Remove ads

Suffer No More (Cultivation, Worm)

Reader mode
"I'd rather be sorry to the world than have the world be sorry to me" makes sense to me. It is a complex idea that is hard to put into English words, but means something along the lines of "I would rather be cruel and pity the world, than go another life with the world pitying me."
 
Oh hey, this looks cool. Although using of all things Way of Choices's god awful system does worry me a little, hopefully you won't include the "old dead people know best just follow their instructions" theme of the early parts.

I do like that you've already shifted, at least the feel of, the nature of the stars of destiny. Reversing the implied causal connection, although from what I remember of what the genius guy who ran away and stole the monolith said you might just be taking that stance. (Can't remember his name, and I don't know if he has shown up again since I dropped the novel at the Holy Maiden Mountain)
 
sdarian said:
But stuff like this just doesn't work. I can see what is trying to be said, but English doesn't really have this kind of saying. It would be an example of something that would need reworded in order to make sense.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It's very interesting you brought this one up. Unlike the other weird translations of actual names, the "I would rather be sorry to the world than to let the world be sorry to me!" isn't truly an idiom or metaphor of some kind. In the original text, it has a poetic structure, but it actually has a literal meaning. I do not think there is any good way to make it easy to understand. Scholars have debated the true meaning of it, the truth of it, and how it relates to principles of the Art of War for centuries. It comes from a historical figure Cao Cao's quote, variously translated as "rather betray others than have them betray me" or "rather wrong everybody under the heavens than be wronged by everybody under the heavens" (the former is the original historical quote, the latter is a romanticization by Romance of The Three Kingdoms). What does it really mean? The novel, written from one who hated Cao Cao's usurpation of power, attributed his successful military feats to a vicious mind that killed the innocent and betrayed everyone and the ruling dynasty. The cultural impact was such that the saying "Speak of the devil and the devil shall appear" has a convergent linguistic evolutionary analog in Chinese that replaces devil with Cao Cao.

Early commentary on The Art of War, as well as Cao Cao's own annotations, suggest that it is drawing on the idea that "the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory". In modern Western historiography, made most prominent by the recent works of de Crespigny, there is less emphasis on the devilishness of Cao Cao's behaviour, and more emphasis on his strategic acumen. For better or worse, nowadays there are even people who take the translation "better be in debt than to have others be in debt to me", and pointing at examples like big banks too big to fail, government debt denominated in their own fiat, businesspeople going bankrupt, etc.

I have chosen to translate it my own way to convey how Taylor feels. To her, it isn't about betraying others or winning. It's about how she thinks the whole world is against her.

RyubosJ said:
although from what I remember of what the genius guy who ran away and stole the monolith said you might just be taking that stance. (Can't remember his name, and I don't know if he has shown up again since I dropped the novel at the Holy Maiden Mountain)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

You mean Zhou Dufu? Or Wang Zhi Ce? I can't remember what they discovered either, except the two methods of changing fate. I finished the novel myself but it was quite a while ago.
 
RyubosJ said:
Him. (I think)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I looked it up and remembered what I think you're talking about:
There is no fate.

This statement probably doesn't mean what you think it means. Not sure which Holy Maiden Mountain part you left off at, but it was later revealed that:
Fate is merely not fixed. CCS's problems are still real. The only way Wang Zhi Ce and others have discovered to massively change fate is exceedingly difficult and evil
My system is a bit different in a number of ways, but I don't know yet what the final verdict on the nature of fate will be. I wonder how the Path to Victory works under the fate mechanism.
 
Eiri Fllyn said:
The only way Wang Zhi Ce and others have discovered to massively change fate is exceedingly difficult and evil
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
(If you haven't read this novel iveI got a massive Spoiler for it in this box, serious you have been warned)
if you are talking about the method the emperors used, and the empress, then I thought Wang knew a second method which is how he could live while all the other generals/advisors died.

There is also what the Empress did to save CCS on the top of the hill of monoliths, which "changed his fate" at the cost of her power.

Anyway for PtV the thing I find important to remember is it is prediction not foresight. So the power calculates the state the world will be in, not looks towards what it could be.
In some ways the exact opposite to how Fate is often used as a force from above forcing the world towards a point.
 
