Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
"It is more complex. It is possible to give offense without intent, for innocuous gestures to breed unexpected response, but…" Xuan Shi shrugged helplessly.

Ling Qi understood, it struck at the uncomfortable feeling that had been growing in the back of her mind. Rather than imagining a confrontation with a strange spirit, she really should be thinking of them as people.

...Dealing with those was so much harder.
AHhhhhhhh yaaaay! Yes they are in fact people!

I am so glad Ling Qi figured this out. Thank you Xuan Shi!

No vote this time, moving into the Zhengui arc next.
EEEEEEEEEEEE OUR SON! YES GOOD!

It wasn't too hard to talk Li Suyin into setting up a meeting, and Xuan Shi wasn't much harder to convince. However, as she arrived at Suyin's workshop and opened the door, it occurred to her that she might have forgotten something. In the dim light of the workshop, more than two dozen eyes stared back at her from the opposite wall.

Suyin did not have any visitors.

They floated in jars, hung suspended between crackling metal prongs, and lay neatly stacked upon trays. Some were human, some were animal, some were even insect, or glittering things of gemstone and precious metal.

Below them was a line of eerily lifelike wax heads, each missing their left eye. One of the heads was melting slowly against the table, half of it carved away by some blast, scraps of wax and ocular tissue being cleaned up by the assistants. Of course, there were assistants, not timply the tiny mouse skeletons that scurried too and fro across the floor, but humanoid and human sized figures with the skulls of beasts, wrapped in spidersilk and garbed in the robes of servants.
I have a strong feeling she is making some kind of weapon talisman that is also an eye. Because she seems nerdy enough to go for that.
 
I have a strong feeling she is making some kind of weapon talisman that is also an eye. Because she seems nerdy enough to go for that.
Maybe she is taking inspiration from that art that allows one to shoot lightning from their eyes? She's just trying to do it without the headache!

A little more seriously, I bet it is more along the lines of exotic senses, but the energy requirements for sticking a talisman in your eye socket are going to be finicky.
 
Maybe she is taking inspiration from that art that allows one to shoot lightning from their eyes? She's just trying to do it without the headache!

A little more seriously, I bet it is more along the lines of exotic senses, but the energy requirements for sticking a talisman in your eye socket are going to be finicky.
Extremely so, especially if you want to be able to take it with you as you rise in stage and realm or whatever.

Hmm. We don't know what her Domain weapon is, perhaps she's intending to turn the eye into one? Assuming of course she does not have one already, which is iffy given her stage.
 
"Is it normal for one of your gowns to… Uh, eat other clothing if left alone for awhile?" Ling Qi asked. She stumbled over the question a little despite herself. She was still a little baffled.

Lin Hai blinked.

"...Not particularly," he said slowly, sounding nonplussed. "Deprived of your energy she should have simply gone dormant, unless she received some damage?"

"No, I left, it… her," Ling Qi corrected. "In my room. When I came back from my training, I found my gown in the closed with a bunch of frayed bedding."

Lin Hai's darkly painted eyebrows drew together, and he reached out, tracing his finger through the air a hair's breadth away from her shoulder, faint glimmering threads rose to meet him, and Ling Qi felt her gown grow a fraction tighter, for just a moment.
The dress is reacting like someone clinging to something while asleep, and that comparison makes me wonder if part of Shenhua's trick is to weave dreams into physical shapes, and give them life.
"Ah, Master," Lin Hai breathed. "How your works still confound…"

Ling Qi shifted uncomfortably. Having been on the receiving end of Cai Shenhua recently, those words were not a comfort.
For one Shenhua is the master who gave him a hand up, and opportunity to reach his current position, but for the other Shenhua is the looming standard setter that threatens to estinguish the tiny fire of justice that smolders in the heart of her home.
"It seems your choice to wear her at all times has had some effects on her development," Lin Hai said. "Which are preceding faster than I thought possible. It seems that she is only waiting for your cultivation to reach a sufficient level before achieving her own evolution."

Ling Qi glanced down in surprise. Her dress seemed no different than normal. "What level is that?"

"Hm, Formation Green and Bronze, I would estimate," Lin Hai mused, withdrawing his hand. "Until then, if you need to remove your gown for a lengthy period, it may be best to put her in your Vent chamber, the qi rich air should prevent any mishaps."
So what I'm hearing is the determination to grow stronger by Ling Qi rubbed off on all her family, and the dress was the only one who managed to outpace the source. :V

Also it is a good thing we didn't take the option to that lead to the dress reacting imo.
Ling Qi brushed her fingers against the silk of her gown, and felt the thrum of qi running through it, transforming silk into something far stronger than steel. If she focused, could she feel something foreign, an energy that was not just her own percolating through the talisman? Maybe it was just her imagination.
Hm. The fact that Ling Qi thinks it is only her imagination makes me think there would be something going on in the Dream with the dress if Ling Qi ever got back there before she woke up, but that is a trade secret protected by the simple fact nobody can safely enter the Dream much less stay there before reaching Green/Bronze Formation.
 
