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

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Varder said:
To say that Sun Shao didn't consult with people about his war is wrong. He literally went around pitching his idea to other clanheads to see if they want to join. He barely even hid his incoming treason or his preparations. If anyone were against it, all they needed to do was tattle on him to the Bai.

But other clans wanted to get out from under the Bai. They wanted it so badly that were willing to do almost anything to get away from the Bai - sacrifice their lands, their homes, their cities and soldiers for a chance to live somewhere else. Sun Shao managed that - now they have an entire province to live in and run as they see fit. Sure, it's a murder jungle, but a) people knew beforehand it will be a murderjungle and b) I belive a lot of them would consider murderjungle a tremendous improvement compared to the Bai.

Sun Shao wanted revenge, for sure; but he also wanted a better life for his family. He partially succeeded imo.
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Yeah. I added "or Fuxi" because I realized he did that. But really, the anyone falls under the Bai since they're the leaders of TL. I should have been clearer. I apologize for that.

But they're really not running the Jungle. The Jungle is running them. They're basically the newest iteration of the jungle barbarians.

And again, most of said family are dead because he wanted revenge against the Jungle. And they really don't have a whole province to live in. They can only build cities in the potholes the Sage Emperor's dragon mom left in the Jungle. I really doubt it's better than the Thousand Lakes.
 
Valmond said:
How much of that is funded by wealth extraction from outer provinces?
I'm going to assume less than i would expect due to cultivator shenanigans making it harder than usual to extract wealth reliably (also weak imperial power pre An).
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There is a benefit to being the place where all the tax carts stop, but as people have noticed the Empire isn't half as centralized as it likes to portray itself even now. A lot of it really is just countless centuries of building up infrastructure and only rarely having it damaged, combined with the genuine efficacy of imperial geomancy.
 
Oliver_Twister said:
But they're really not running the Jungle. The Jungle is running them. They're basically the newest iteration of the jungle barbarians.

And again, most of said family are dead because he wanted revenge against the Jungle. And they really don't have a whole province to live in. They can only build cities in the potholes the Sage Emperor's dragon mom left in the Jungle.
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Eh, they have a direct blood relation to the Jungle Goddess - that's a step better than the barbarians Shao slayed had. And let's be honest - no province save Celestial Peaks started "tame" or even "habitable". It's a death world for a reason.

Oliver_Twister said:
I really doubt it's better than the Thousand Lakes.
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I don't see how it wouldn't be. At least you can fight back against the jungle when it tries to kill you, y'know?
 
Varder said:
Eh, they have a direct blood relation to the Jungle Goddess - that's a step better than the barbarians Shao slayed had. And let's be honest - no province save Celestial Peaks started "tame" or even "habitable". It's a death world for a reason.



I don't see how it wouldn't be. At least you can fight back against the jungle when it tries to kill you, y'know?
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The blood relationship just happened recently. And just because it's a step better doesn't mean that they aren't the newest iteration of the Jungle barbarians. And we'll have to wait and see if the Jungle relationship will only help Shao's family or the people of the Western Territories as a whole.

And yes, it's a death world, but generally there are places you can retreat to for safety. You don't really have that in the Jungle, where the land you're walking on is actively trying to kill you. The Western Territories can't be compared to any other province in terms of danger and inhabitability apart from say, the Golden Fields, where a Sublime went boom boom. Even then, the GF are *taking back* land. From what we've seen, the Western Territories are struggling to do that and can only live in millennia old craters.

And you can't really fight the Jungle when each thing you kill just strengthens her and births new monsters more suited to killing you. Shao calls her the Great Spirit of Bloody Evolution for a reason. Again, *everything* is trying to kill you. It's just a sad feedback loop.
 
Oliver_Twister said:
But they're really not running the Jungle. The Jungle is running them. They're basically the newest iteration of the jungle barbarians.
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As far as we know, they are not raiding their neighbors for blood sacrifices to fuel their cultivation. So no, they are not jungle barbarians.

Wide swatches of the Emerald Seas are ruled by powerful spirit courts and the Weilu were famous for their pacts with local spirits, many of which undoubtedly last to this day. You could just as well argue that the forest is running the Emerald Seas.
 
Random Shinobi said:
As far as we know, they are not raiding their neighbors for blood sacrifices to fuel their cultivation. So no, they are not jungle barbarians.