All shard-based precognition is prediction rather than proper foresight. Quite simply, they take a snapshot of the world as it is when the entities arrive, and lock down all other variables so that they have a REALLY GOOD idea of what is going to happen. Not a perfect idea, because uncertainty principle and all that, but a good idea.
 
Just as an aside, you may want to tone down the "rape 100 times a day" stuff when dealing with a 15 year old. Rule 6 is a pretty hard ban on that kind of thing.

Most xianxia is quite subtle with that kind of thing, you may want to be too.
 
RyubosJ said:
if you are talking about the method the emperors used, and the empress, then I thought Wang knew a second method which is how he could live while all the other generals/advisors died.

There is also what the Empress did to save CCS on the top of the hill of monoliths, which "changed his fate" at the cost of her power.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I cannot remember all the details anymore, nor is it easily looked up, but I believe:
Wang did not need to defy fate to live. He just had to escape. It was the Taizong emperor that was trying to defy fate by sacrificing his people. The fundamental idea is that fate has a path, but each star is connected to other stars, therefore to change one's own fate, one must also change the fates of others. A particularly evil way of doing so was to use the Taizong emperor's grand formation. What the Empress did is the only other method shown/mentioned in the novel. It's not clear if Wang and Zhou Dufu was aware of this method. But it is heavily implied during the scene and the original Chinese wording (my grasp of Chinese is much weaker than English so I could be wrong here) that the Empress was in fact the highest level cultivator ever, which is how she was so much stronger than the all the other Saints fighting her combined -- she broke through to Hidden Divinity already. But, even that stage was not enough to fully control fate, therefore to change CCS's fate, she had to sacrifice her own power and was forced back to Saint level.

Ultimately the conclusion was that what CCS had been told for his whole life wasn't pure BS. There are lots of things about the themes of the Way of Choices and its discourse on the nature of fate that I found appealing and potentially useful in this story,

Jack Stargazer said:
Just as an aside, you may want to tone down the "rape 100 times a day" stuff when dealing with a 15 year old. Rule 6 is a pretty hard ban on that kind of thing.

Most xianxia is quite subtle with that kind of thing, you may want to be too.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

No problem. Some edits are already incoming for this chapter as I caught flak for it elsewhere too. This stuff doesn't really happen again in the story, only serving as a tool to show how Cultivator!Taylor's life was just as awful as Worm!Taylor, so I'm planning to just change it.
 
Eiri Fllyn said:
Ultimately the conclusion was that what CCS had been told for his whole life wasn't pure BS. There are lots of things about the themes of the Way of Choices and its discourse on the nature of fate that I found appealing and potentially useful in this story,
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
ah okay. I will admit the world building behind WoC was great. However the timeskip kill a lot of my interest and the journey to the Holy Maiden Mountain and the events at the gate just bored me in the end. Might return to it once the rest is translated.

Anyway as I said, nice first chapter (apart from the locker scene which I skipped [because I almost always skip it nowadays]) and I'm looking forwards to where the story goes from here.
 
let's hope the shard's can't cultivate or use the energy required to do it ":} since you know, they gather data on their host's and most likely experienced what amy has when taylor linked them together?
 
I like it so far, but, could you gimme a link to the non Worm part's official stuff? I'm kinda interested in learning more on it.
 
evol21 said:
let's hope the shard's can't cultivate or use the energy required to do it ":} since you know, they gather data on their host's and most likely experienced what amy has when taylor linked them together?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
If cultivation requires a soul, then the Shards could try to help their host cultivate themselves, but not being capable of it themselves.
 
merv said:
If cultivation requires a soul, then the Shards could try to help their host cultivate themselves, but not being capable of it themselves.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Worm is so against any spiritualism or magic that we don't actually know if Shards and Entities have souls or not. Though it is quite possible that if they do, they have vastly different requirements for cultivation with potentially different results. After all, a lot of the power Cultivation grants they already have.
 
I just want to say I ship this so hard. I do hope Danny gets out of his funk though. He's not a good parent but most of that is because he's in a bad place.
 
I have a feeling that it too late for anyone to start redeeming themselves to Taylor since this is cultivation story with Amelia/Taylor shipping. Unless, she is feeling very charitable at the moment which I doubt would happen easily and if Danny found out she has powers then try to play super-parent it just might make things worse by having Taylor drift even more away from him to consider killing him.
 
