Is that how people reached Ascended Mortal despite not having access to good enough manuals?
Yah. Most people will have a few different cultivation arts they practice but it would need hundreds of weak ones to reach the AM realm and higher. This is unfeasible.
Cultivators in the higher realms will have mostly reached them by either having better quality cultivation manuals, or they manage to somehow breakthrough their bottleneck and expand the capabilities of their cultivation art. This can be from personal insights, or through the use of pills and treasures.
This seems a little odd, since it means that you could exhaust a cultivation art before reaching the last cultivation stage it's useful for. Why can't you continue to use a cultivation art to progress once you've mastered the art?
The progress bar will be ridiculously high if it's a high ranking art. By the time you fill it, you'll likely be in the appropriate realm already, if not higher. The xp bonus from practicing a high ranking art while in a lower realm will have your own cultivation rocket up.
After a point, however, your own cultivation will need so much xp that you'll have to ignore low ranking arts simply because they give you scraps. Your own training xp might even have you maxing them out in one or two days.
But cultivation stages aren't knowledge based, they're physical/spiritual states. You finish the Body Refining realm, not once you deeply understand Body Refining, but once you've actually refined your body enough.
To explain it better, there is a difference in cultivation realms and cultivation stages. Realms are the big ones like Body Refinement, Core Formation and so on. Stages are the small points in between the realms like Early, Intremediate and upper/peak.
There are set requirements that must be met to pass from one stage to another, these will be mentioned when they become relevant in the quest so don't worry about that. Filling the overall xp bar is akin to ticking off these requirements, the higher it goes, the more you've accomplished. By the time you max out the bar, your body/spirit will have reached the requirements to step into the next stage/realm.
So, to borrow your example: whenever you max out the xp bar for the body refinement realm, that's when your body has been refined enough to enter the next realm. This doesn't mean you cant refine it further with different arts, however, just that the basic requirements have been met.
Further:
In most Xianxia cultivation arts don't have a maximum stage, it just becomes harder and harder to reach the next stage based on the quality of your cultivation art. Some story's have characters get around this through pills or rituals. But most cultivation arts don't really have a hard limit, just a soft one.
This is true and this is how I would do it if this was a story. As a quest, however, I have to impose hard caps so you can actually master your arts and move on to a new one. If I dont, what would be the point of the dozens of manuals you guys have placed in the store? It wouldn't make sense to pick up a new one if you can still focus on the one you got at the start of the quest.
Even your techniques shouldn't have a mastery level since it's always possible to improve them in some way. The hard caps aren't a workable limit in a story but they're required for a quest.