Wide swatches of the Emerald Seas are ruled by powerful spirit courts and the Weilu were famous for their pacts with local spirits, many of which undoubtedly last to this day. You could just as well argue that the forest is running the Emerald Seas.
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I mean, that's how Shao got to White so you can't really say that :V

And yeah, that's fair. The Emerald Seas has a lot of spirit courts. But the Emerald Seas as a province isn't a genus loci.

There's a big difference between well, something based on culture and maybe malicious mismanagement from the Hui and a province-sized Great Spirit genius loci that a Sublime (Dragon Mommy) and one of the oldest clans in the Empire (the Bai) cannot kill
 
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Oliver_Twister said:
I mean, that's how Shao got to White so you can't really say that :V
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We don't actually know how Sun Shao got White. But yeah, it probably involved murdering the former inhabitants of the jungle. Still, that was a single instance and not their current modus operandi.

And yeah, that's fair. The Emerald Seas has a lot of spirit courts. But the Emerald Seas as a province isn't a genus loci.

There's a big difference between well, something based on culture and maybe malicious mismanagement from the Hui and a province-sized Great Spirit genus loci that a Sublime (Dragon Mommy) and one of the oldest clans in the Empire (the Bai) cannot kill
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the jungle much older than the Sunflower Goddess? Didn't the Priest-Queen do some sacrificial ritual that killed both her and the Sage Emperor, while also somehow birthing the Sunflower Goddess? I don't think she is the spirit of the jungle, she just lives there.
 
Oliver_Twister said:
There's a big difference between well, something based on culture and maybe malicious mismanagement from the Hui and a province-sized Great Spirit genus loci that a Sublime (Dragon Mommy) and one of the oldest clans in the Empire (the Bai) cannot kill
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Minor nitpick but momma dragon wasn't sublime yet at the time. She was "only" white and managed to do some permanent damage. She'd hit a lot harder now, but it would be a lot more apocalyptic.
 
Random Shinobi said:
We don't actually know how Sun Shao got White. But yeah, it probably involved murdering the former inhabitants of the jungle. Still, that was a single instance and not their current modus operandi.
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We know exactly how Sun Shao got to White. He literally ate his enemies' cultivation.
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The Butcher - Tales of Destiny

Red was the color of massacre and butchery. It was a sea of broken bodies piled high in the streets of a ruined city. It was coagulating blood in the staring (...)
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Veins and arteries snapped like cord as his fist closed around the still beating heart and wrenched it free with a wet rip. In it burned a blazing star of power, the seed and soul of a dead man's enlightenment.
[...]
He cracked open the priest king's skull with his bare hands, tore out his sovereign chakra, and devoured it.
His ascension had turned the sky crimson for twelve days and eleven nights.
He took a second bite of weakly beating flesh, chewed, and spit, leaving a smear of offal across the broken stones.
 
Random Shinobi said:
We don't actually know how Sun Shao got White. But yeah, it probably involved murdering the former inhabitants of the jungle. Still, that was a single instance and not their current modus operandi.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the jungle much older than the Sunflower Goddess? Didn't the Priest-Queen do some sacrificial ritual that killed both her and the Sage Emperor, while also somehow birthing the Sunflower Goddess? I don't think she is the spirit of the jungle, she just lives there.
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We do know how Shao got to White.
yrsillar said:
Veins and arteries snapped like cord as his fist closed around the still beating heart and wrenched it free with a wet rip. In it burned a blazing star of power, the seed and soul of a dead man's enlightenment
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yrsillar said:
He brought the lump of bloody flesh to his mouth and bit down, inhaling the scent of copper and the strands of a dead man's power.
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yrsillar said:
He cracked open the priest king's skull with his bare hands, tore out his sovereign chakra, and devoured it. His ascension had turned the sky crimson for twelve days and eleven nights.
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And Shao wasn't the only one who did it.

yrsillar said:
They marched to Rammadh on a carpet of the dead. There had been no time for burials, for rites, not for friends and certainly not for foes. The scavenging began with weapons, replacing the broken, the cannibalization of what should have been grave goods, of consumption of the dead's qi, to fuel the march of the living.
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But even if that practice has stopped, it still doesn't change the fact that they're the next iteration of the Jungle barbarians. Liling realizes it.

"If only the might of Sublime Ancestors is to be respected, then our choices are few," Grandpa said softly. His voice was sad, defeated even, as he looked upon the blurring form directly. "Liling, give respect to your Great-Grandmother."

