dhasenan
always lowercase
- Pronouns
- She/Her
"Death, we've been together for a while now, and I can't imagine going back to life without you. I want to be with you forever. Will you marry me?"
Reach Heaven Via Feng Shui Engineering, Drug Trade And Tax Evasion
- Thread starter Winged_One
- Start date
- Original Novel Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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Yeah. But it feels insulting in such an abstract, philosophical sense, which makes Shanyi's instant violent response feel off. If it was something like that, my instincts tell me Shanyi should have needed a moment to process that before deciding to punch Yonghao, instead of punching him without thought or decision, like the narration implies.
Maybe I'm overthinking this.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Well, she was already getting angrier and angrier, so it's not much of a stretch to imagine one more thing she parses as an insult causing her to resort to violence. We know her thought processes are full of rationalization for why cultivators are so violent and touchy all the damn time, after all. Even if we accept the rationalizations as true, they are still rationalizations of a way of life in which violence is a routine and quick resort to 'provocation.'
But if you're thinking "gee, Shanyi is getting absurdly angry over purely philosophical points, which if anything lends credence to the idea that she's being subtly manipulated in ways that are making her normally rational self very irrational" then I don't disagree.
- Location
- Before the Ninth Gate
See, I'm not sure that it is. For the criteria that she has: continue cultivating + do not become a puppet of the heavens, this may be her best available options. Saying something has a high chance of death is meaningless until you look at what the costs & risks of the alternative options are.
PhDEevee
Mathematician and Questgiver
- Location
- Sydney
He basically told Shanyi that she had no agency, and that her decisions and her actions weren't her own - basically a helpless damsel in the face of his luck.
Shanyi is a quite opinionated, passionate cultivator who has been dealing with sexism for ages, and she casts a lot of bigoted sect behaviour as 'becoming the Heavens, instead of defying them'. I imagine that while Yonghao absolutely deserves a punch in the face here, he's also receiving the brunt of Shanyi's built-up frustration at her very patriachal sect.
- Location
- US
From an outside viewer perspective, honestly I agree with Yonghao. But not in the way that he means, with luck completely controlling Shanyi's decisions. I think that the only time that his luck/the Heavens actually affected her was right when he bailed in town.
From then on, it was all her. Her, and a bunch of sunk cost fallacy. Because if there's one thing we know about her, it's that she's stubborn as all hell. The heavens probably didn't even need to change anything else.
But Yonghao was a dick when he pointed it out so he did kinda deserve a punch.
I think that right here, luck or the Heavens reached down and tweaked a few things. Amplified her anger, her greed, pushed down her other concerns, and led her to become obsessed with tracking him down. She had other options, but she never really gave them more than a pittance of thought.
From then on, it was all her. Her, and a bunch of sunk cost fallacy. Because if there's one thing we know about her, it's that she's stubborn as all hell. The heavens probably didn't even need to change anything else.
But Yonghao was a dick when he pointed it out so he did kinda deserve a punch.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Only if you accept a few premises:
1) Lucky Guy actually doing what the vow says he's going to do and cultivating intensely would be "becoming a puppet of the heavens."
2) Lucky Guy cultivating intensely for even a few days (to buy her more prep time) would also be "making herself a puppet of the heavens."
3) The part where if you die or are 'crippled' (a loosely defined term in xianxia), you don't get the "continue cultivating" part of that deal really doesn' matter.
4) Importantly, and tying into (1) and (2), she thinks the Heavens are capable of learning not to manipulate her, while presumably assuming the Heavens aren't capable of responding to this 'lesson' by simply destroying her. That seems like an unlikely calculation. She's treating the Heavens as an anthropomorphic construct that can learn lessons when it justifies her in acting out against them, but not when predicting their reactions to her behavior, even though she's basing her justification IN her expectations of their reactions!
I think the intensity to which she's holding to those premises goes beyond "rationality." I don't think she's doing a good job of judging the costs and risks of the alternatives, or even what the alternatives really are.
I mean, his luck IS a mind control mechanism that seems to routinely sling people around the landscape and get them making all sorts of weird or seemingly arbitrary choices on a regular basis.
There's a fine line between punching someone in the face for saying you have no agency, and punching someone in the face for saying "you are not immune to propaganda," as it were.
Shanyi's frustration at her patriarchal sect and general society can definitely be informing the punch, though I really don't think Yonghao had it coming.
