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Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest)

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yrsillar said:
the Living Isle
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That's Ancestral Xuan Wu, right?
yrsillar said:
-8100BP: Emperor Li raises daughter clan of Weilu, Xin to dukedom over the warring factions of Emerald Seas
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I think this should be -7100, no?
Katreus said:
Yes. I got confused between violet and indigo. I keep forgetting which is higher. But yes, Cai Shenhua was more impressive than Sun Shao's own 10 year run at white.
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Wasn't this told before the Prism stage was a thing?
 
It did say there were warring factions. I suspect what happened was there were various clans ruling the province, but none were successful enough to gain the Ducal title. Eventually, either the Xi managed to emerge on top in the power struggle, or the Emperor decided it had gone on quite long enough.
 
Alectai said:
So, in light of the revelation that the Weilu just fucking up and vanished, here's my current crazy speculation.

The Weilu withdrew from society as a whole and went full out Fair Folk in secret, hidden redoubts in the deepest and most primeval places in the Emerald Seas. But sometimes their diviners (And we know they've quite likely got the best ones, between the Moon patronage and the fact their founder's sobriquet is literally "The Diviner") forsee times of trouble, and work to tweak things just a little bit, like Eldar who are actually good at biting their tongues and not making a scene of things.

QiDad then was a Weilu Cultivator, sent to Tonghou at this time, to seduce a specific woman at a specific time and ensure she has a child with him. It explains how he managed to somehow evade the notice of a Viscount level clan in their home ground after all, and how he managed to subsequently mysteriously vanish after the deed was done. It even explains how someone who had the eyes of one of their Young Masters managed to slip the dragnet long enough for this all to unfold, and why they found her so quickly after he left.

Because if they could, they'd have murdered QiDad and shown it off to help break Qingge's spirit after all, but they never found him--a Viscount level Clan's young master couldn't find a 'Mere Mortal?' who was a 'Travelling Entertainer?'

TL;DR: Ling Qi is a Weilu Remnant fired bullet aimed at achieving some Specific Purpose, which is probably going to be left eternally vague until endgame where it'll turn out what we did was the plan all along. It's why she's got a Ducal Scion level of talent and drive, and a few weird apparent bloodline tricks as based on her Mystery Ability, despite her mother being from a lay cultivator household. It even explains the special attention the Moons have been giving us even before we really warranted them, because the Weilu are close to them, and Divination is also the themes of a couple of their numbers.

Sounds cliched, right?

Well...

We were straight up told that this character origin was "Kind of cliche", weren't we?
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Inb4 the climax and emotional center of the story is meeting QiDad again and Ling Qi-ing him until he puts Qi's well-being above the Weiluminati.
 
So... somethign I notice.
- Sage Emperor establishes a kingdom in teh Celestial peaks.
- 200 years later, all of the major powers aroudn him bend the knew, creating the Celestial Empire.
- 200 years after that, the Priestess-Queen of the Red Gardens kills him in the marriage bed.

So... presumably, then, he *also* managed to integrate the Red Gardens into his empire at some point (however briefly). It was a mistake. Right now, one of the many reasons the Empire rather likes Sun Shao is that he gets a chance to integrate that province with someone *else* handling those conjugal relations.

I also notice... the Savage Seas and the Seafolk were in open war for something like 200 years before they each brought out their respective Really Big Guns... and it was another 200 years before the damage was repaired.

This isn't just a world with enormously long spans of history. It's a world with enormously long interregnums, too. The Strife of Twin Emperors lasted 1000 years. The Emerald Sease were without a ducal house for 600 years after the Weilu left. The Golden Fields were without a ducal house for 2000 years. There's 100 years from the fall of the last Ao emperor to the rise of the Mu.

It speaks to a people who cling to concepts and identities ferociously, even after the people who remember the people who remember them have almost all died. Cultivator lifespan makes some of this work, but not all.
 
Alectai said:
Hooooo.

That's a real interesting timeline.

Noteworthy, it explains why there's still so many Weilu Loyalists. They were never destroyed, they just fucking up and vanished for some reason.
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Yun said:
Given the inspiration from Lovecraft it makes me wonder if they all died in a desperate ritual to seal some eldritch horror that went poorly.
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They were obviously trying to use the Heart of Lorkhan.
 
Sirrocco said:
It speaks to a people who cling to concepts and identities ferociously, even after the people who remember the people who remember them have almost all died. Cultivator lifespan makes some of this work, but not all.
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Keep in mind they are each forced to cling steadfastly to a particular concept to advance their cultivation and further that clans are quite likely to choose concepts similar to those of their ancestors.
 
Gotta ask. Are there other stronger nations in the setting. It's in most Xianxia's settings. The protagonists starting nation is usually the weakest
 
blitzxs said:
Gotta ask. Are there other stronger nations in the setting. It's in most Xianxia's settings. The protagonists starting nation is usually the weakest
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None that we know of, the Empire's pretty much the local superpower--the various other groups that neighbour them tend to lack the ability to reliably produce White grade entities.

We know there's other powers out there, but it's mostly the Xuan who handle External Affairs, as they're the only ducal clan that's not busy dealing with the local brand of Frontierness preventing exploration.
 
