Hmmph... this junior is a good seed [Cultivation Management Quest]

[occipitallobe]

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[TehChron]

Corpse Gulper at mid nascent soul isnt sustainable with that territory as impoverished as it is

He'll either go for Blood Cannibal Sect directly. The Jianghu Clan. Or us. And if he goes after us on a war footing, he'll likely just die.

My greed says to take them all, but my instincts say secure the corpse so that we can ensure that the Blood Cannibals remain impoverished from this.

 

[NotteBoy97]

@occipitallobe question but does the weakening curse goes away when other people take our lands? Cause I suddenly wondered if we take the lands if Canibal will even want them back after we got them cursed the fuck out of.

 

[occipitallobe]

@occipitallobe question but does the weakening curse goes away when other people take our lands? Cause I suddenly wondered if we take the lands if Canibal will even want them back after we got them cursed the fuck out of.

Click to shrink...

The Curse is truly excellent at discriminating. It can't fully destroy you any more, but when you take new territories Spirit Herb gardens will wither, mineshafts will be found to run dry, and so on.

Conversely, if enemies take your land those old Herbs will find themselves reviving, that abandoned mineshaft was only one pick-strike away from a new vein of Spirit Stones, and so on.

 

[DangerKitty]

The Curse is truly excellent at discriminating. It can't fully destroy you any more, but when you take new territories Spirit Herb gardens will wither, mineshafts will be found to run dry, and so on.

Conversely, if enemies take your land those old Herbs will find themselves reviving, that abandoned mineshaft was only one pick-strike away from a new vein of Spirit Stones, and so on.

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its mentioned to become weaker every time it triggers. do we have any idea how many more time it needs to be triggered before it goes away for good?

 

[Zaealix]

@occipitallobe question but does the weakening curse goes away when other people take our lands? Cause I suddenly wondered if we take the lands if Canibal will even want them back after we got them cursed the fuck out of.

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Not worth it.
As I see it, if one of these two big Demons eats the other then that guy's going to be free to go on a LEGENDARY rampage. making a deal with us is good for him because it means once he's had his fun and burnt off the excess fat he can comfortably sleep without worrying about us shanking him.
The BIG danger to them doing something like this, thunderdoming until there's one super Nascent Soul or whatever the rank is left, is that everything hinges on that guy winning and winning hard. Because if he gets punked by Manuel showing up right when he's low on gas there goes an entire Blood Path Sect just like that.
Conversely, once the agreement runs out, if he's still standing then he gets to spin around and put us on his dinner plate. And chances are if he's been free to gorge himself he will happily do so, consuming us and becoming the last man standing, at which point he wins because there's no one else to provide a long-term strat that can stonewall him, only victims waiting to be eaten.

 

[TehChron]

Yeah

On second thought my dice reads are that all inning will fuck us

But taking the oasis rebels and corpse Gulpers corpse will set the table to remove the blood Cannibals as a threat for the foreseeable future while also potentially holding the scarred lands as a convenient hostage to take later at our leisure due to proximity to the scorpion road

 

[occipitallobe]

Bear in mind Old Cannibal's territories are heavily depopulated. If he agrees not to attack you for a hundred years (a deal which will be magically enforced), he won't be gaining a stage of cultivation. Advancing a stage without sufficient resources to support you is tantamount to betting your life - either you seize those resources, or your cultivation collapses and you are killed.

Even a Late Nascent Soul wouldn't go ham in seizing territory from either you or the Jingshen Clan.

Don't mistake me, he genuinely hates Manuel and if it were possibly would happily kill him and every Golden Devil alongside him, but he's not trying to win 'become super cultivator and destroy enemies'. Rather, he's in genuine distress, most of his resources (cultivators and mortals) are dead, and he desperately needs to kill his enemy to ensure he doesn't need to run into enemy territory and start attacking cities, which works for a bit but is ultimately a very good way to get trapped, your trump cards lured out, and eventually killed.