Yonghao's trying to warn her off a course of action even she admits has a very high likelihood of killing her. And this is when from his perspective there's something he could do, that he's absolutely willing to do for her, that might even benefit him, and she is telling him not to do it because of her own hangups, even though it involves controlling him, not herself. In the context of him knowing that he is literally cursed to cause people around him to make bad choices that cause disasters, often for themselves.
I don't think any amount of background societal sexism can truly justify punching you for trying to warn someone that your magical "make your friends make bad choices" field may be affecting them when you see that they are in a bad situation of exactly the type often caused by that very same "bad choice" field.
Within the context of cultivation culture where virtually all forms of rudeness and negative implications justify violence, I suppose...
But then, this cultivation culture is very explicitly why so many cultivators make terrible choices and act like fools with their heads up their asses so much. So I dunno what to make of it.
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- Earth
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- He/Him
In my humble opinion, Yonghao "had it coming" in the sense that he should have known that attributing Shanyi's plan to heavenly manipulation would piss her off. I don't think that him saying that was anywhere near bad enough to earn physical violence, but...he had this punch coming the way someone throwing a bowling ball in the air has that ball coming to them.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Honestly, in contrast to what everyone has been saying, I agree with Shanyi here much more. All of you are thinking in a mortal frame, not the frame of a cultivator. Succeeding at cultivation against the heavens requires the stubborn and unreasonable attitude Shanyi is displaying here. Defiance against odds, defiance of the wishes of the heavens is perhaps the very cornerstone of cultivation. It may be forgotten at times when this story is about using engineering and rational principles to progress in many ways, but I feel that not taking this risk would ultimately shackle Shanyi's cultivation. She would bow to rationality and it would ultimately keep her from progressing toward her potential.
In cultivation, a thousand die, a million shackle their cultivation to rationality to avoid being struck down by the heavens (even if they do not acknowledge this is what they are doing), and perhaps ten have the stubborn defiance (and ability to plot and scheme and fight endlessly) to risk everything and make it to the top. Every stage, as the odds get more and more dire, the siren call of rationality cuts deeper as their risks get greater. This doesn't mean that cultivators should not give themselves every tool possible, knowing that they are fighting against a nigh-unbeatable foe, but they must still fight and not let the odds cow them, for cultivating is already the ultimate irrationality.
Perhaps it is Yonghao's luck that pushed her here, but it ultimately does not matter because the true nature of cultivation is to spit on the heavens, to plot and prepare but never be cowed (this is partially embodied in the incomprehensible-to-Shinyu attitude of the Karmist Spirit Hunter whose name I have forgotten, who (correctly) believes it is the will of heavens for him shackle himself and not face tribulation, and takes the cultivation he has achieved to be the blessing of the heavens for his hard work but not to strive above his station). As Shanyi said, the heavens are not clever but they are wrathful. It stands to reason that if Yonghao's luck is granted by the heavens then this luck is ultimately powerful but somewhat foolish, for allowing Shanyi to show that Yonghao's luck is the result of the heavens can only increase his defiance of them, which I suspect the heavens do not desire.
Yonghao has an ultimately mortal-like attitude that he can be able to have specifically because of his heavenly luck. Not once yet has he had to draw on this kind of defiance, not once has he had to understand the nature of being a cultivator because the heavens (I suspect) want to place someone in power who does not embody this kind of defiance in a plot to hold their power and perhaps be their agent or at least a deleterious role model for those who would defy them. But with Shanyi at his side and the proof that his hated luck is at least in part given by the heavens, he may yet begin to cultivate this kind of defiance, this heart of a cultivator that the heavens wishes someone with great power would not have in order to be their unwitting pawn.
This last bit is all a theory, however.
In cultivation, a thousand die, a million shackle their cultivation to rationality to avoid being struck down by the heavens (even if they do not acknowledge this is what they are doing), and perhaps ten have the stubborn defiance (and ability to plot and scheme and fight endlessly) to risk everything and make it to the top. Every stage, as the odds get more and more dire, the siren call of rationality cuts deeper as their risks get greater. This doesn't mean that cultivators should not give themselves every tool possible, knowing that they are fighting against a nigh-unbeatable foe, but they must still fight and not let the odds cow them, for cultivating is already the ultimate irrationality.
Perhaps it is Yonghao's luck that pushed her here, but it ultimately does not matter because the true nature of cultivation is to spit on the heavens, to plot and prepare but never be cowed (this is partially embodied in the incomprehensible-to-Shinyu attitude of the Karmist Spirit Hunter whose name I have forgotten, who (correctly) believes it is the will of heavens for him shackle himself and not face tribulation, and takes the cultivation he has achieved to be the blessing of the heavens for his hard work but not to strive above his station). As Shanyi said, the heavens are not clever but they are wrathful. It stands to reason that if Yonghao's luck is granted by the heavens then this luck is ultimately powerful but somewhat foolish, for allowing Shanyi to show that Yonghao's luck is the result of the heavens can only increase his defiance of them, which I suspect the heavens do not desire.