Heh, Taylor being absolute Yin is hilarious to me as a native Chinese. According to traditions, and as they are depicted in most web novels, Chun Yin people are supposed to always be, you know, extremely feminine, selfless, unambitious, peaceful, spiritual, good at dispersing social tension, etc. All qualities that are pretty much opposites of Taylor's personality. On the other hand, absolute Yang people are supposed to be stubborn, self centered, extremely goal-focused, unbending, and not good at compromising, which pretty much fits Taylor perfectly.:rofl:

And oh yeah, according to tradition, whether someone is Absolute Yin or Yang or something else depends entirely on their date of birth and the eight characters of the horoscope. Men can be Chun Yin, woman can also be Chun Yang, it's not gender restricted.
 
Eiri Fllyn said:
It comes from a historical figure Cao Cao's quote, variously translated as "rather betray others than have them betray me" or "rather wrong everybody under the heavens than be wronged by everybody under the heavens" (the former is the original historical quote, the latter is a romanticization by Romance of The Three Kingdoms). What does it really mean?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I realize that you're working with translations here, but I have to ask are you a native English speaker? Because neither of those translations are remotely confusing or complex. They are in fact extremely straightforward and easy to understand, even knowing they are alternate takes on the same saying doesn't really make it any more complicated to grasp the intended meaning behind it that the translations are trying to convey.

Your chosen translation though IS extremely confusing and difficult to understand, not because of the ideas you're playing with, but because it simply isn't a correctly built sentence.

Now you can make the excuse of poetry, the rules are looser there to say the least, but remember that the main goal of an author should be to properly convey their ideas and vision of the story to the reader. Since nothing else around that phrase makes the reader interpret it as a poetic turn of literal phrase it comes across as jarring and confusing as to why the main character has suddenly lost their command of the English language.

I would really consider how to rephrase those lines to better get Taylor's feelings across. Obviously you shouldn't use the other two examples since as you said they were offered by someone that hated the person who spoke them.

Perhaps something along the lines of "I would rather burn/destroy the Order of the World, than allow the Order of the World to burn/destroy me."

To me at least that gives it more of a flavor of her rebelling against the Celestial Bureaucracy, but that may just be me having played too much Jade Empire and watching too much of the new Journey to the West adaptations that Netflix keeps putting out.

Just a suggestion and it won't break the story to ignore unless you plan to have Taylor spouting it off every five minutes. :V
 
Last edited:
zhuull said:
Your chosen translation though IS extremely confusing and difficult to understand, not because of the ideas you're playing with, but because it simply isn't a correctly built sentence.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I would be happy to do something about it, but I actually am a native speaker of English, and I cannot find what is grammatically or structurally wrong with my rendition. Suppose I replaced the noun like so: "I would rather be sorry to you than to let you be sorry to me", do you still find this confusing? For me, the other two translations are also very easy to grasp, my point wasn't about the strangeness of the English translation. All of them have understandable literal meanings, but I simply felt that those two translations did not convey the full sense of "寧我負人，休人負我", because they did not imply any sense of remorse or regret, which the word 負 does imply. For Taylor, this is a significant part of her statement. Even if she is willing to do wrong unto others, she would still be regretful. Then I added "the world", to put the emphasis not only on people, but also on the general world (for a reason which has only been hinted at so far). But to my mind, the English statement did not require any context from the original quote, it is simply where I got the inspiration from. On the other hand, I find your suggestion more difficult to understand, and less applicable, especially without context as to what Order of the World means. I suppose it may be Heaven's Law, but that wouldn't be quite right for Taylor. If you could point out what part of the statement is improper, then I could take a closer look.
 