He's just trying to get a good deal in which he keeps most of his territory, gets a peace with the Golden Devil Clan, and gains time to recover his territory to the point where it can reliably support him and let him rebuild his Sect.

This whole situation has been an out-of-control disaster for Old Cannibal - he's doing damage control right now.

 

[cheesyme]

hmm, go for the Child Gulper's Corpse + Immortal Aperture for cultivation bonuses and goodies, go for Wealth for raising up more disciples aiming for a lot of foundation establishment soldiers, or go for territory and trigger/weaken the curse.

Xianxia seems a setting where individual power matters more than all else and thus the Corpse + Aperture would be best, but the Golden Devil's ability to punch above its weight class through numbers and teamwork kinda disrupts that.

Personally I'm still kinda thinking Wealth over the corpse because we get that wealth now rather than later. Bird in Hand and all. Additionally, the paid wealth would mean his faction is weaker while attacking the Child Gulper's followers, thus possibly resulting in them taking more casualties.

Chron has a good arguments for the Corpse + Aperture tho, so I could go either way.

 

[mastigos]

hmm, go for the Child Gulper's Corpse + Immortal Aperture for cultivation bonuses and goodies, go for Wealth for raising up more disciples aiming for a lot of foundation establishment soldiers, or go for territory and trigger/weaken the curse.

Click to shrink...

And also to deny Old Cannibal the opportunity to eat it.

 

[cheesyme]

And also to deny Old Cannibal the opportunity to eat it.

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The Wealth is in Spirit Stones I believe, so that's kinda true both ways, but you are absolutely correct.

 

[will408914]

I think we want to take the Oasis Rebels lands, in addition to the corpse. IIRC, the usual result for a Blood Path rebellion is basically a new Blood Path sect, but if we take the rebelling lands, we can safely integrate the rebels and prevent its cultivators from needing to take such a path.

 

[Enigma]

Xianxia seems a setting where individual power matters more than all else and thus the Corpse + Aperture would be best, but the Golden Devil's ability to punch above its weight class through numbers and teamwork kinda disrupts that.

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Absolutely true that "Might makes right" is core to the genre. Without Manuel or another Nascent Soul (or the remaining Nascent Soul Wills we have left) the Golden Devils would be completely fucked. I highly doubt Old Cannibal would even think of the idea of not invading out territories, because there would be no way for us to resist a Mid Nascent Soul.

I definitely think that the corpse and immortal aperture should be taken as well, if only to deny Old Cannibal and not for the rest of the benefits (although they are probably really good). Looking at the numbers, the corpse and aperture are worth about two pieces of land so at the very least we will probably have to cede the lands. I think it is also pretty likely that he will value the corpse and aperture a lot higher than unusable land (for him) anyway.

 

[TimEd]

I wanna get Child Corpse Gulper's Immortal Apperature and the resulting treasure traded (with a reasonable discount) to that Elder whose identity we borrowed causing the death of their favored decendant. Would add smoothing Harmony in the Clan to the benefits we get, and to those not in the know of the stolen identity, would make Manuel seem that much more magnanimous.

 

[LordEdric]

So, if I'm reading the agreement right, Old Cannibal is so desperate that he only promised to not invade our land, but nothing about us invading him. I mean he wont have a rival to distract him, but his sect is very reduced by infighting right now. Plus, the sects lands don't have enough people for them to rebuild their forces for years

We should ask for the body at least, then we can attack or raid his sect after corpse gulper is dead

 

[TehChron]