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blitzxs said:
Gotta ask. Are there other stronger nations in the setting. It's in most Xianxia's settings. The protagonists starting nation is usually the weakest
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That's a bit of a tricky question, as we don't know a lot about other nations in the setting. We know that the Empire considers all of the people around them to be barbarians and the Empire has successfully defeated all incursions by those people groups.

For instance, the Empire beat back the Sea Folk and the Cloud Barbarians. And while they suffered significant damage in those fights, the Empire always came out on top.

In fact, the greatest threat to the Empire's existence came from a member of the Royal family who went rogue and tried to usurp the throne. That event resulted in a massive catastrophe where the Golden Fields became a desert and gained the moniker, "The Grave of the Sun."

So I would have to say that the Empire is the strongest power around.
 
Sirrocco said:
It speaks to a people who cling to concepts and identities ferociously, even after the people who remember the people who remember them have almost all died. Cultivator lifespan makes some of this work, but not all.
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Power abhors a vacuum. The absence of imperial recognition won't stop aspirants and pretenders from doing their bloody work. I personally believe the Guo is the last family in a long line of them to seize power. Ruthless enough to stand on top of a mountain of corpses. And powerful enough to force the Emperor's hand to grant them dukedom.
 
Alectai said:
None that we know of, the Empire's pretty much the local superpower--the various other groups that neighbour them tend to lack the ability to reliably produce White grade entities.

We know there's other powers out there, but it's mostly the Xuan who handle External Affairs, as they're the only ducal clan that's not busy dealing with the local brand of Frontierness preventing exploration.
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Who are Ebon Rivers and Alabaster Sands facing off against then? Also, the Bai don't necessarily have an external border anymore, given that the Sun went and conquered it for them. Mostly, I get the impression that a lot of it is that basically everyone has a lot of untamed wilderness.

...which is odd, given that they've had tens of thousands of years to do the taming, but it makes more sense when you realize that cultivation resources tend to come from untamed land... which means that if you tame too much of the land, then you get not enough cultivation resources, you can't sustain enough power in your cultivators, and then stuff starts breaking through and rampaging horribly. Given how Empire/Barbarian fights go, ti seems like the Empire has climbed that curve pretty far already, actually.

As far as the Xuan specifically, I sort of figured it was the other way around. They have external affairs because they were dealing with their own set of barbarians... it's just that the barbarians they're dealing with are at least semi-civilized, and it was possible to convince them to try trade, rather than combat.
 
Sirrocco said:
Who are Ebon Rivers and Alabaster Sands facing off against then? Also, the Bai don't necessarily have an external border anymore, given that the Sun went and conquered it for them. Mostly, I get the impression that a lot of it is that basically everyone has a lot of untamed wilderness.

...which is odd, given that they've had tens of thousands of years to do the taming, but it makes more sense when you realize that cultivation resources tend to come from untamed land... which means that if you tame too much of the land, then you get not enough cultivation resources, you can't sustain enough power in your cultivators, and then stuff starts breaking through and rampaging horribly. Given how Empire/Barbarian fights go, ti seems like the Empire has climbed that curve pretty far already, actually.

As far as the Xuan specifically, I sort of figured it was the other way around. They have external affairs because they were dealing with their own set of barbarians... it's just that the barbarians they're dealing with are at least semi-civilized, and it was possible to convince them to try trade, rather than combat.
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They're not facing anyone, but they're hemmed in on all sides by other provinces.
 
Sirrocco said:
...which is odd, given that they've had tens of thousands of years to do the taming, but it makes more sense when you realize that cultivation resources tend to come from untamed land... which means that if you tame too much of the land, then you get not enough cultivation resources, you can't sustain enough power in your cultivators, and then stuff starts breaking through and rampaging horribly. Given how Empire/Barbarian fights go, ti seems like the Empire has climbed that curve pretty far already, actually.
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From where do you take that cultivation materials come from wilderness? Or rather why do you think wild processes can't be imitated? No, I think the problem's not that.

I tend to think that the setting has the problem of constantly harrased land. When you tame some location and move on, all kinds of spirits, spirit beasts, etc appear out of nowhere to start living there. And with time they only grow stronger and more aggresive. Considering that to not take attrition losses with such beings you need a high level fighter (which are incredibly rare) being constantly present in the location, it is only sensible that Empire/clans don't try to take more land than they can reliably hold.
 
Varder said:
From where do you take that cultivation materials come from wilderness? Or rather why do you think wild processes can't be imitated? No, I think the problem's not that.

I tend to think that the setting has the problem of constantly harrased land. When you tame some location and move on, all kinds of spirits, spirit beasts, etc appear out of nowhere to start living there. And with time they only grow stronger and more aggresive. Considering that to not take attrition losses with such beings you need a high level fighter (which are incredibly rare) being constantly present in the location, it is only sensible that Empire/clans don't try to take more land than they can reliably hold.
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This also really clarifies why a feudal structure is used. Giving a ton of third realm cultivators a personal stake in a small piece of land is an efficient way to keep that land domesticated after someone stronger cleared it. The numbers are such that, in a less hostile setting, armies of 10000 third realm cultivators would be the norm, but here economic prosperity depends on force not being concentrated so much.
 
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