Recursive Cultivation (Original Xianxia Cosmology)
- Thread starter PrimalShadow
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- Worldbuilding
Usually to make a Dantian, you manifest the Existence Law, and it creates your Dantian. There is no mechanic for creating a world without the Existence Law.
What a world without Existence actually means is largely a philosophical question, because you don't have any way to explore it empirically. I'm not going to give a canon answer, because in fact lots of things are consistent with the rest of canon.
But! The answer you gave is absolutely a possible answer, and it is one I tend to like. What is a World that follows the Law of Recursion, but not Existence? Well, it should be the Grandmist itself! A region of total self-similarity and of infinite potential, which contains nothing but is the source for everything.
- Location
- PA
Ahh, so it's like they ascend, run into the body problem, and likely cease existance due to not knowing how to deal with that.
And, bemusingly, while I imagine climbing from realms nested super-deep within themselves actually increases one's odds due to having to deal with more variance in Laws teaching the cultivators more as they go, that Existance road-block sounds like a toughie.
And, bemusingly, while I imagine climbing from realms nested super-deep within themselves actually increases one's odds due to having to deal with more variance in Laws teaching the cultivators more as they go, that Existance road-block sounds like a toughie.
Well, they don't cease to exist. It is perfectly fine to be a Cultivator without an Energy Body. The downsides are that:
- You have no ability to draw in external Qi
- You have no protection against someone doing something to your Dantian in the Outer World
- You cannot directly act in the Outer World
Someone having ascended in Top will still be the God of Top, with the ability to add Laws and generally do any of the sort of thing that Gods normally do. In particular, if you ascended because your response to looking out at an uncaring universe was to look back and shout "well, I'll make you care" - well, in that case, you got your wish.
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Writing a story in this setting was never my plan - see here.
I like worldbuilding, and thought that exploration of the concept here would be worthwhile and entertaining all on its own; that has indeed been the case for me, and I hope that it has been the case for people reading this thread as well.
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I enjoy reading the world building, I was just curious. Also, would it be possible for me to write a story using this setting? By the way, I think you might have used the wrong link. Unless you meant to link to that omake? It's a good omake, but I don't know what it has to do with this.
Yikes! Looks like I pasted the wrong thing; my bad. Here is the actual link I meant to use.
Absolutely! I would ask that you include a brief note crediting this thread for the inspiration, but other than that feel free to use all or part of the worldbuilding ideas here in your own work.
Have you read the work of Nuturing Humanity? There is a cultivation system inspired by confucianism that is similar to your concept.
These space humans are able to open a material space in the dantian and a spiritual space in the mind.
So a righteous cultivator is able to store a city in their inner space using actual materials. In return, the citizens worship the cultivator so that incense energy is given to help cultivation and restrain the cultivator from killing civilians to get the energy of death instead.
However, incense is poisonous, it can patch up your soul and body so you are undying as long as people worship but it is filled up with the hopes and dreams of the populace and your 'self' is eroded away.
Another way it works is that if a cultivator produces a poem or does a heroic deed that is very resonant, they can also make a spiritual city in their 'sea of knowledge' where the characters live. So dream and reality get blended together.
Then the recursive part is that the low level scholars might only contain a village, but in turn can worship higher and higher ranks of officials. Such that a world of cultivators might be stored in the peak expert's space. So that they can avoid disputes with primordial innate gods.
These space humans are able to open a material space in the dantian and a spiritual space in the mind.
So a righteous cultivator is able to store a city in their inner space using actual materials. In return, the citizens worship the cultivator so that incense energy is given to help cultivation and restrain the cultivator from killing civilians to get the energy of death instead.
However, incense is poisonous, it can patch up your soul and body so you are undying as long as people worship but it is filled up with the hopes and dreams of the populace and your 'self' is eroded away.
Another way it works is that if a cultivator produces a poem or does a heroic deed that is very resonant, they can also make a spiritual city in their 'sea of knowledge' where the characters live. So dream and reality get blended together.
Then the recursive part is that the low level scholars might only contain a village, but in turn can worship higher and higher ranks of officials. Such that a world of cultivators might be stored in the peak expert's space. So that they can avoid disputes with primordial innate gods.
- Location
- Russia
Question. If Top only holds the Laws of Existence and Cultivation, then how did the original Cultivators form? And what form did they take?
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- Australia
This poses an interesting thought experiment.
A cultivator on Top takes a hit to the dantian, manage to escape the attackers and then die. Being a relatively new cultivator (by cultivator standards) their inner world has not reached qi saturation, but they live in Top which HAS.