[] Plan A Truly Fortuitous Opportunity
-[ ] Negotiate - If you choose to negotiate, ask for things below. The more you ask, the less chance of the offer being accepted, though. Negotiate is Accepting the Offer but asking for more before agreeing. To Negotiate, create a Plan with what you're asking for below.
--[ ] More Land - The Scarred Lands, The Oasis Rebels
(A secure border to hold back any further trepidation should another Child Corpse Gulper appear. We all know that Old Cannibal only intends to let you rear the population up and grow fat before his Blood Cannibals return to try and reclaim them. Let the Optimatoi do the job in full if he should so desire. Leaving a work be half-done is worse than not starting at all!)
--[ ] Child Corpse Gulper's Corpse and Immortal Aperture - An Immortal Aperture can be turned into valuable storage items, and there are likely many treasures stored within.
(It is an open secret that Blood Path can get far more out of the remains of their Nascent Soul Cultivators after their passing, not merely in re-using the Immortal Aperture, but likely similar practices to what the Demon Oaks practice as well. The treasures are practically secondary to denying such a potent resource to the Blood Cannibals. This, more than anything else, is to secure the safety of the Clan for just a little bit longer. To weaken a foe just that bit more. To buy your people just that little bit more time)
--[] Wealth - Fuck you, pay me. Ask for Wealth in units. 1 Wealth is roughly 10 years of savings for the Clan, and 5 Wealth is worth as much as an additional piece of land. The corpse and Aperture is worth 10 Wealth, as is a Heavenly Treasure. (1 Unit)
(A trivial amount in the grand scheme of things, but the cost of serving as the Blood Cannibal Sects strength shall cost the Golden Devil Clan dearly this generation, so soon after the damages taken this past century. This shall ease the sting between now and the Hundred Year Trials by fueling the growth of what promising Juniors remain after this)

Really straightforward stuff. Child Corpse Eater's Corpse and Aperture are the really big ask here, because this is about hobbling the Blood Cannibal Sect for the next century while we try and exploit the expanded territory for as long as we can. It'll take time for us to repopulate and get going though, so it won't be ready until long after the next Hundred Year Trials have passed.

The Wealth is way more immediate and useful however, in that it's something that can immediately be fed back into the Clan to recuperate the losses of taking on this deal for Old Cannibal in the first place. Naturally, he's going to be treacherous shit and try to have the Optimatoi eat the majority of losses in taking down Child Corpse Eater. Pretty straightforward, and a pretty clear message that we won't take any shit from the Blood Cannibals for the duration of that deal and for however long afterwards. They're mad dogs stuck over a barrel, and if they can't even work up the humility to plead for assistance without committing mass murder, then why even show up in the first place if you aren't ready to make these kinds of concessions at all?

 

[cheesyme]

my worry with such a plan @TehChron is that it's making our intentions too obvious. With the demand for Wealth weakening him and then us preventing him from recovering strength through the Child Gulper's Corpse he has to be able to see the position he's left in. Such a position leaves him frighteningly vulnerable even if he thinks we won't attack, and as he's as much an Old Monster as Manuel he can probably see what we're hoping for with that.

 

[TehChron]

my worry with such a plan @TehChron is that it's making our intentions too obvious. With the demand for Wealth weakening him and then us preventing him from recovering strength through the Child Gulper's Corpse he has to be able to see the position he's left in. Such a position leaves him frighteningly vulnerable even if he thinks we won't attack, and as he's as much an Old Monster as Manuel he can probably see what we're hoping for with that.

Click to shrink...

I mean, he hates Manuel anyway and opened by slaughtering an entire city's worth of innocents and presumably killing one of the Clan's highest non-Nascent Soul Elders to try and get his attention to negotiate.

Whether he's an Old Monster or not, he's not omnipotent nor omniscient, which is borne out by the fact that he's in his current position to begin with.

All we're doing is denying him the ability to make a swift comeback in exchange for us not seeing them as a threat to clean up in the immediate aftermath.

He'll have to negotiate a separate truce with the Jianghu Clan after he's done here as well. The most he'll be able to do is to try and bribe them into assisting him in fighting off the Golden Devil Clan....

And wasn't he planning to do that anyway?

That's the entire point of that 100 year truce. It's not meant to last, so why would we need to bother cloaking our intentions? We know his position. He knows his position. And when Manuel makes his intentions clear Old Cannibal will know that Manuel knows just how fucked he is right now without securing Manuel's assistance.