Yonghao has an ultimately mortal-like attitude that he can be able to have specifically because of his heavenly luck. Not once yet has he had to draw on this kind of defiance, not once has he had to understand the nature of being a cultivator because the heavens (I suspect) want to place someone in power who does not embody this kind of defiance in a plot to hold their power and perhaps be their agent or at least a deleterious role model for those who would defy them. But with Shanyi at his side and the proof that his hated luck is at least in part given by the heavens, he may yet begin to cultivate this kind of defiance, this heart of a cultivator that the heavens wishes someone with great power would not have in order to be their unwitting pawn.
This last bit is all a theory, however.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
When you are sufficiently lost to reason that you are no longer capable of considering the idea "you are under mind control" or noticing the contradiction implicit in "by defying Heaven, you can show Heaven that you will never accede to its wishes, and it will react to this lesson by never trying to manipulate you again, but will not take note of you as a particularly stubborn enemy and obliterate you as a result..."
Well, there's a saying I've become fond of, that in life, you can become the teacher, the student, or the lesson.
By selectively switching off the parts of her brain that allow her to successfully overcome obstacles, and refusing to listen to others' tactical advice, Shanyi is setting herself to become the lesson.
...
Personally, I think you may have slipped a bit too far into the narrative and taken for granted that the viewpoint character is right about everything, not just in an abstract philosophical sense but in terms of assuming that they're making correct choices whenever they quote those philosophical principles as their motivation.
It's entirely possible to do something really stupid because you have become convinced that your philosophy demands it, when in fact one is making a terrible mistake and not really even serving the nominal philosophical goal.
Of course, it's possible that the narrative will reward Shanyi for making reckless choices, but in a rational fic where being calculated and sober in how one pursues one's goals is usually a good idea, I'd hesitate to expect that.
- Location
- Low Earth Orbit
I very rarely comment, but whatever makes you think Shanyi does not expect this? I'd appreciate seeing the logic outlined.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
To clarify, if Heaven is anthropomorphic enough to "learn lessons" like "this person cannot be manipulated," then Heaven is anthropomorphic enough to draw corollary conclusions like "therefore, this person must actually be destroyed immediately, using any means at my disposal, out of proportion to normal or even heavy Tribulations."
The usual way the trope of 'tribulation' plays out in xianxia, as I understand it, is that it's sort of like stepping on a cosmic land mine. An action of yours causes the harmful reaction. You do something that Heaven disapproves of. Heaven zaps you with a lightning bolt or six. You die, or you don't. And if you're still alive, you stagger out of the smoking crater, dust yourself off, and go on about your business.
The thing about stepping on a land mine is, if you somehow withstand the blast, you won't automatically get hit by more and bigger land mines. Normally, if you as a cultivator survive a tribulation, it's because you caused Heaven to hit you, and Heaven did hit you, but Heaven is now done and will leave things be, at least until you step on another (entirely different) cosmic land mine.
But if Heaven is anthropomorphic enough to understand and retain details about an individual's betrayal and "remember" that they can never be manipulated, enough to be "taught a lesson" as Shanyi fantasizes... Heaven is also anthropomorphic enough to know that such individuals are likely to cause more trouble.
At which point Heaven would seem quite capable of breaking out the big guns and crushing Shanyi like a bug. Better to do it now than to have to wait until she's a Nascent Soul cultivator or whatever and can really start to make trouble.
...
Normally, cultivators get away with their shenanigans in no small part because Heaven is mechanistic- it is on some level modeled after the Chinese celestial bureaucracy, which obeys rules and can be outwitted through cleverness. But that same mechanistic system should logically be incapable of being "shown" a valuable lesson like "Shanyi cannot be manipulated." Conversely, Shanyi hopes that she can cleverly avoid getting blown up by this impending tribulation and that if she does, she won't just get hit with another one, conveniently supersized to kill Foundation Establishment cultivators, some time next week. But a Heaven that is mechanistic enough that it won't try to do that is also a Heaven that is incapable of really registering detailed lessons about her personality.
