Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest)

Big Numbers that don't make sense are a Xianxia genre convention.

Well, you have to remember that most people simply stall out in the third realm, do to drastically increasing requirements as levels pass, and growing responsibilities eating up time, as well as the slow withering of talent that comes with age. People like Yanmei always exist. They're certainly rare, but the empire is pretty massive, like it's land area is probably somewhere around the size of the entire continent of asia, even if big chunks of that are functionally uninhabited, so even rare talents aren't necessarily something to completely flip your shit over. They're reason for celebration within a single clan or Sect, but not something that comes up on the province scale... yet.

Basically, just as the majority of the empires cultivators are lifetime first and second realms who form the base of the cultivation economy and society, layered on top of the mortal one, the majority of the talented are lifetime third realmers, who fill in all the administrative and leadership roles. The cream of the crop are those who can break into the fourth realm, at a young age, but even then, the vast majority of those stall out somewhere in the long climb to indigo.

Basically, although percentage wise, geniuses like Yanmei are rare, in terms of absolute numbers there are still many thousands like her who will never get more than halfway to indigo, which is where the numbers really start to shrink drastically, until you get down to White, where there are only ~10 or so practioners alive at any time.. That's why they are a 'hope' and not a certainty.
Do we have hard number on the population on each rank ?
How hard is it exactly to reach the following rank ?
We know there's only ~10 White, what's the amount of Prisms in the Empire ? ~100 ? ~1'000 ? more ?
A 1:100 ratio seem drastic enough for people to simply give up when they hit a plateau, it'd put Indigos at 100'000
Cyan 10'000'000
Green 1'000'000'000
Yellow 100'000'000'000 ( 15 times Earth population ?)
Red 10'000'000'000'000 (...)
Mortals 1'000'000'000'000'000 (oh look, a wuxia-level number)
 
Is it permitted to attach [] After hearing of your encounter in the woods, Gan Guangli announced that he wanted to challenge the strange boy. You... might be interested in watching.
To our [] Cultivate With Cai Renxiang action? Attaching the Cai minor to the Cai major feels like it won't really contribute anything to the scene.
 
Do we have hard number on the population on each rank ?
How hard is it exactly to reach the following rank ?
We know there's only ~10 White, what's the amount of Prisms in the Empire ? ~100 ? ~1'000 ? more ?
A 1:100 ratio seem drastic enough for people to simply give up when they hit a plateau, it'd put Indigos at 100'000
Cyan 10'000'000
Green 1'000'000'000
Yellow 100'000'000'000 ( 15 times Earth population ?)
Red 10'000'000'000'000 (...)
Mortals 1'000'000'000'000'000 (oh look, a wuxia-level number)

Although there's of course no evidence, by extrapolating from the Outer Sect I think it would proabably be more like 1 White for every 20 or so Prisms, which would put say 1 White with an area which itself has 4-5 major forces, each with 4-5 Prisms, which sounds pretty good.

If this distribution is somewhat similar throughout the ranks then it also matches up with our current situation, with about 5 or 6 Greens in the Outer Sect first year leading to 100-150 Outer Sect first year Yellows, which sounds pretty accurate (hence extrapolating).

Assuming the greatest amount of 20, then we get closer to this:

10 Whites
200 Prisms
4000 Indigo
80,000 Cyan
1,600,000 Greens

Due to the fact that Green is the more common limit point I think its safe to say below here the difference in numbers is far less drastic (once we get away from children of course), but lets say 10 times anyway:
16,000,000 Yellows
160,000,000 Reds

Then we can go back up to say 20 times for mortals due to low resources and we end up with:
3,200,000,000 Mortals

Which although still high for a place around the size of Asia with their tech level, is far more reasonable. In fact with cultivation magic it might even make sense, they managed to make cities on giant trees and radioactive wastelands after all. Once again this is of course highballing it.

One more piece of maths (although I'll admit this one is based on flawed logic, but still hear me out):

If say the average lifespan of a Cyan is 500 years (does anyone have an accurate number? I don't recall, but I imagine if you add deaths from combat this is likely fairly accurate), then considering that Yanmei has only been cultivating 10 years, hence say 1/50th of total population of Cyan are around this age and we get 80,000/50=1600 Cyan around Yanmei's age throughout the continent, which based on what Yrs just said above... sounds pretty good. Once again flawed maths, and tons of assumptions, but considering FoGs so far seemingly less extreme numbers anyway than standard Xianxia and this sounds pretty good.