Because Old Cannibal is fighting for his own life and that of his Sect. If he fails this, he's gonna need to fight Child Corpse Gulper on his own, in a mirror match against someone on par with him, and likely a good chunk of his Sect behind him.

While the other powers in the desert know to watch and wait in the wings to swoop down and play the vulture after the dust settles. This is just such a drastically catastrophic position for Old Cannibal to be in that his lashing out is less to intimidate us and more a futile attempt to distract Manuel from realizing just how utterly fucked he is.

He's a peacock desperately fanning his plumage to appear stronger than he really is, lest the predators descend upon him.

But for us, Old Cannibal is just one of several foes we need to be wary of. Whether or not he knows what we did and holds a grudge doesnt matter. He won't be able to do anything about it for centuries if not ever, and in the meantime the Clan will have time to reposition itself and try to prepare itself for the Demon Bees and the Trials as well.

We need to take this opportunity for all its worth, lol

 

[cheesyme]

I mean, he hates Manuel anyway and opened by slaughtering an entire city's worth of innocents and presumably killing one of the Clan's highest non-Nascent Soul Elders to try and get his attention to negotiate.

Whether he's an Old Monster or not, he's not omnipotent nor omniscient, which is borne out by the fact that he's in his current position to begin with.

All we're doing is denying him the ability to make a swift comeback in exchange for us not seeing them as a threat to clean up in the immediate aftermath.

He'll have to negotiate a separate truce with the Jianghu Clan after he's done here as well. The most he'll be able to do is to try and bribe them into assisting him in fighting off the Golden Devil Clan....

And wasn't he planning to do that anyway?

That's the entire point of that 100 year truce. It's not meant to last, so why would we need to bother cloaking our intentions? We know his position. He knows his position. And when Manuel makes his intentions clear Old Cannibal will know that Manuel knows just how fucked he is right now without securing Manuel's assistance.

Because Old Cannibal is fighting for his own life and that of his Sect. If he fails this, he's gonna need to fight Child Corpse Gulper on his own, in a mirror match against someone on par with him, and likely a good chunk of his Sect behind him.

While the other powers in the desert know to watch and wait in the wings to swoop down and play the vulture after the dust settles. This is just such a drastically catastrophic position for Old Cannibal to be in that his lashing out is less to intimidate us and more a futile attempt to distract Manuel from realizing just how utterly fucked he is.

He's a peacock desperately fanning his plumage to appear stronger than he really is, lest the predators descend upon him.

But for us, Old Cannibal is just one of several foes we need to be wary of. Whether or not he knows what we did and holds a grudge doesnt matter. He won't be able to do anything about it for centuries if not ever, and in the meantime the Clan will have time to reposition itself and try to prepare itself for the Demon Bees and the Trials as well.

We need to take this opportunity for all its worth, lol

Click to shrink...

I'll agree with that last bit on him trying to look stronger than he is, but the rest of that wasn't my point. By taking both the Child Gulper's Corpse and the 10 Wealth, we are rendering Old Cannibal tremendously vulnerable. This can't be denied, he'll certainly know it, and likely so will the Jianghu Clan. If he accepts that offer he is quite likely fucking screwed, as both the Jianghu Clan and the Golden Devils hate him and he knows this.

He's a monster who's used to preying upon the weak and vulnerable, and if we render him such the obvious expectation is that we're going to attack him immediately afterwards along with the Jianghu Clan. With that being obvious, his choices become increase his odds of winning this war a bit in exchange for destroying any chance of surviving the aftermath or risking it all on this war. He might just go the way we want, granting us those demands and leaving him open for our follow up on him.

He might also say fuck that and try to win the war without any sort of alliance, resulting in us getting no wealth, no corpse, no treaty, and if he succeeds he'll be stronger for it.