Last edited:
Eiri Fllyn said:
I would be happy to do something about it, but I actually am a native speaker of English, and I cannot find what is grammatically or structurally wrong with my rendition. Suppose I replaced the noun like so: "I would rather be sorry to you than to let you be sorry to me", do you still find this confusing? For me, the other two translations are also very easy to grasp, my point wasn't about the strangeness of the English translation. All of them have understandable literal meanings, but I simply felt that those two translations did not convey the full sense of "寧我負人，休人負我", because they did not imply any sense of remorse or regret, which the word 負 does imply. For Taylor, this is a significant part of her statement. Even if she is willing to do wrong unto others, she would still be regretful. Then I added "the world", to put the emphasis not only on people, but also on the general world (for a reason which has only been hinted at so far). But to my mind, the English statement did not require any context from the original quote, it is simply where I got the inspiration from. On the other hand, I find your suggestion more difficult to understand, and less applicable, especially without context as to what Order of the World means. I suppose it may be Heaven's Law, but that wouldn't be quite right for Taylor. If you could point out what part of the statement is improper, then I could take a closer look.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
You're focusing on the wrong part of the phrase I think. The main problem I have is the use of "sorry". I have never seen it used in this way other than the phrase "sorry to intrude/interrupt/do something". The way you're using it makes the whole sentence sound discordant to me when reading it, but it all stems from the way you have the "sorry to" portion phrased. I think it might be a subject verb disagreement if I'm remembering the term right. You are sorry to "do" something, you aren't sorry to "at" something if that makes any sense.

Perhaps the issue is the definition of "sorry" you're trying to convey with the phrase? If I see sorry used like this I think "apologetic" but I think you're going more for a "done/behaved poorly" meaning which is much rarer to see.

Sorry if my suggestion changes weren't helpful, I just can't think of a good way to say it while making it regretful of the actions taken instead of coming off as defiant.
 
Last edited:
zhuull said:
You're focusing on the wrong part of the phrase I think. The main problem I have is the use of "sorry". I have never seen it used in this way other than the phrase "sorry to intrude/interrupt/do something". The way you're using it makes the whole sentence sound discordant to me when reading it, but it all stems from the way you have the "sorry to" portion phrased. I think it might be a subject verb disagreement if I'm remembering the term right. You are sorry to "do" something, you aren't sorry to "at" something if that makes any sense.

Perhaps the issue is the definition of "sorry" you're trying to convey with the phrase? If I see sorry used like this I think "apologetic" but I think you're going more for a "done/behaved poorly" meaning which is much rarer to see.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I tried looking it up but it seems inconclusive. It is a fairly unusual construction, but I don't think the structure is actually wrong. I get what you're saying about the infinitive verbs, but in this case the "to [noun]" construction is using the "to" as a preposition for targeting the noun rather than as part of the infinitive form of the verb. Sorry doesn't get used this way often because it comes up as direct dialogue most of the time, but if one tried to convey an idea like "Don't be sorry to me. Be sorry to Father Mike," (Grey's Anatomy, S4, Ep 11, 13:17 in this video, or this script) then it becomes relevant, especially if the speaker didn't want to imply that merely "saying sorry" was sufficient, but to actually "be sorry". Some other more common examples would include the scandal apology "I am sorry to all my fans, my friends, my family, and everyone else who has supported me." These all use the "[be] sorry to [noun target]" construction (the second example's "am" is first-person conjugate form of "be"). While there might be better ways to say it, I haven't thought of one yet, so I'll leave it for now.
 
Last edited:
Lizard said:
Heh, Taylor being absolute Yin is hilarious to me as a native Chinese. According to traditions, and as they are depicted in most web novels, Chun Yin people are supposed to always be, you know, extremely feminine, selfless, unambitious, peaceful, spiritual, good at dispersing social tension, etc. All qualities that are pretty much opposites of Taylor's personality. On the other hand, absolute Yang people are supposed to be stubborn, self centered, extremely goal-focused, unbending, and not good at compromising, which pretty much fits Taylor perfectly.:rofl:
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Huh. I read this and instantly thought of Vir and Londo's talk at the end of S5E2, about a Centauri folktale Vir heard many times as a child.

"If the spirit of a Centauri ends up in a body that's not worthy of it's presence, it can choose to separate, to cause the death of the body. That's only if the higher spirit is a real, real high one, I mean we're talking major angelic here, and the person it's stuck inside is a complete monster, just nasty and corrupt and disgusting and..."

In Taylor's case, perhaps it is the reverse; an Absolute Yin body, and an Absolute Yang soul in uncompromising, goal-focused control.

And those idiots on Cultivar!Taylor's world focused on her body, not her soul, losing their lives and a continent in the process, while merely delaying her goal a bit.

Amy, now that I think about it, has been shown Taylor's soul.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top