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

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So, if the sage's empire cannot coexist with virtue, then either virtue or the empire must be sacrificed.

I wonder how one would go about sacrificing virtue, if approached directly from that perspective. Status quo does so from an apathetic place, but I'm betting that an active approach would be quite different.

Was the Bai white killed during the current reign? I thought she was.
 
Glau said:
So, if the sage's empire cannot coexist with virtue, then either virtue or the empire must be sacrificed.

I wonder how one would go about sacrificing virtue, if approached directly from that perspective. Status quo does so from an apathetic place, but I'm betting that an active approach would be quite different.

Was the Bai white killed during the current reign? I thought she was.
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Bai Fuxi, the previous Bai White, was a man and was killed centuries ago by Sun Shao under the reign of Emperor An.
 
Glau said:
So, if the sage's empire cannot coexist with virtue, then either virtue or the empire must be sacrificed.
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Or you can slowly and systematically work towards making the Empire a place that can be called virtuous. Like Xiang is doing. Shenhua is doing the same thing for the ES, but starting with Xiangmen first.
 
Erebeal said:
Bai Fuxi, the previous Bai White, was a man and was killed centuries ago by Sun Shao under the reign of Emperor An.
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Ah, thank you. I was confusing him and Meihzen's mom.

Oliver_Twister said:
Or you can slowly and systematically work towards making the Empire a place that can be called virtuous. Like Xiang is doing. Shenhua is doing the same thing for the ES, but starting with Xiangmen first.
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By that framing, Shenhua is following the same approach as Elder 'Cruel Virtue' followed. I'm much more with you and Reixiang here. (because she is a builder and not a scalpel- structures that allow people to be virtuous must be created, it's not enough to burn out the corrupt)
 
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Yeah, the difference is that [Revolution] is a fantastic Way that contains within it both its flaws and the solution to those flaws.

She is the Breaker and Builder of Thrones. While she may, in time, break too much in the mean time she can build pretty well. And the inherent imperfection of herself and the world is no barrier to pursuing [The Ideal] since [Revolution] addresses that too. Imperfection both motivates and is addressed by revolution, which in turn falls short and is solved by more revolution.
 
Alright, for cultivation I'm strongly leaning towards this combination at the moment:

Thief of Names: details to be unveiled

Wind Thief - Boundaries Untrodden: To slip between, through and around, through the tiniest keyhole or the open window. Round the mountains or through even the veil of death. So walks the thief, who must bypass boundaries in the same way that a bird must fly. But to step across or through, one must understand that which they will violate. Alters and advances the Breeze in the Vault technique. +1 XP to Want and Mystery. Unlocks a new project.

FFS - Ice and Dust: The ice consumes and becomes. It is beautiful in its stillness, its starkness. The ice kills, the cold ends, death is hideous. There is no thing which lives without death. The beast devours its prey with claw and fang. The tree strangles and suffocates with root and shade. The mountain grinds over the plain, the wind wears the mountain unto dust. The winter freezes, the spring floods. New arises from old, and those left behind weep bitter tears, and beat their chests in futile rage. Meditate upon ending and the cycles of the world, and find in it the meaning of winter. +1 XP to Cycles and Ending. 30 Spiritual Cultivation XP. Advances the Year's End Aria technique. Unlocks one project (0/4)

Thief of Names is useful for the diplomacy and poking at people's political interests and stuff that we're doing, plus it's just got a lot of leadup to it by this point. Our stunt in our Dream tribulation has also kind of influenced it with Huisheng stuff, or at least it looks like it. The [Communication] we touched on during the tribulation has been straining our eyes on people something fierce.

But the core of our relationship with Huisheng rests in our Wind Thief art, so it seems appropriate to me to throw that into the mix. Happily, the project Boundaries Untrodden is also super thematically in line with stealing intangible things like knowledge of other people's core identity; the project text even calls out that you need understanding to trespass all daring like. So it'd be a great intro laying the foundation for twisting Thief of Names out of our old perception art. Might pair well with reacquiring Sixiang too.

The FFS project is on my list because it's our first successor art, and it's important enough to our character I don't want it left behind. Especially considering how juiced Thief of Names is with various plot threads, I think it's important for FFS to keep up. Making sure to develop our personal understanding should also matter for White Skies diplomacy; FSS's mark on our cultivation, and the relationship it represented with Zeqing forms the foundation of our legitimacy in the eyes of the White Sky, so continuing to keep it in focus during the summit arc is important. Also, next turn we have a scene with Zhengui and the underground fires/waters + farming coming up, which Ice and Dust can probably hook into philosophically while causing minimal extension to the turn/leaving more room for other things.
 
