Recursive Cultivation (Original Xianxia Cosmology)

[PrimalShadow]

Question about Ascension: instead of integrating, would it be possible for God to jettison the interloper into a freshly-made Energy Body powered by a pseudo-Dantian?

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No, but actually yes (but really no).

There is no way to skip the Integration step in general, so there is no way for a cultivator to Ascend without joining into a single entity with God.

But if the Ascendant was willing, and the God was particularly skilled at controlling Will, it should be possible to do an integration that maintains both original personalities mostly intact with minimal mixing. Then, if God was skilled enough in the use of the Recursion Law, they could perform a variant of the Ascension ritual to trigger Transmission for only part of his Will, and then sever the connection. In effect, this would allow the God to "jettison" the Ascendant into a pseudo-Dantian.

Of course, the problems with this are manyfold.

• At least some mixing is unavoidable, and it would take considerable skill to keep said mixing to a manageable level.
• This sort of use of the Cultivation Law is very non-standard, and would probably require a lot of practice and cultivation to pull off. Since you can't easily practice the Transmission step of an Ascension Ritual (since that step triggers the actual Ascension), it is not a skillset that you would expect many people to have.
• Splitting the Will is ALWAYS traumatic*, even if the limited mixing would make it less so than usual. Both Ascendant and God would probably suffer significantly from this procedure.

So in practice, while this is possible within setting rules, it is not realistically something you see people pulling off. Though admittedly I see it as the sort of quest an MC might set for themselves, much like how e.g. in Desolate Era the MC set out to resurrect his wife after her truesoul was shattered.


(*This is why you don't see many cultivators cloning themselves, or splitting off a small portion of their Will to feed Law comprehension to someone else as a gift/trade.)

 

[We Just Write]

So, I came up with an idea for a world shape that combines all the best features of a Plane and a Cosmos, which I will call a Honeycomb. It's effectively a series of spheres connected by relatively small holes. Here's a cut-through view of the geometry.

In this case, the black is Firmament with ground on it, the Blue is the Heavens, the tiny gold filaments are the Firmament support struts connecting the ground to the Heavens, and the gaps are Reality.

In all cases, gravity is pointed away from the nearest Heavens, pushing the world's denizens into the spherical shells of ground. Meanwhile, the ground curves around the inter-sphere pores, allowing people to easily walk/sail between spheres without needing an aircraft.

As an added bonus, this geometry is (relatively) easily expanded, without any more difficulty than expanding a plane. In fact, due to its high habitation density and the fairly narrow regions that need to be pushed back into the Grandmist in order to grow, the expansion front could eventually become supersonic, leading to truly exponential growth, limited only by how many babies the residents have.

As a side note, a cubical version of this geometry which I will be calling the 'boxpile' could also theoretically be constructed, but would be more awkward for the inhabitants and somewhat less efficient. Other alterations could include inverting the locations of the Heavens and Earth within each cell, or concentrically nesting several Earth/Heavens shells inside each other for each cell, though each layer would require access pores in order to keep the Heavens and Earth as single contiguous masses.

 

[The Froggy Ninja]

I'd imagine a lot of powerful experts avoid Ascension for fear of ego death but the will splitting thing might make them more open to it. It won't help much with Will cultivation but once you reach the point that this is possible you're already way ahead of the curve on that front anyway and the more common Ascensions not only help improve your Law cultivation but also supply you with allies with Ascension tier Will and Law cultivation. And the Ascendants might lose their Qi cultivation but the one-way thermodynamics of the setting means that higher realms have more Qi anyway.

 

[Subrosian_Smithy]

So, I came up with an idea for a world shape that combines all the best features of a Plane and a Cosmos, which I will call a Honeycomb. It's effectively a series of spheres connected by relatively small holes. Here's a cut-through view of the geometry.

In this case, the black is Firmament with ground on it, the Blue is the Heavens, the tiny gold filaments are the Firmament support struts connecting the ground to the Heavens, and the gaps are Reality.