 

[TehChron]

He's a monster who's used to preying upon the weak and vulnerable, and if we render him such the obvious expectation is that we're going to attack him immediately afterwards along with the Jianghu Clan. With that being obvious, his choices become increase his odds of winning this war a bit in exchange for destroying any chance of surviving the aftermath or risking it all on this war. He might just go the way we want, granting us those demands and leaving him open for our follow up on him.

He might also say fuck that and try to win the war without any sort of alliance, resulting in us getting no wealth, no corpse, no treaty, and if he succeeds he'll be stronger for it.

Click to shrink...

???

You know from the very start the plan for this turn was about setting us up for a next turn invasion of Blood Cannibal core lands?

If he does that I'd be laughing my ass off with glee because then he'd be desperate enough to leave his back open to us while Manuel holds insurance on making sure the kill can stick whichever one of them comes out on top.

"Archegetes. We are in no shape for a full war, but I could countenance a raid in force to seize minor territories from the Blood Cannibals. It would be risky, however. We might be in shape for a full war in twenty years."

You hiss through your teeth and think.

Click to shrink...

And if that happens the Jianghu clan would smell weakness as well and backstab Old Cannibal too. And keep in mind that if he'll refuse to give Manuel those depopulated territories westward, imagine just how little he'd be willing to tolerate the Jianghu keeping their gains from this turn.

 

[cheesyme]

You know from the very start the plan for this turn was about setting us up for a next turn invasion of Blood Cannibal core lands?

Click to shrink...

That is a plan I agree with, but by doing this we're making it obvious that's exactly what we're planning on doing. Even if he does accept such a bargain, if he didn't recognize the trap in that offer then I'd doubt he would have been smart enough to ever reach Nascent Soul.

Of course he's not going to let the Jianghu Clan keep their gains if he has any say about it, yet at the same time of course the Jianghu Clan are going to smell weakness and pile in. It doesn't matter if he takes the bargain or not he's risking a death spiral if this doesn't go perfectly for him. Regardless of whether or not we get these conscessions, our decision to hammer him after the Corpse Gulper is dead will lead to the Jianghu Clan joining in and him straight up dying.

If he wants to survive, he has to either not get attacked after the Corpse Gulper is dead, or get the Corpse Gulper's Corpse and use that to rank up. By demanding both the corpse and the wealth, we're placing ourselves in an obvious position to roll right over him afterwards. He should be able to recognize this, and thus has nothing to lose and everything to gain by gambling on the power from eating the Corpse Gulper's corpse being enough to stabilize him/his sect

 

[TehChron]

That is a plan I agree with, but by doing this we're making it obvious that's exactly what we're planning on doing. Even if he does accept such a bargain, if he didn't recognize the trap in that offer then I'd doubt he would have been smart enough to ever reach Nascent Soul.

Click to shrink...

That doesn't really matter, though?

Thirdly, reaching out to their neighbours to intervene in their conflicts. Ideally after crippling some of their warmaking capacity, and allying with another Nascent Soul to take down their rival. A trade in wealth or territory, no doubt.

Divide and conquer.

His mind went back to those words. By forcing them into a fight, and only assisting the other, he could quite possibly press a wound on one, and kill the other at no cost to himself. In that time, the abandoned territory would be open and easily taken - in theory, he could seize perhaps as much as a fifth, maybe even a quarter of the Cannibal Sect territory.

If, he reminded himself, everything went to plan.

It was another year before Old Cannibal reached out to him.

Manuel felt like laughing. He had sent Ioannes Vatatzes out, his current Protostrator.

To his death, of course.

Or at least, that's what Old Cannibal would have thought. In reality, Ioannes was safe at home, a clone of his generated at great expense. Only in the Early Core Formation Realm, but the poison would make it believable. He sent him out to gather men on the border, to build up what looked like a strike into Cannibal Sect territory.

Old Cannibal had materialised there, and killed the clone swiftly, taking its head. He had proceeded to demolish a local city of fifty thousand people, killing them down to the last man, woman, and child.