Sun Liling's mouth went dry at the implication. They used barbarian arts, tamed barbarian spirits, but…
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They use barbarian arts, tame barbarian spirits, but now they're allied with the Goddess. Like, it really doesn't matter if they don't intentionally worship her, when every death and drop of blood spilt on the ground is an act of worship to her because again, she's the Great Spirit of Bloody Evolution. Shao admits this.

yrsillar said:
The heartbeat never went away. It thrummed beneath the streets of Kailasa. It beat in the silence of palace chambers at night. It beat in his own chest and underlaid the war chants of his men. He had closed the temples, shattered the altars, but the heartbeat never ceased. Though it had not been his intention, he had built new temples and new altars, her worship was every shedding of blood. The Goddess of the Sunflower fields was with him always.
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And yes, the jungle predates her, but the current Western Territories is the one with where she rules. She's the one who fought Momma Dragon iirc.

The Sunflower Goddess is the genius loci of the place, the difference between a deadly jungle and "this place is alive and trying to kill you now". For all purposes, she's the Jungle and its creatures, and the Jungle and its creatures are her.

She felt the ground quake, and the furrow pulled apart, soil and grass and flowers all pulling away in opposite directions.

Before them was an eye. Wider than the palace complex of Kailasa, it burned verdant green.

Sun Liling heard a song.

It rose from the sway of the sunflowers and the rustling of stalks. A warm song, a loving song, it was an invitation and enticement to lie among the flowers and be embraced by the earth. Yet it was also a sad song, the singer wounded and in pain. For a moment, Sun Liling saw, with the eyes of her spirit, not only an eye, but also a whole woman's face in the contours of the land with green hair that stretched for kilometers and a wide and inviting smile that could swallow a city.

The sunflowers around them turned from the sun to face her, and Sun Liling felt her vision fading, her thoughts unraveling. Why did she need to think when she could stay right here and let her roots drink deep, forever and ever, loved and cared for?
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The titan—Grandpa—spoke, and the words were lost to her ears, too loud, too mighty for her to comprehend.

Her vision spun, and the song of the sunflowers became the sigh of a woman in love, and the sunflower petals caressed the ten-faced visage of the titan of war, leaving trails of oozing black blood.

And then, they stood once more in the garden. Beside her, trickles of blood dripped from cuts on Grandpa's cheek, staining his beard red. From the vast eye before them, something rose. It was a hundred different jungle beasts all at once. It was a tree wrapped in thorny parasitic vines that bloomed with yellow flowers. It was a tall woman with caramel skin and verdant hair, all but nude save for trailing scarves of red.

It was a bared blade, stained with dragon's blood.
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Which is kind of like Zeqing or Lake Hei I guess? I admit my memory of early Forge is very spotty, so I may be wrong here, but Zeqing was literally the cold winter storm on her mountain and the cold winter storm was her. Storms and winter and snow can exist on her mountain peak if she wasn't tied there, but once she was there, she was an embodiment of them.

Elsecaller said:
Minor nitpick but momma dragon wasn't sublime yet at the time. She was "only" white and managed to do some permanent damage. She'd hit a lot harder now, but it would be a lot more apocalyptic.
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Huh. I didn't know that. Thanks for the correction.
 
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veekie said:
ES, SS, ER and TL have contact with foreign cultures, and as such their xenophobia tends to take the form of more practical matters of raiding, cultural dominance and territorial encroachment. Less likely to dismiss barbarians, more likely to hate some.
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Uuuuummmm... ER? Ebon Rivers? Contact with foreign cultures?

Btw AS (Alabaster Sands) have the Treasure Fleet
 
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So if I've understood it correctly from the texts and WoGs Sun Shao made a deal with Big Weed to help him crump the Bai.
Then he spends four centuries trying to subdue her, to subdue the jungle.
Unfortunately he runs out of time, with the Bai finally resurgent and his voice in the capital about to die from old age.
So he says "fuck it!" and marries Big Weed like she's been trying to make him for all these centuries.
Only, he's got a condition: Adopt my great-granddaughter as your descendant, or you ain't getting shit.
Big Weed doesn't like it, but she agrees.
The figure was before her, and Liling felt her heart thundering as the spirit's disapproval fell upon her. Grandpa's hand tightened on her shoulder. Whispers of song battered against Grandpa's power.
"You accepted my proposal," Sun Shao, King of the Western Territories, ground out, and the earth trembled. "I am yours, but my great-granddaughter is your great-granddaughter. The bargain was struck."
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So what does the Sun clan get out of this, given that Big Weed only reluctantly adopted Liling? Just a promise not to eat her in particular? An agreement to let the Sun and their vassals live in the Jungle without getting attacked all the time? Something else?
We need to see the fine print of that prenup.
 