In all cases, gravity is pointed away from the nearest Heavens, pushing the world's denizens into the spherical shells of ground. Meanwhile, the ground curves around the inter-sphere pores, allowing people to easily walk/sail between spheres without needing an aircraft.

As an added bonus, this geometry is (relatively) easily expanded, without any more difficulty than expanding a plane. In fact, due to its high habitation density and the fairly narrow regions that need to be pushed back into the Grandmist in order to grow, the expansion front could eventually become supersonic, leading to truly exponential growth, limited only by how many babies the residents have.

As a side note, a cubical version of this geometry which I will be calling the 'boxpile' could also theoretically be constructed, but would be more awkward for the inhabitants and somewhat less efficient. Other alterations could include inverting the locations of the Heavens and Earth within each cell, or concentrically nesting several Earth/Heavens shells inside each other for each cell, though each layer would require access pores in order to keep the Heavens and Earth as single contiguous masses.

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Interesting! I wonder if you could have a similar cosmology with the geometry of a Kelvin structure or a Weaire-Phelan structure...

 

[Skelm]

It seems like it might be better to go with a 3-dimensional analog of a space filling curve. This would allow for completely inhabiting a 3 dimensional volume as densely as possible for a certain desired heaven/earth distance, albeit with a weirdly elongated terrain from the inhabitants perspective.

I assume that we're limited to 3-dimensional Euclidean geometry here?

 

[Subrosian_Smithy]

It seems like it might be better to go with a 3-dimensional analog of a space filling curve. This would allow for completely inhabiting a 3 dimensional volume as densely as possible for a certain desired heaven/earth distance, albeit with a weirdly elongated terrain from the inhabitants perspective.

I assume that we're limited to 3-dimensional Euclidean geometry here?

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Well, it's not just a matter of population density per unit volume - no matter what you do, that's hard-capped by geometry and the mechanics of life in the multiverse.

You also want to minimize the amount of Grandmist you need to excavate in order to expand the boundaries of your World, because the faster you can expand, the more Cultivators your world can host, and that itself both increases your Qi access AND increases the rate at which you excavate Grandmist.

 

[PrimalShadow]

I'd imagine a lot of powerful experts avoid Ascension for fear of ego death but the will splitting thing might make them more open to it. It won't help much with Will cultivation but once you reach the point that this is possible you're already way ahead of the curve on that front anyway and the more common Ascensions not only help improve your Law cultivation but also supply you with allies with Ascension tier Will and Law cultivation. And the Ascendants might lose their Qi cultivation but the one-way thermodynamics of the setting means that higher realms have more Qi anyway.

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A couple of points here.

A) This sort of approach wouldn't actually benefit God's Law cultivation when done properly. The reason one's Law cultivation advances from merging Wills with someone else is that you absorb their Law comprehension, but if you keep the Wills from properly mixing then you aren't absorbing Law comprehension from the joined Will either.

B) This is not merely neutral to Will cultivation, but actively and meaningfully damaging to it. The process is akin to having an operation to extract something from your stomach, but the only tools you have are a sharp blade for cutting yourself open and a vaccuum cleaner for the extraction itself. There is going to be serious trauma involved.



None of this makes what you suggested impossible, but it does mean that this cultivation style isn't something encountered often.

 

[PrimalShadow]

I assume that we're limited to 3-dimensional Euclidean geometry here?

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Yes.

You also want to minimize the amount of Grandmist you need to excavate in order to expand the boundaries of your World, because the faster you can expand, the more Cultivators your world can host, and that itself both increases your Qi access AND increases the rate at which you excavate Grandmist.

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That is a thing people often optimize for, yeah.

It is actually one of main ways a 3D structure is superior to a 2D structure. In both structures, surface area grows slower than volume, but more so in the 2D case than the 3D case. Thus, once you hit the exponential expansion phase, access to Grandmist will bottleneck you much faster in 2D than 3D.