Edit:
Been pointed out on Discord that Violet was missed between Indigo and Prism, which does modify maths quite a bit, but depending on what we learn later and considering this was being highballed its still not necessarily insane numbers.
Thanks for screwing my maths Arkeus :p
 
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Do we have hard number on the population on each rank ?
How hard is it exactly to reach the following rank ?
We know there's only ~10 White, what's the amount of Prisms in the Empire ? ~100 ? ~1'000 ? more ?
A 1:100 ratio seem drastic enough for people to simply give up when they hit a plateau, it'd put Indigos at 100'000
Cyan 10'000'000
Green 1'000'000'000
Yellow 100'000'000'000 ( 15 times Earth population ?)
Red 10'000'000'000'000 (...)
Mortals 1'000'000'000'000'000 (oh look, a wuxia-level number)

As @FallenPears have mentioned in part, do keep in mind that as the cultivators go up in this they also live a lot longer, and thus the 10 whites would have come from many generations of mortals. Your numbers do seem a bit overly inflated even so, but a thousand years of mortals being born and dying do allow for effectively a much larger number of them to produce each high level cultivator.
 
Although there's of course no evidence, by extrapolating from the Outer Sect I think it would proabably be more like 1 White for every 20 or so Prisms, which would put say 1 White with an area which itself has 4-5 major forces, each with 4-5 Prisms, which sounds pretty good.

If this distribution is somewhat similar throughout the ranks then it also matches up with our current situation, with about 5 or 6 Greens in the Outer Sect first year leading to 100-150 Outer Sect first year Yellows, which sounds pretty accurate (hence extrapolating).

Assuming the greatest amount of 20, then we get closer to this:

10 Whites
200 Prisms
4000 Indigo
80,000 Cyan
1,600,000 Greens

Due to the fact that Green is the more common limit point I think its safe to say below here the difference in numbers is far less drastic (once we get away from children of course), but lets say 10 times anyway:
16,000,000 Yellows
160,000,000 Reds

Then we can go back up to say 20 times for mortals due to low resources and we end up with:
3,200,000,000 Mortals

Which although still high for a place around the size of Asia with their tech level, is far more reasonable. In fact with cultivation magic it might even make sense, they managed to make cities on giant trees and radioactive wastelands after all. Once again this is of course highballing it.

One more piece of maths (although I'll admit this one is based on flawed logic, but still hear me out):

If say the average lifespan of a Cyan is 500 years (does anyone have an accurate number? I don't recall, but I imagine if you add deaths from combat this is likely fairly accurate), then considering that Yanmei has only been cultivating 10 years, hence say 1/50th of total population of Cyan are around this age and we get 80,000/50=1600 Cyan around Yanmei's age throughout the continent, which based on what Yrs just said above... sounds pretty good. Once again flawed maths, and tons of assumptions, but considering FoGs so far seemingly less extreme numbers anyway than standard Xianxia and this sounds pretty good.

Edit:
Been pointed out on Discord that Violet was missed between Indigo and Prism, which does modify maths quite a bit, but depending on what we learn later and considering this was being highballed its still not necessarily insane numbers.
Thanks for screwing my maths Arkeus :p
I agree with all of what you said, but you seemed to have forgotten the Violet stage
 
While I'm tempted to switch to plan that has Gan fight or Spirit playtime, in the end I feel like we need to work on our relationship with Cai while it's fresh, especially since we have a relationship based Domain.
 
I've been thinking about the numbers for the sect.

We know that there are about 1000 people in the inner sect at any point in time. Very roughly speaking, I think the people in the sect at any one time can be broken up into "student" and "employee" Sect members. "Students" comes in, gets training, and leaves within a decade or two; "employees" stay long term, spending multiple decades at least in the inner sect.

It has to be the case that students form a tiny minority of the 1000 sect members. If there are 10 or so new students recruited a year and each of them stays for on average a decade, that comes to 100 students in the sect at any one time, making up nary 10% of the total Inner Sect. Even if all 16 of the people recruited each year through the tournament were "students", unless the sect found a bunch more students to recruit directly (which seems odd, since Outer -> Inner sect is precisely what we would expect from the student track, with other tracks being more likely for employees), I still doubt that more than a fifth or a quarter of the outer sect could consist of students as opposed to employees.

Alright then. Lets talk about employees. If there are 20 such recruited each year through some combination of Outer Sect tournaments and other approaches, that would mean that the average Employee spends 50 years in the sect. Given that the lifespan of a Green is something like 300 years, that means on average a sect-employee spends something like a sixth of their lifespan in the sect. Seems... not unreasonable, given eastern norms.

The thing I find more unlikely is that there are 20 sect employees recruited each year. That would only make sense if the sect did major recruitment outside of the 16 promoted by the tournament. Realistically, out of the people promoted to via the tournament sect each year, I expect a great deal either have or join a noble family, or to get a job in the ministry, or end up settling on a job other than the Sect. All in all, I'd be surprised to see more than half-a-dozen of the graduates this year to stay on with the sect for more than a decade. So They'd have to do a LOT of outside recruitment.

And if the total number of recruited "employee" inner sect members each year is only 10 instead of 20, that bumps up the expected time with the sect to 100 years, which is close to 1/3 a Green's lifespan. Still possible, but kind of a stretch. Especially considering that 200-300 is one's NATURAL lifespan, and the actual lifespan is a great deal shorter when you consider lethality rates among cultivators.
 