The Desolation absorbs qi to expel it into Top... but Top is already saturated and there's nowhere to expel the qi to at all! In fact, if liquid qi exerts pressure in its tendency to expand into areas not saturated, you would expect the environment of Top to start forcibly cramming qi down through the wound instead.
A Heavenly Desolation in a damaged dantian on Top might not generate Desolation at all and just turn into a massive liquid qi fountain spraying ludicrous quantities of liquid qi everywhere in the lower universe.
- Location
- Sweden
So I haven't read through this entire thread, so this might have been mentioned before, and if so I apologize, but isn't this almost exactly the way that cultivation works in Stellar Transformations? I mean, the entire verse of the story is the inner world of Lin Ming, otherwise known as Linley Baruch from Coiling Dragon.
Stellar Transformations is indeed one of the inspirations for this setting! Though of course, I like to think that the setting I've outlined offers a number of things that the inspiration settings (ST among them) do not.
I talk about this quite a bit in Where Does Will Come From. That is actually a set of ideas that I'm particularly proud of; in short, it outlines how mere physical matter can birth a non-physical Will. I could talk at length about the stuff there that I think is cool, but I won't because it's not exactly the question you asked, even though it is a question I want to answer.
For your question specifically:
- Anything that "thinks" (scare quotes intentional, see the linked post for details) generates sparks of Will.
- Sparks of Will have the possibility to coalesce into a true Will, in control of the body. This can happen to plants, animals, natural phenomenon, rocks, you name it - though the likelihood of it happening can vary by many orders of magnitude.
- A being with a Will can Cultivate - they can learn Law, control Qi, and start creating their own Inner Worlds. From there, the sky is the limit, and perhaps not even that.
Yes, absolutely! A damaged Dantian in a fully saturated region doesn't actually expel qi as normal.
Imagine a bucket of water with a hole in it. The bucket is the damaged Dantian; the water is Qi. Normally it would just pour out over time, but if the bucket is sitting in the middle of a lake, well, that is a different story.
This is where the bucket analogy breaks down, I'm afraid. Desolate Heavens are not as symmetric as a hole - they function more like a pressure pump, constantly drawing Qi out rather than merely equalizing the Qi level inside and outside. Really, the Heavens always act like a pump; it is just that normally there is a range of possible options for its operation from taking Qi in to pushing it out, whereas Desolate Heavens have the controls stuck on the maximum "expel" level.
Anyways. Being in a region of maximal Qi saturation is enough to stop Qi from being pushed out, but only barely; you don't see Qi being pushed IN, no matter what. You need a proper Heavens for Qi to flow inwards.
- Location
- Russia
My question is more that, well... if the Top only consists of Existence and Cultivation Laws, where did the things that became the first cultivators came from? Isn't there no water without the law of Water, no fire without the law of Fire, no plants without the law of Life, etcetera?I talk about this quite a bit in Where Does Will Come From. That is actually a set of ideas that I'm particularly proud of; in short, it outlines how mere physical matter can birth a non-physical Will. I could talk at length about the stuff there that I think is cool, but I won't because it's not exactly the question you asked, even though it is a question I want to answer.
For your question specifically:
So that is where the original Cultivators came from. I'm not going to specify what exact form they took, but I expect them to be nature spirits of some sort; it takes a long time for conventional life to naturally evolve without specific nurturing, and even though plants/animals are much better at coalescing will than rivers or storms or what-have-you, the latter are going to be around for a long while before the former appear.
- Anything that "thinks" (scare quotes intentional, see the linked post for details) generates sparks of Will.
- Sparks of Will have the possibility to coalesce into a true Will, in control of the body. This can happen to plants, animals, natural phenomenon, rocks, you name it - though the likelihood of it happening can vary by many orders of magnitude.
- A being with a Will can Cultivate - they can learn Law, control Qi, and start creating their own Inner Worlds. From there, the sky is the limit, and perhaps not even that.
Ah. I see what you are asking.
The thing is, you don't need the Law of Water to have water, the Law of Fire to have fire, etc. The Law of Existence is enough for those things to exist. What you need the law of e.g. Water for is to make water a platonic ideal, with supernatural properties. If you wanted to use Water to heal, or ward off evil with running water, or what-have-you, that might require the Law of Water.
- Location
- Russia
Ah, so the Law of Existence can also be, in a way, called the Law of Physics? At least as we understand them? Now it makes sense.
Mostly. I think it is more fair to say that the Laws of Physics are a particular manifestation of the Law of Existence; it is possible for the Law of Existence to support physics other than our own. Broadly, the Law of Existence is the principle of there being a physical reality containing physical stuff that interacts with itself in accordance with established rules. The Laws of Physics is what we tend to call those established rules.