Of course, for most cultivators such a thing is a distant dream. "Oh no; an Inner World large and prosperous enough that it produces more Qi than even the World's expansion can't keep up. Whatever shall I do?" Since a Dantian is usually formed at the beginning of the Cultivation path, it is a question of theoretical foundation for who-knows-how-many-levels up, so most people don't even bother to worry about it. And they aren't wrong; after all, the vast vast majority of cultivators never make it to a point where such a thing would matter.

 

[We Just Write]

Yes.


That is a thing people often optimize for, yeah.

It is actually one of main ways a 3D structure is superior to a 2D structure. In both structures, surface area grows slower than volume, but more so in the 2D case than the 3D case. Thus, once you hit the exponential expansion phase, access to Grandmist will bottleneck you much faster in 2D than 3D.

Of course, for most cultivators such a thing is a distant dream. "Oh no; an Inner World large and prosperous enough that it produces more Qi than even the World's expansion can't keep up. Whatever shall I do?" Since a Dantian is usually formed at the beginning of the Cultivation path, it is a question of theoretical foundation for who-knows-how-many-levels up, so most people don't even bother to worry about it. And they aren't wrong; after all, the vast vast majority of cultivators never make it to a point where such a thing would matter.

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Curiously, about how common would you say the Honeycomb geometry would be?

 

[Zaealix]

Curiously, about how common would you say the Honeycomb geometry would be?

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Judging by the whole 'Qi appearing faster then the inner world can use it' being a distant dream, it sounds like the sort of thing Cultivators only deal with when super-established and successful.
...Now that I think on it, it occurs to me Cultivators probably have the mother of all debates over how to grow one's inner realm properly, not helped by the fact that whole Inner Brother DunceCap regularly gets himself nailed trying to gather medicine ingrediawnts while Inner Sister StarMother's actually done well enough for herself to figure out that 3D fractal Inner World.

 

[PrimalShadow]

Curiously, about how common would you say the Honeycomb geometry would be?

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I'm not sure. This sort of detail is below the resolution of the world-building than I've done, and I don't want to just make up a number.
This sort of thing is actually true of a number of questions you might ask; I have an idea of how things work and what is possible/impossible, but I'd rather not commit to specifics about the occupants of the multiverse here because honestly I haven't thought it through enough to give an informed opinion.

What I can tell you is that the default topology you get mostly matches your Outer World, and that modifying it from there takes a degree of skill and most people don't do it. Since Top itself uses the Plane topology, that one is most common by far, though you do regularly have other things cropping up (and of course, once a cultivator uses a different topology, so does most of their inner world as well).

Now that I think on it, it occurs to me Cultivators probably have the mother of all debates over how to grow one's inner realm properly

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Totally. At the Intermediate+ power levels, when people talk (or argue) about the "Dao of Cultivation", one of the main subjects in question here is Inner World Cultivation. Setting up an Inner World properly isn't critical at low levels, but it is absolutely critical for advancement once you are past the low-level stages.

 

[We Just Write]

Also, I think I've figured out the 'cheat code' for Energy and Inner World Cultivation. As you have stated, converting Grandmist into Reality produces Qi, but producing Reality consumes more. However, I think I've noticed a loophole here: When you suck all the Qi out of a chunk of Reality it turns back into Grandmist, but you still have the Qi you spent on the initial Grandmist conversion, plus however much you got from the Grandmist itself.

Thus, it seems to me that to properly exploit this effect, one must construct their Inner World with a Law of Oscillation, dictating that Qi will be periodically pulled back towards the center, then forced outwards again. This will establish an exponential growth cycle as the Dantian expands and contracts, retrieving more Qi from its border with each retraction cycle than it spent on the previous growth cycle.

This process will take place orders of magnitude faster than waiting for internal Cultivators to crop up and start dying to give you Qi, leading to utterly ludicrous amounts of Qi being available to those Cultivators who construct their inner world with a Law of Oscillation, and in only a few years at that.

Of course, if there is a limit to the speed of the expansion front, the size of the Cultivator in question's Inner World will eventually stabilize along with the Qi yield at some absurdly high value. But either way, a Cultivator doing this will find themselves with a massive leg-up on the competition.

