's rambling are that the 'Godhead' that is 'dreaming' his reality is in fact the computer running the video game.
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm glad I'm not the only one who got it, but I still felt clever when I realized they were in Skyrim. Hopefully they share something that triggers a memory soon; she should really warn her parents about the numerous existential dangers they might face. For example, to what ends might Hermaeus Mora go for the secret of Planar Travel to another cosmos?
- Location
- Paradise, Hawaii
So Karma is taken care of atm, but will it matter once she is known? Original Soul hopped to body then iived her life, does Karma backlash happen due to 'Reasons?'
Do Family get informed by wandering child soul who got a pair?
Does a diety that deals with spirits trade them back?
Do Family get informed by wandering child soul who got a pair?
Does a diety that deals with spirits trade them back?
Because it'd be terribly in-character for them? They're infernal cultist necromancers who contracted with an erinyes, and encouraged their daughter to bargain a third of her soul with one. Then, when their back was to the wall, they attempted an improvised ritual to contact THE PET GOAT. This entire conversation is speculation, but if they are in Nirn, the setting is full of people just like them who bargain with daedric lords all the time. It would be surprising if they somehow avoided the temptation to dabble in, oh, let's call it adventurous mysticism and conjuration. That's their entire thing, that's what they do.
Neruz
Rogue Spiderbanana
- Location
- The Land of Fire and Poison
Exactly, you contract with one of the lord's minions, not the lord himself, and you definitely don't try and steal his shit.
- Location
- Lake superior, Minoc
awww, I'm enjoying the world-building and her little growing army of monster girls.
You give them way more credit than they deserve, Neruz, and presume competence and restraint on their part that I simply don't see in the earlier chapters. Happy to simply disagree with you here.
- Location
- Venezuela
Her cat self has a young mistress energy. End them by the roots!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
They bargained with a specific well-understood devil for low stakes and pretty carefully calculated gains and costs.
It's possible that they'd deal with Daedra, but they're professional cultists, not fanatics or desperate amateurs, and aren't going to jump into that until they feel they have a pretty thorough understanding of what's involved.
That doesn't save them ofc, but it means that any contract is probably years out and is going to be more careful than just yoloing it.
Even the GOAT summons was made under pretty extreme duress.
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Computers were first invented to do math. It isn't even that hard to build from first principles, assuming you have ability with math and an understanding of what those first principles are: namely, binary logic/math.
Fun history fact: the term "computer" referred to a person that performed mathematical computations before the advent of computing machines such as the one Alan Turing built or the machines IBM built to replace the humans doing computation for the US space program.
Fun history fact: the term "computer" referred to a person that performed mathematical computations before the advent of computing machines such as the one Alan Turing built or the machines IBM built to replace the humans doing computation for the US space program.
Ginny McAllister
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog
- Location
- Pacific NorthWet
I found this yesterday and read the whole thing. What a delightful story.
I wouldn't think there's necessarily any reason to go to binary in particular for a computer formation. Discrete computation, yes (which the MC implies jade tablets do by describing it as a bitmap, though they might be getting that wrong), but base two is an implementation detail of our electronic computers not a key to computation in general.
Winged One
Not the Simurgh
- Location
- definitely the ground
- Pronouns
- They/Them/It
Wouldn't that be too much torture for any soul that isn't enough to pay off her bullshit debt by themself?
- Location
- Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Who says she can't double-dip?
(Seriously though my original suggestion was to just rip out the natural language processing bit of he Animate Dead spell structure, not use actual souls. But then it became a running gag.)
She's building off of the Math array. You know, the one that adds to six?
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- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
It was the easiest way to make an electronic math computation machine due to materials science limitations. Without those material limitations, base two isn't necessary. If you could work out all of the logic gates in base 12, that would probably be a better base for engineering purposes. The main problem there is that you're spending time designing logic gates instead of using the computer to do your math for you.
All other things being equal, the radix economy of base 3 is superior. But they're not equal.
There are material concerns, as you said. A ternary state machine built out of semiconductors sounds awkward if not outright impossible.
There's also the simple advantage that boolean logic is extremely useful and naturally base 2. You probably wouldn't want to build a computer using base 12. But I am curious, what would those logic gates even look like? There are N possible transformations for one input, and N^3 possible composition operations for two inputs, for any give base N. Of the eight dual-input gates that are possible for binary, we use traditionally use AND, OR, XOR, there's a lot of unnecessary hypothetical space even with two values.
Anyway, dreaming up "I'll invent fantasy excel" is hilarious. You're talking about millions upon millions of person-hours of labor, people building abstractions upon abstractions for generations. I think the author did a good job of gesturing at the scale of the problem, that it would take years of work to even get input encoding working properly. In this universe you would literally have an easier time creating a pocket dimension, using it to breed a race of code monkeys, and leaving them to figure it out over thirty years.
Which is more or less what we did on Earth, historically. The first computer was the antiquitous Chinese bureaucracy, which allowed for programmable symbol manipulation by virtue of hiring hundreds of functionaries to perform simple, repeatable tasks.
- Location
- London
Actually speak with dead is probably better, it's already been compared to a SQL query after all. So if she's capable of arbitrarily mixing in specific bits of DnD magic with her Qi formations (which is something that I think is explicitly beyond her current capabilities but that she's edging towards) then that'd be a good starting point.
As a bonus it's powered by the spirit of the dead, not the soul so you can happily use it without worrying about negative karma from torturing someone too much!