Shanyi seems not to have a total death wish. So I assume she at least thinks she's got a chance of surviving how she expects this to play out. And that seems unlikely to happen if she actually succeeds in "teaching Heaven the lesson" that Shanyi, personally, is a totally determined enemy. Her best hope is that Heaven is too blind and mechanistic to really understand this, after all...
- Location
- Leeds
Yes but I think the metaphor confuses the actual reasoning.
The punishment for offending heavens/breaking whatever law they have is the tribulation, not death.
If heaven wants you dead they'll pick a tribulation to try and kill you, but if you survive the tribulation then you've already been punished, they don't get to keep calling do overs. They now need to wait for you to reoffend.
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- Earth
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- He/Him
Simon is not arguing against any of those points. He is simply arguing that, if Heaven's bureaucracy is too inflexible to target Shanyi again once she makes it clear she'll be a long-term problem, it's also too inflexible to leave her alone once she demonstrates that she won't let herself be manipulated by them.
Which I think is a valid argument, but needlessly circuitous. A simpler path to the same destination would be: Why does Shanyi assume Heaven's reaction to her inflexible defiance will be to leave her alone, rather than smiting her harder?
Does she assume Heaven will ever leave her alone?
By her own words, she doesn't intend to leave Heaven alone. And I'm pretty sure she expects them to continue retaliating.
- Location
- Minnesota
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Whether this is an assumption on her part or not, it was mentioned in the narrative that the heavens get energy from vows and the like. So their power isn't infinite. Presumably if they smite her repeatedly and fail, expending a lot of energy each time, then she would see it as a success .
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- Mid-Atlantic
Well, the answer to that boils down to "because she thinks Heaven will smite her once for each offense against Heaven's rules, and not harder than is precedented." That is to say, she expects that Heaven is strictly obedient to its own rules, even as she goes to extreme lengths to defy those rules.
Yeah, but if they smite her once with a 'normal' wrathful tribulation for her Qi Condensation (?) stage, and then hit her again a week later with something calibrated for Foundation Establishment, and succeed and fry her... well, that's not a win for her. I doubt she's self-abnegating enough to be willing to die just to decrement Heaven's budget that much.
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Can they do that? There are presumably limits on how often and when they can tribulation someone
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- Earth
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- He/Him
We don't know much about the Heavens, so this is just speculation, but...
The Heavens are a celestial bureaucracy, like a mortal government exaggerated to epic proportions. The strength of a government bureaucracy is its scale, the resources that it can call upon to achieve its goals. The weakness of a bureaucracy is its blind rigidity.
There are theoretical limits on tribulation caused by basic conservation of energy, but approaching those limits would require expenditures on a scale unthinkable to mere mortals, and difficult for even a super-mortal like Shanyi to grasp. Its practical limits are self-inflicted, whether due to internal regulations or cumbersome internal processes. Or, most likely, a combination of the two.
There might also be limitations from conflicting goals, but we know little enough about both tribulations and Heaven's goals that speculating on the practical implications of those limitations would be less akin to media analysis than esoteric fanfiction.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
All this is logically thought out.
From my perspective, it's entirely reasonable to suppose that Heaven is too inflexible, to bound by its own rules, to simply target Shanyi for destruction with overwhelming force on the grounds that Heaven dislikes a smartass who's obviously determined to never do Heaven's will no matter the cost. Nothing we've learned so far in the story gives us any compelling reason to reject this hypothesis.
The trouble is just that a Heaven that is too rule-bound to look at Shanyi, go "no one likes a smartass" and kill her is almost certainly also a Heaven that won't be adaptable or flexible enough to react the way Shanyi wants:
"I need to beat it into their thick angelic skulls that I will never go along with their bullshit, that any vow they put in front of me I will break, even if it might kill me - because otherwise, they will scheme, and they will cheat, and they will contrive things to force me into one vow after another, until I am nothing more than their hand on your throat."
If Shanyi really believes she can do that, can teach them the lesson that manipulating her will always fail by a single act of spectacular defiance, then it seems most illogical of her to think that the same thick-skulled angels who can "learn" that lesson can fail to conclude that it would be better to kill Shanyi and have done with it, even if that means breaking rules.
From my perspective, it's entirely reasonable to suppose that Heaven is too inflexible, to bound by its own rules, to simply target Shanyi for destruction with overwhelming force on the grounds that Heaven dislikes a smartass who's obviously determined to never do Heaven's will no matter the cost. Nothing we've learned so far in the story gives us any compelling reason to reject this hypothesis.