ESPECIALLY when internal Cultivators take a look at the Law of Oscillation and start using it for themselves, thus contributing their own utterly ludicrous Qi output. Which will, again, take place much faster than for a normal Cultivator, seeing as the Law of Oscillation's main benefit is growth rate.

So, am I on the right track with the Law of Oscillation being the key to ludicrous Qi?

 

[PrimalShadow]

When you suck all the Qi out of a chunk of Reality it turns back into Grandmist, but you still have the Qi you spent on the initial Grandmist conversion, plus however much you got from the Grandmist itself.

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A cultivator can't just suck the Qi out of a chunk of Reality. You can move all the free-floating Qi out, of course, but the Qi that is part of Reality's Laws is fixed in place and doesn't move.

Reality can be forced to destabilize and lose all of it's Qi. It is not something cultivators normally manage to do, but it does happen regularly when a cultivator's Dantian is damaged externally and Qi is drained into the Outer World fast enough to eat up all the free Qi and start cannibalizing reality itself.
However, this process doesn't generate free Grandmist in the place of the deconstructed reality. Instead, you get a thing called Desolation/Doom/Debt (names vary). As I'm sure you can judge from the name, this is not a healthy phenomenon. I'll write up a Threadmark about it at some point; it was one of the lighting vote options earlier.

So, am I on the right track with the Law of Oscillation being the key to ludicrous Qi?

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You are thinking of my statement referred to here, right? In that case, I can tell you what the "cheat" I had in mind was, though I admit it is less cool than the type of approach you imagined here.

In truth, growing a Dantian with a large amount of power-generation from scratch can't be done in a short period of time, at least from what I understand of the rules I've set out. It is also impossible to "inherit" a Dantian from someone in the same world as you, because you can only claim a Dantian from the inside out. But what you CAN do is seize the Throne of Heaven in the very World where you reside, therefore effectively gaining its accumulation. If a normal 18-year-old tried this, they would be pass either the Integration or Dominion phase (depending on whether the Throne of Heaven was empty) - but there are ways around that in theory.

One way is that if God gave up and actively assisted in letting the Ascendant's Will consume theirs, even an MC with previously low Will and Law cultivation could take over the Throne of Heaven. Convincing someone to do that is hard, but not necessarily impossible. You can do it because God has some sort of ambition that they can't fulfill for whatever reason but which the MC might be able to fulfill on their behalf, or because a bunch of people Ascending affected God in a way that allows for it, and so on.

Another way is to get the MC to have an unbreakable Will, or a supernaturally good understanding of Law; not sure how that sort of thing would be accomplished, but it is a possibility. There are many Xianxia stories where the MC gets a legitimately otherworldly cheat that doesn't actually fit directly into the cosmology; one of those would do it, if nothing else.

 

[The Froggy Ninja]

Are souls real? And if so, how do they interact with the impermeability of Heaven?

 

[PrimalShadow]

Are souls real? And if so, how do they interact with the impermeability of Heaven?

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Soul and Will are synonyms in this setting.

 

[We Just Write]

Hmmm... Well, since reality doesn't turn into more Grandmist, that just means that the approach needs to be altered.

WARNING: the following is extremely counterintuitive.

As you have noted, it costs more Qi to support Reality than you get from Grandmist, since all the Laws that make Reality, well, Reality cost Qi to implement.

This brings to mind the idea that by stripping out all but the absolute bare minimum of Laws for most of your Dantian's volume, you could get the cost to 'digest' Grandmist below what you gain from doing so. Ditch everything to support life for the vast majority of the Dantian's volume, your Pseudo-Reality can only move Qi around, hold Heavens and Firmament, digest Grandmist, and THAT IS IT.

Life can't exist in pseudo-space due to the lack of Laws that would support it, and neither can anything else interesting. Everything but the absolute bare minimum to process Grandmist into Qi is being jettisoned.