Confirmation Xuan Shi's dad went out for smokes and never came back.


"This one wonders at that," Xuan Shi said, tugging at the brim of his hat. "To break the earth in a new field is more impressive than to merely tread anew old ground."

"No really," Li Suyin insisted. "The complexity of your reaction matrices still baffle me, how in the world did you encode so many behavioral variations into each individual tile with so little material real estate? I was not able to discern any core command processing talisman, nor thought based transmission, so each piece is obviously autonomous."
Lol look at these nerds doing the classic "not really" at each other.
 
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So that bouncing ball means that rubber exists. Neat.

And I guess Dress-chan is ready and waiting to transform. I cannot wait, even if we likely will only reach that point in 2022.
 
Yeah, but if so, Xuan Shi should be the last person to find that bouncyness as anything worth noting.
If he was a child, he would have been unable to see any hidden formations in the ball. If bounciness is indeed strange and noteworthy in the empire it than doesn't mean formations for bounciness don't exist outside the empire.

The very first use of rubber was making balls. However, it seems odd to me to jump to the conclusion that rubber exists when another option is so readily available. It may be true that rubber exists, but saying that a bouncing ball is proof of it seems like a stretch.
 
If he was a child, he would have been unable to see any hidden formations in the ball.
He's a formations expert.

If he knew a way to make a bouncy ball via formations, I don't think he'd be calling the ball strangely bouncy, even if he couldn't see how it was done at the time. Or at least, if he does know a way to make a bouncy ball with formations, it doesn't look the same - he doesn't think he knows how that ball was bouncy, and given he remembers the incident, he's probably tried to replicate the thing since.
 
I am interested in what Ling Qi's reaction will be when she meets Elves and all the other different cultures. Not!Elsa should be a good appetizer for that I hope.

The world will soon tremble at Lingplomacy in action.
 
He's a formations expert.

If he knew a way to make a bouncy ball via formations, I don't think he'd be calling the ball strangely bouncy, even if he couldn't see how it was done at the time. Or at least, if he does know a way to make a bouncy ball with formations, it doesn't look the same - he doesn't think he knows how that ball was bouncy, and given he remembers the incident, he's probably tried to replicate the thing since.
I did mention, in the post you quoted, that even if the empire doesn't know how to make things bouncy with formations other traditions might have figured it out.

Rubber might exist. It might be super popular and common. But stating that rubber exists based on a sample size of one ball bouncing is too much a stretch for me.


I am interested in what Ling Qi's reaction will be when she meets Elves and all the other different cultures. Not!Elsa should be a good appetizer for that I hope.

The world will soon tremble at Lingplomacy in action.

We even got a hint of it in Ling Qi's close encounter with a dream titan. It seems like dreams stretch very far indeed if we were able to observe the different aspects of the moon that other civs have. It makes me even more excited to explore the Liminal realm and what we might encounter in it.
 
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Does anyone remember how many levels Green has again and the names? I recall there being 7 or 9 but I haven't a clue which one is Formation or how far off LQ is. Also, how fare is she from Bronze?
 
Does anyone remember how many levels Green has again and the names? I recall there being 7 or 9 but I haven't a clue which one is Formation or how far off LQ is. Also, how fare is she from Bronze?
If you look at the Informational threadmarks, "Tutorials" and "Cultivation Chart" both have the information you want about the stages of Green/Bronze. It has eight stages, of which Ling Qi is at the fourth in Spiritual and the third in Physical*. Our physical cultivation currently lags behind a bit, but will catch up a lot once we have our "water turn" where we leverage the Trench-Swimmer's Pill and the Gushing Spring Pill to pump our numbers up big time, which is currently slated for Turn 12.

*Stages follow, names are the same for both spiritual and physical, so we're at Threshold Spiritual and Foundation Physical.
Green
-early
-appraisal
-foundation
-threshold
-framing
-formation
-fortification
-completion
 
You know, they say that the best form of diplomacy is food. I wonder if candied fruit is a universal pleasure? Maybe Tanghulu - Wikipedia, since its easy to prepare on the spot in front of people to prove you're not poisoning them.
 
You know, they say that the best form of diplomacy is food. I wonder if candied fruit is a universal pleasure? Maybe Tanghulu - Wikipedia, since its easy to prepare on the spot in front of people to prove you're not poisoning them.

We could hire a Yellow chef. That's good enough to make acceptable food while weak enough to be unable to perform any hostile actions while under the watchful eye of Greens.
 
Our physical cultivation currently lags behind a bit, but will catch up a lot once we have our "water turn" where we leverage the Trench-Swimmer's Pill and the Gushing Spring Pill to pump our numbers up big time, which is currently slated for Turn 12.
Did we actually bought Gusing Spring Pill? Because I don't see it in our inventory.
 
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