Honestly, a large part of those 1000 inner sect disciples could easily be "on paper" disciples.

The Great Sects seem to be a state military academy, a university and a knightly order all rolled into one.

I don't think it's unreasonable to estimate a good 100-200 (at least) cultivators to be "part-time" disciples, they don't stop being inner sect disciples by performing official duties for their clans, or perhaps even lower echelons of most Ministries (Ministry of Integrity being a possible exception).
 
Alternatively, if we assume that all Inner Sect reach Green, which has lets assume a 300 years average lifespan, then it would only require about 3 people join the sect every year who are also determined to remain in the sect their whole lives. Considering that 16 people join the Inner Sect every year (this is correct right? 8 through combat and 8 production) only 3 out of 16 people deciding to stay in the sect isn't too outrageous a claim.

Furthermore, if say half of those who enter the inner sect remain just 50 years that's 400 people right there, then you only need 2/16 members to remain for their whole lives.

We just don't know enough about what the average cultivator does, both due to the strangeness of our year and general ignorance.

Alternatively it could of course be the case that barely anyone who isn't an Elder remains in a sect beyond 100 years and all those extra people are indeed employees or some equivalent.

Also, recall that all of the Inner Sect members are ranked and fight over spots. It seems a bit odd to me that employees would be included in such a ranking system.
 
I've a few questions that have probably been long since been addressed but aren't on the information tabs.

About how physically superhuman are those in early/mid bronze? Not mechanics wise, but description wise. 10x peak human? Is there a way to measure it by that view with dots, speed, and health boxes?

How many stages does each level of cultivation have? I'm aware of it for red through green, but am ignorant otherwise.

How long until someone who's, say, stuck at early indigo have until they die of old age? Is there a scale for that?

When has yrsillar hinted our first chance to increase our talent will probably be?

Is there any notable difference between RL China's yearly and seasonal calendar and this one's?
 
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Alternatively, if we assume that all Inner Sect reach Green, which has lets assume a 300 years average lifespan, then it would only require about 3 people join the sect every year who are also determined to remain in the sect their whole lives. Considering that 16 people join the Inner Sect every year (this is correct right? 8 through combat and 8 production) only 3 out of 16 people deciding to stay in the sect isn't too outrageous a claim.
It would need those people to decide to stay in the sect their entire life, and doesn't allow for for anyone dying (likely to violence) before their natural lifespan is up.
 
I've a few questions that have probably been long since been addressed but aren't on the information tabs.

About how physically superhuman are those in early/mid bronze? Not mechanics wise, but description wise. 10x peak human? Is there a way to measure it by that view with dots and health boxes?

How many stages does each level of cultivation have? I'm aware of it for red through green, but am ignorant otherwise.

How long until someone who's, say, stuck at early indigo have until they die of old age? Is there a scale for that?

When has yrsillar hinted our first chance to increase our talent will probably be?

Is there any notable difference between RL China's yearly and seasonal calendar and this one's?
Well, I'll try to answer these questions as best I can.

1. How superhuman are bronze? It's hard to say, but a mid/late silver is capable of splitting a boulder with a swing of a sword and outrunning a horse. I don't know enough about any scaling system to guesstimate how strong we are now that we are bronze, but it wouldn't actually be that hard for us to defeat an entire army of mortals by ourselves.
2. How many stages are in cultivation outside of red-green? We don't know, it hasn't come up in the quest yet, and Ling Qi certainly doesn't have the knowledge.
3. Age limit for cultivation? We know that the age limit for White's is 1000 years. And every stage has a longer time prescribed to them. I'm not sure what age limit there are for the other stages, but I don't think that reds live much longer than 100-200 years.
4. Talent increase potential? We don't know when talent increase will occur, or if it will ever occur. We should be on the lookout for it though!
5. Calander difference? I have no idea what the Chinese yearly/seasonal calendar is, but the Forge of Destiny calendar is 13 months each with 4 weeks, and each week is 7 days.
 
About how physically superhuman are those in early/mid bronze? Not mechanics wise, but description wise.
We don't know. But a while ago, when Ling Qi was in Mid Yellow or so, she mentioned that she didn't strictly need shoes because if she stepped on a rock then the rock would break before her skin did. Not quite applicable to the rest of your question about quantitative conversion from the mechanics into the real world, since that's not a quantitative measure, but hopefully that gives a good idea.
Is there any notable difference between RL China's yearly and seasonal calendar and this one's?
Yrsillar hasn't mentioned anything like the branches and stems of the traditional Chinese calendar and was puzzled when he was first asked about FoD's calendar. This isn't an area that he's put a billion hours of thought into. After some thinking he decided to keep it easy and simple for himself and say that FoD has 13 months of 28 days.

For every other question of yours, we don't know for sure.
 
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