If we survive the apocalypse, we likely eventually ascend to nascent soul, at that point killing us probably becomes much harder, add a domain a realm later and I suspect that physical death wouldn't really do much to us, and would be more of a problem that we need to cultivate away by making a new fitting body.
The goddess having the ability to claim our soul mostly matter for the apocalypse, I suspect that if we survive the apocalypse, we are going to take a few decades to recover (replenishing spent lifespan, helping those that broke under tribulation, just ruling well to help society rebuild), and than can go back to cultivating.
Just like the Keku race, we are currently vulnerable, still functionally a baby cultivator, we are just exisiting foundation building this turn after all.
Honestly I'm more worried about the tribulation than the actual apocalypse. We get to plan there, to have allies at our side, to make plans...
tribulation is pass or fail
Why would we "replenish spent lifespan"? We can just replenish exactly what we need if/when we reach the end of our "natural" lifespan, spending 2 divine charges per turn to basically stay at the edge forever... or, well, until we decide to try for the next tribulation.
it's more like fear (although there is a great deal of hate too), less fear of you as you are now and more fear of the potential you represent *looks at the potential core formation abilities* and they aren't exactly wrong in that fear.
First to third step are not particularly impressive from their point of view, sure. Even Shikatu, with all his near-perfect cultivation (we just lack a few stages of body and dantian, but they don't really make THAT much of a difference) and for all of his talent, is currently ONLY a tier IV champion.
but we're a threat along two vectors.
1) We can TEACH and share our method with others. by screening all (or near all) the Keku for potential and teaching them our methods, we're removing near all Keku psykers (or at least the actually talented ones) from their influence. Which means they'll have a much harder time corrupting our people compared to basically anyone else. Even if they manage, they'd likely only get few and weaker demonic cultivators that won't have much of a chance against our wider institution.
WORSE, we might end up
sharing this method with other races.
2) We're still in the early stages of our cultivation, we still have many discoveries left to make, AND our institution is well posed to scale up.
Right now it looks like, more or less
1)Everyone can become a first step. IN THEORY we could potentially make our whole race 1st step cultivators eventually... and there might be some potential in that just to make them more resistant to the corruption, actually.
In fact, once we have a large number of step 4s or above we might make the knowledge of how to become a step 1 public, so that anyone interested might do it on their own time. Just move the goalpost forward and make only second steps and above "true" cultivators from a societal/religious point of view, which actually makes sense considering it's only then they actually get "supernatural" abilities besides a stronger body, which is not that relevant at higher levels of tech outside for the chance to carry heavier armor and weapons.
2)I'll avoid going back to look at all old numbers, but in turn 10, 7 out of 145 first steps attempted the tribulation and succeeded. That's 4.83% success rate. I'll round it up as it's only going to become better, let's say 1 in 20 manages it.
We also currently have 46 second steps compared to 2280 first steps. So 2% of the first steps, though this number AND % will definitely go up in time, getting closer to that 5%.
And then, for the third steps, we currently have 7. 15.2% of our second steps, quite a jump in performance... but that's also because we made bigger effort to help the ones who tried for it, and the number is also artificially boosted by how Shikatu, Netika and Haku didn't have to roll for it at all.
If we remove them, which I think for long term considerations we should (long term we won't invest as much in third steps once we get the fourth steps anyway), we effectively have 4 compared to the 46 second steps. that's a more reasonable 8.7%, which is also boosted a fair bit by the fact we helped them through personal lessons, the arrays and so on.
All in all it's not that the third step is easier, but mostly that the previous tribulations have already screened for some of the weakest/least dedicated cultivators AND that we're investing far more effort into letting those succeed.
Also 2 of the 4 I counted are half-steps, slim successes. We can probably come up with a way to heal them/push them to full third step WITHOUT spending divine charges and lifespan, but that would lower the successes to only 2.
2 compared to 46. 4.35% of the second steps. Would you look at that, we're far closer to that 5% ratio between second and first steps!
So... first steps are only limited in our capacity to teach and recruit. We could,
in theory, EVENTUALLY, have a significant % of our population, potentially even ALL of them, become first steps.
Still, let's assume for simplicity that we'll keep to current %s
We have
1st steps: 2,280.
2nd steps: 46.
3rd steps: 2 "normal" ones, 2 "half", and 2 "champions/MCs".
our population has gone up by a lot. We don't have numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if we were at 1 or 2 billions.
I'll keep it low and say we're 2k cultivators out of 1 billion Keku, so 0.000002% of our population is made of cultivators.
I'm sure that number will grow up immensely. Let us assume it reaches a full 1% eventually, as we can basically skip over the stage with relatively low tier pills, cheap enough we might be able to afford them for that % of our population.
if/when we reach a 1 trillion population...
1st step: 10 million first steps
let's keep to the 5% chance of successful tribulation
2nd step: 500k second steps
3rd step: 25k third steps
4th step: 1250 fourth steps
5th step: 62.5 fifth steps
6th step: 3.125 sixth steps
Above that we get statistical anomalies.
The Imperium of mankind is, according to fan calculation, at least 4 quadrillions, though there's estimates going as high as 150 quadrillions I think. So long term we can get FAR higher numbers of very strong cultivators as seen above. just multiply all numbers by 4k.
Shikatu is an outlier, but even for all of his insights and talent, he's probably not significantly stronger than a peak 4th step
at best. It seems a reasonable estimate, considering demonic 3rd steps were maybe as good as our second steps, so the emperor being about a step ahead of the curve seems reasonable.
So, given a few centuries, we can get some 1250 cultivators as strong as current emperor, and
a few dozens far above him as he currently is.
IN A FEW CENTURIES.
and the chaos gods' plans are measured in
millennia or more.
Give us a few millennia, reaching the low estimate of population of the imperium of mankind (4 quadrillions)...
we get...
4 quadrillion mortals
1st step: 40 billion first steps
let's keep to the 5% chance of successful tribulation
2nd step: 2 billion second steps
3rd step: 100 million third steps
4th step: 5 million fourth steps
5th step: 250k fifth steps
6th step: 12500 sixth steps
7th step: 625 seventh steps
8th step: 31.25 eighth steps
9th step: a bit over 1.5
how scary must that look to chaos gods who have lived for millions or even billions of years?
it's more like fear (although there is a great deal of hate too), less fear of you as you are now and more fear of the potential you represent *looks at the potential core formation abilities* and they aren't exactly wrong in that fear.
just to get an idea: At which step would you say we become an actual threat 1v1? Or, at which step do we become an equal to emperor of mankind at his peak? 9th step?