The trouble is just that a Heaven that is too rule-bound to look at Shanyi, go "no one likes a smartass" and kill her is almost certainly also a Heaven that won't be adaptable or flexible enough to react the way Shanyi wants:
"I need to beat it into their thick angelic skulls that I will never go along with their bullshit, that any vow they put in front of me I will break, even if it might kill me - because otherwise, they will scheme, and they will cheat, and they will contrive things to force me into one vow after another, until I am nothing more than their hand on your throat."
If Shanyi really believes she can do that, can teach them the lesson that manipulating her will always fail by a single act of spectacular defiance, then it seems most illogical of her to think that the same thick-skulled angels who can "learn" that lesson can fail to conclude that it would be better to kill Shanyi and have done with it, even if that means breaking rules.
i suspect it will work somewhat but that she will suffer more than she expects. we know the spiritual energy that The Heavens are able to use and the ways they are allowed to use it are limited by The Mandate of Heaven (a peace treaty). we know they are normally not allowed to interfere directly in the mortal world but that there are exceptions. indirect action (luck, even to the point of absurdity, apparently), mass scale judgements (likely as a punishment/contract breach? as in the lion kingdom), and tribulations (filters cultivators to determine who gets into heaven, maybe a type of border/immigration agreement basically).
it's likely that since making a Heavenly Vow drains (all) of the maker's spirit energy but only a small amount of it is held in reserve (to guide them along, likely the amount that the Vow needs is this smaller amount but as our MC says they always take all of it) and the rest is known to directly power the tribulations of future cultivators (and is therefore banned) the energy that The Heavens can use to intervene directly in the mortal realm (tribulations/judgements) is limited to energy gained from the mortal realm. (might also include worship/offerings?)
in any case, the reason to go hard on convincing the heavens that the subtle stuff can't be used to manipulate you is so that they give up on the indirect manipulation (luck) on you (because it doesn't work and their energy might be limited). the motive for avoiding the luck stuff is that it is unpredictable and annoying where the direct interventions (like tribulations) have catalogs and can be preprepared for or even baited out and countered. as seen by the widely disseminated enciclopedia of all 200 types of tribulations and how to deal with them found in every post office.
she's betting on her ability to lie to the face of god and bluff him into giving her a trial she can beat. again and again. betting that even through constant tribulations (literally), she can control the flow of information to make the attacks less useful to heaven than serendipity and to give up on controlling luck (where she's concerned) by making them think it will never work (on her in the way they want). they want to use luck to get a certain person to cultivate, not kill her. they have tribulations for that. if she successfully makes them think she wont play ball, they'll just throw a tribulation at her anytime they are legally allowed to.
personally, i think she's probably underestimating the number of things the Mandate lets Heaven try to smite you for but this is more interesting anyway, so i'm also all for it.
- Location
- Leeds
And I'm not arguing about his points:
I cut off the quote because I'm not really sure familiar with the wider debate I just disliked the metaphor.
As far as the wider argument goes, Shanyi and Yonghao both seemed to accept that the fish was an attempt to kill Shanyi, and yet it was not a tribulation.
Given that people agree that a tribulation would be far more dangerous, why didn't they throw a lightning bolt at her? The most consistent answer is that they can't that the heavens are too wrapped up in their own rules to throw tribulations at everyone they dislike and they have to wait for the right circumstances.
Now I'm sure Shanyi is signing up for the worst tribulations that the heavens can throw at her for the rest of her life, much the inverse of how Kharmists always get the lightest possible tribulations. If there are heavenly offenses that could be straddling the line between tribulation and not tribulation I'm also sure Shanyi will also fall on the tribulation side each time.
But the heavens can't just throw them out whenever they want.
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Still seems weird that such a thing is so widely disseminated but that there's no well-established way to ask to read it without doing so out loud where the Heavens can hear you.
- Location
- Australia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
obviously Shanyi is very intelligent, but imo she's not very emotionally intelligent/introspective; practically, this means she's often rationalizing. I think this interpretation clears up the meaning of that quote (on beating into angelic skulls). perhaps I'm projecting, but I believe Shanyi is not so much afraid of being tricked by the Heavens—instead, she's afraid of being a bad person; that, if she loses sight of her ideals, she will become like those unprincipled, obsequious karmists she hates so much. but Shanyi also wants to feel that she is a logical person, and this is not such a logical fear, yes? so she rationalizes it away (perhaps subconsiously) by blaming it on the Heavens. in the process, she 'personifies' them beyond what is perhaps justified (as you noted).
then again, perhaps I am reading too much into it. either way, I'm really enjoying the story; thank you for writing, Winged_One! c: (please let my family out of Canberra)