To prevent excess Qi from congealing into Reality at the Grandmist expansion front and ruining the whole process, have the 'move Qi around' function concentrate all excess Qi at the Dantian's center. This functions as storage and a way to keep excess Qi from gumming up the works at the Grandmist expansion front. If it's possible to have different chunks of the same Dantian operating under different Laws, here you can allow Reality to exist, Laws preventing it from encroaching into pseudo-space any more than the bare minimum necessary.

Is this in any way a viable plan to cheat the system?

 

[Subrosian_Smithy]

You know, if it was that easy to cheat the system, one assumes the setting would look very different.

 

[We Just Write]

You know, if it was that easy to cheat the system, one assumes the setting would look very different.

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At this point I consider it an obligation to poke holes into the constructed metaphysics until either something breaks and their creator admits I've found a viable cheat, or the constructed cosmological rules prove well and truly bulletproof.

 

[PrimalShadow]

Hmmm... Well, since reality doesn't turn into more Grandmist, that just means that the approach needs to be altered.

WARNING: the following is extremely counterintuitive.

As you have noted, it costs more Qi to support Reality than you get from Grandmist, since all the Laws that make Reality, well, Reality cost Qi to implement.

This brings to mind the idea that by stripping out all but the absolute bare minimum of Laws for most of your Dantian's volume, you could get the cost to 'digest' Grandmist below what you gain from doing so. Ditch everything to support life for the vast majority of the Dantian's volume, your Pseudo-Reality can only move Qi around, hold Heavens and Firmament, digest Grandmist, and THAT IS IT.

Life can't exist in pseudo-space due to the lack of Laws that would support it, and neither can anything else interesting. Everything but the absolute bare minimum to process Grandmist into Qi is being jettisoned.

To prevent excess Qi from congealing into Reality at the Grandmist expansion front and ruining the whole process, have the 'move Qi around' function concentrate all excess Qi at the Dantian's center. This functions as storage and a way to keep excess Qi from gumming up the works at the Grandmist expansion front. If it's possible to have different chunks of the same Dantian operating under different Laws, here you can allow Reality to exist, Laws preventing it from encroaching into pseudo-space any more than the bare minimum necessary.

Is this in any way a viable plan to cheat the system?

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The cost of the Existence Law by itself is itself per unit volume precisely equals the Qi generated from Grandmist per unit volume. The Cultivation Law then inevitably pushes the cost of Reality up above the cost of Grandmist. Since a Dantian is founded on the Existence Law, you can't win - and since you also need the Cultivation Law to digest Grandmist at all, you can't break even either.

Maybe if there was some way to create a Dantian based on something other than Existence there might be a way? That is not someone has ever pulled off, however, and it is not clear how someone could do such a thing if it was possible.

At this point I consider it an obligation to poke holes into the constructed metaphysics until either something breaks and their creator admits I've found a viable cheat, or the constructed cosmological rules prove well and truly bulletproof.

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I am quite happy to keep engaging with these sorts of challenges, as long as you don't mind hearing a lot of "no"s. I feel a bit guilty shooting down your proposals over mechanics that you might not know yet, but as long as you are having fun in net I am game as well.

 

[We Just Write]

Question: is Grandmist a substance, or a region of spacetime with specific properties? Knowing this would be extremely helpful for figuring out my next attempt to break the system.

EDIT: In addition, is there any way to increase the dimensionality of the space making up Reality, say for a 4D or 5D topology?

 

[PrimalShadow]

Question: is Grandmist a substance, or a region of spacetime with specific properties?

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Depending on one's interpretation, either.

Keep in mind that there is no way to directly interact with Grandmist. You can't touch it, see it, or measure its properties; you can only interact with Reality, and Grandmist is what happens after reality ends. The empirical fact that people know is that expanding Reality costs less than it should by a fixed amount per unit space; anything else is hypothesis.