Manuel frowned. He had expected some restraint if the man was looking to make a deal. Old Cannibal was more desperate than he thought.

Still, it had worked. He would believe that the Clan were in no shape to wage a war. If Manuel couldn't get the deal he wanted, he would have an exceptionally easy time of invading, especially against a Sect who believed their chief commander to be dead.

Click to shrink...

Fundamentally, Old Cannibal is the one flying blind here.

If he doesn't take the deal, he's fucked, and even if we don't get Child Corpse Gulper's corpse, what we get in land and territory will be far more than enough to make up for the loss because then we'd be taking stabs at the Blood Cannibals core territories and other centers of power and wealth.

What he hadn't known was how to use Child Corpse Gulper's leg as the foundation for a new Blood Key, one allowing him access to practically anything Child Corpse Gulper had himself had access to, which had been the vast majority of the Sect's possessions. It had been two years after that, his spying had truly borne fruit. A slow infiltration, but the keys allowing him to plunder arrays for their knowledge and records. Often incomplete, but he had begun to put together a picture of the Cannibal Sect.

Slowly at first, and then faster and faster, he found nothing but depopulated territories. Empty villages, ruined cities. Corpses, dried-up and withered lining the streets, from city centre to the traders entering it. By his count, at least ten million mortals had been consumed.

It was then his greatest advantage occurred. A single Foundation Building expert of his had died, consumed by Child Corpse Gulper. A shame, but the woman had known her risks going in. However, as he was tearing away at her legs with his razor-sharp teeth, she remembered her duty to the clan. A jade slip, sending messages across vast distances, directly to him. Child Corpse Gulper had advanced to mid-level Nascent Soul.

Click to shrink...

And they have no idea just how deeply Manuel and the Clan have penetrated the Sects secrets. When we move, we're basically going to cut through their depopulated territories like a hot knife through butter on top of having a free pass to get through most of the Blood Cannibal Sects defensive arrays.

If Old Cannibal doesn't take the deal here, then he is genuinely fucked.

 

[Shard]

Do we have any plan to resolve the 'dangerous tribulations' problem? Maybe setting up specialized arrays or somesuch?

Currently, for our negatives, the solution(s) I see are:

Tampering Trials: Make it problematic for the cultivators to win their same-stage duels.

Qi Condensation: Ensure as many people are at 9th Qi Condensation as possible, and sacrifice some of the less talented to 13th Heavenstage to function as people who will trollolol over enemy Qi Condensers.

This strategy becomes problematic from Foundation Establishment onwards though. One thing I wonder - Can you deliberately 'go down' heavenly realms?

 

[Enigma]

One thing I wonder - Can you deliberately 'go down' heavenly realms?

Click to shrink...

This is a thing in the genre. Usually it is as a result of injury or punishment, where someone else damages the magical bullshit inside the cultivator that enables their magic bullshit superpowers. There are also cases where people (usually protags) go back to the start because they learned some super secret awesome overpowered bullshit technique that you can only learn from the bottom up.

 

[Alectai]

Yeah, my feeling is to push for more. At the least we want his Aperture, because if he's going to try and encourage a Nascent Soul to take the field he'd best have something appealing to a Nascent Soul Straight up "Here have some token barren territories and a hundred years" is him showing quite a lot of contempt for us when we're in a position to potentially end his Sect next turn.

There's a great deal of risk, given how Corpse Gulper should have gotten his fucking ass handed to him going this loud and this rabid, but somehow managed to get the upper hand anyway against another old monster, which strongly suggests that "Yes, actually, I am getting external support from some fucker in the shadows".

Extra lands would be the bonus prize to help burn off more of our Impoverishment.

 

[Catpetter1981]

[ ] Decline the Offer - Prepare for a war in force against the Cannibal Sect. Much riskier, but the gains could be much higher. With your new Blood Key and surviving Protostrator, you can easily prosecute such a war against the Cannibals.