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I mean, I imagine it's a significant power boost for Sun Liling personally, as well as marking her as 'officially' part of the jungle, which likely has some implications for her eventual ability to rule it.
 
Karthak Urzak said:
So if I've understood it correctly from the texts and WoGs Sun Shao made a deal with Big Weed to help him crump the Bai.
Then he spends four centuries trying to subdue her, to subdue the jungle.
Unfortunately he runs out of time, with the Bai finally resurgent and his voice in the capital about to die from old age.
So he says "fuck it!" and marries Big Weed like she's been trying to make him for all these centuries.
Only, he's got a condition: Adopt my great-granddaughter as your descendant, or you ain't getting shit.
Big Weed doesn't like it, but she agrees.

So what does the Sun clan get out of this, given that Big Weed only reluctantly adopted Liling? Just a promise not to eat her in particular? An agreement to let the Sun and their vassals live in the Jungle without getting attacked all the time? Something else?
We need to see the fine print of that prenup.
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Well, they've got a Sublime in their corner now, so people have to take them seriously. And they get some cool spiritblood to supercharge their cultivation.


Shao doesn't need to actively hold her back too, so now the Sun's White can leave the WT and go fight even more wars and he can maybe call on her power and spread her influence in a more dangerous manner than what Liling tried at the sect.

I'm not sure about the rest. Which is terrifying! We'll need to wait and see!
 
Karthak Urzak said:
So what does the Sun clan get out of this, given that Big Weed only reluctantly adopted Liling? Just a promise not to eat her in particular? An agreement to let the Sun and their vassals live in the Jungle without getting attacked all the time? Something else?
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In addition to Sublime Ancestor in their corner, they get spirit blood. The thing that lets old clans (ex: Xuan Shi) and spirit descendants (ex: Su Ling) to cheat in cultivation. Before, both Sun Shao and Sun Liling were just normal humans - their snake blood was too diluted to count or affect anything, now Liling and her children will have the same cultivation advantage.
 
The adoption also protects Sun Shao's last family, by giving Sun Liling a Sublime spirit ancestor. The Bai, the Peaks... either by fear of marriage or of power, it makes Sun Shao think that the future of the Western Territories with a Sun in control is stabilized.

Food for thought: Meizhen being forgiving enough to tolerate the Sun's existence, or at least not be the raging Bai lord that Sun Shao fears. And the misunderstanding field that runs between the Bai and the Sun and how that would affect things.

Meizhen: "Well, Rexiang's peace treaty with the White Sky is sufficiently interesting as is, and I'm OK with just having the Western Territories soft locked out of things. And serves those Peakaboo's who lobbied for killing my mother right to squirm slightly."
Sun Liling: Obsessed with images of the Bai choking out the Jungle, Does Something down South.
Meizhen: "I'm going to tell Ling Qi she was wrong, and now I have to work with those same Peakaboo's to fix this. Sun Shao's plan cannot stand."
Sun Shao: "I'm glad I protected my family. To think that the Bai would work with their mother's killers against us. They have no family honor even among the Whites."
 
Varder said:
Sure, it's a murder jungle, but a) people knew beforehand it will be a murderjungle and b) I belive a lot of them would consider murderjungle a tremendous improvement compared to the Bai.
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Well, 'people' in this case means the nobles that are almost at the top of the food chain. I do not remember any sources for how both the actual people live under Bai rule and how the foot soldiers feel about the jungle.
Like, it is unlikely the Bai system leads to much better results for mortals than what others are doing but it is important to keep in mind that most of the information we get is the equivalent of upper management ranting about the CEO.
 
CeBrudras said:
Well, 'people' in this case means the nobles that are almost at the top of the food chain. I do not remember any sources for how both the actual people live under Bai rule and how the foot soldiers feel about the jungle.
Like, it is unlikely the Bai system leads to much better results for mortals than what others are doing but it is important to keep in mind that most of the information we get is the equivalent of upper management ranting about the CEO.
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Non-snake cultivators are/were looked down upon as lesser, weak, expendable and unimportant. Why'd they think differently about non-snake mortals?
 
Yes. It was the Meng iirc.

And I think the Bai totally care about their mortals. Unless I'm mixing them up with a different clan, they see them as defenseless children that they must protect.
 
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