OOC, I can tell you that I typically consider Grandmist a substance when reasoning about things, but I do this because it is convenient and not because I decided that the underlying truth of Grandmist is that it is a substance. If you want to think of it as a property of space that doesn't yet have reality in it, that is fine. Alternatively, you can think the Existence Law itself as having the property of being able to propogate for free while producing Qi, though that theory is generally considered a poor fit because free Qi production hasn't been observed as an ability you can Manifest via the Existence Law.

EDIT: In addition, is there any way to increase the dimensionality of the space making up Reality, say for a 4D or 5D topology?

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Nope. Three dimensions of space is all. Mind you, this isn't especially important to my cosmology so I'd be willing to change it if people had ideas for how it would make for a better setting. However, since I already banned Time shenanigans, I though I'd bundle in Space as well and call it a day.

 

[The Froggy Ninja]

Soul and Will are synonyms in this setting.

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So how about ghosts then?
EDIT: Also, I too would like to know if it's possible to cordon off spaces in your Inner World that operate on different laws.

 

[PrimalShadow]

So how about ghosts then?

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Ghosts are not supported by the default Existence+Recursion Law setup.

Normally, a Will without an anchor just dissipates. It is possible to set up Laws that change this. The most applicable one I can think of now is the Reincarnation/Afterlife Law. By default, that Law would anchor any free Will to a "river of souls", and from there allow either reincarnation, assimilation into said river, carrying on in an illusionary afterlife, or other post-life options. Unfortunately, by default this is only going to work on mortals; anyone who has formed a Dantian will have their Will housed in said Dantian instead of their Outer World. Forming an afterlife that affects Cultivators is far harder, since you'd need them to move their Wills to the Outer World at some point for the laws of the Outer World to save them from oblivion.

A different approach would be the Echo Law, which allows the capture and reproduction of past events. That approach would allow ghosts to be formed from cultivators, though the ghosts would be more of the "looping video" rather than "wandering spirit" variety.

Finally, the Law of Freedom can allow Wills to move around without an anchor, and such a Will can reasonably be called a ghost. You could even have Ghost Cultivators, though they wouldn't have Inner Worlds and would thus be quite limited by this deficit.



This is not an exhaustive list; Laws are many and varied, after all. There are almost certainly more options that I just haven't thought of.

 

[The Froggy Ninja]

Ghosts are not supported by the default Existence+Recursion Law setup.

Normally, a Will without an anchor just dissipates. It is possible to set up Laws that change this. The most applicable one I can think of now is the Reincarnation/Afterlife Law. By default, that Law would anchor any free Will to a "river of souls", and from there allow either reincarnation, assimilation into said river, carrying on in an illusionary afterlife, or other post-life options. Unfortunately, by default this is only going to work on mortals; anyone who has formed a Dantian will have their Will housed in said Dantian instead of their Outer World. Forming an afterlife that affects Cultivators is far harder, since you'd need them to move their Wills to the Outer World at some point for the laws of the Outer World to save them from oblivion.

A different approach would be the Echo Law, which allows the capture and reproduction of past events. That approach would allow ghosts to be formed from cultivators, though the ghosts would be more of the "looping video" rather than "wandering spirit" variety.

Finally, the Law of Freedom can allow Wills to move around without an anchor, and such a Will can reasonably be called a ghost. You could even have Ghost Cultivators, though they wouldn't have Inner Worlds and would thus be quite limited by this deficit.



This is not an exhaustive list; Laws are many and varied, after all. There are almost certainly more options that I just haven't thought of.

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If there were two sequential worlds with the Law of Reincarnation, could a soul theoretically escape from the smaller world as it was destabilizing?

 

[PrimalShadow]

If there were two sequential worlds with the Law of Reincarnation, could a soul theoretically escape from the smaller world as it was destabilizing?

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No; Laws cannot bridge Worlds, and any passage outwards must pass through the Heavens.

What WOULD be possible is for those Wills who are willing to be funneled from the River of Souls into stabilizing the Heavens in the smaller World, or collectively take over as God. But without claiming the Throne of Heaven there is no way to exit a World, because the Heavens themselves are precisely the exit itself.