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Oliver_Twister said:
Or you can slowly and systematically work towards making the Empire a place that can be called virtuous. Like Xiang is doing. Shenhua is doing the same thing for the ES, but starting with Xiangmen first.
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Erebeal said:
Yeah, the difference is that [Revolution] is a fantastic Way that contains within it both its flaws and the solution to those flaws.

She is the Breaker and Builder of Thrones. While she may, in time, break too much in the mean time she can build pretty well. And the inherent imperfection of herself and the world is no barrier to pursuing [The Ideal] since [Revolution] addresses that too. Imperfection both motivates and is addressed by revolution, which in turn falls short and is solved by more revolution.
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I think anyone that looks at Shenhua needs to keep in mind that she has a human safety brake who actively sought out Ling Qi to make sure she knew that, "hey, if you and her daughter are serious about this, then you have until I die, because when I do shit is going down." She looks way more reasonable than she is because she's got a giant rose growing around the REVOLUTION lever and keeping it from going all the way down. If not for that, then I'm pretty sure Shenhua would be doing way, WAY more Breaking of Thrones... And if she was, strong odds are that she'd be long dead on account of trying to 1v1 the entire Empire, because as repeatedly addressed it's very, very flawed.

In terms of Ways, REVOLUTION is about as bad as one can get and still get to White. It's dangerous to everyone, including and especially the White and their original goals, because it compels constant conflict and leaves you at strong risk of both value AND context drift. You know how some people talk about how super-intelligent AI needs to be really carefully restricted, because if you fuck up its basic values then it's eventually going to decide to strip-mine the entire universe to tile it with paperclips? That's a REVOLUTION White.
 
So, I wonder what happened if she ascends.

Does every throne fall soon thereafter?
 
DeadmanwalkingXI said:
No. There are tiers of power even among ascended beings, so she doesn't auto-win in conflicts with those who've enshrined thrones as a thing. I'm not sure what happens, honestly...depends on what she targets with her Revolutionary Fervor once she's ascended.
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I don't know that there will be such a thing as focused attention from a great spirit; the most we've seen is larger avatars of yet larger concepts, like Xin or the glimpse we got in the dream hut. It also sort of plays against whites ascending by becoming a single perfected moment.

Those examples suggest shards of revolution all over instead of one focus, which makes me think about what a Sixiang level fragment of Revolution might be like.

Which thrones were made by ascended beings?
 
Glau said:
Which thrones were made by ascended beings?
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Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny) Original - Users' Choice!

One would imagine that it would be an easy thing, to track the ascensions of the greatest cultivators to the status of great spirit, that the ripples of their profound insights would be wholly unignorable. Yet it is fact that many scholars of cultivation only notice a small change to the...
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See this sidestory "Echoes of Ascension".
 
I don't think Shenhua is going to ascend. My gut is saying that the sacrifices she took in getting to White in order to topple the Hui are such that she won't be ascending to become a great spirit.
 
Erebeal said:
I don't think so. Rather, similar to us she sees that the only path is major systematic and structural reform. The empire must change.

Jiao and An were I think limited first in they were largely focused on clearing out corruption, and potentially started with a bit of a naive vision that if they could just clear that out then everything would work, and then eventually realised that the problems run right to the roots of the empire and didn't know how to handle that, since they were built to cut away bad things. They weren't really builders per se, while Xiang is and it's why she's capable of going "ok so basically we need to rebuild how the empire functions from the ground up". In contrast Jiao broke since stabbing the empire to death to save it doesn't really work.
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Hmm... I'm not sure if I agree, at least myself.

Firstly, I just am not sure that she has really undertaken much in the way of major systematic and structural reform, at least that seems clear to me. An did do quite a bit of structural moving and shaking, and quite a bit of institutional re-building. In terms of political moving and shaking, those these are kind of local things, he made to neutralize the rivalry politics between the imperial throne and the Bai by marrying one of their own, and then after the backfired spectacularly to do so via another route by weakening the Bai by allowing the Western Territories and Sun Shao to happen. He also allowed the revolutionary reformation of the Emerald Seas by very deliberately allowing the Hui to be taken down and replaced by the Cai there. But on the larger and institutional level he is accomplished - he created the Great Sect systems and the Ministry of Integrity, and we keep seeing the reverberations of the creations of the institutions come up again and again within the provincial setting of the game and among the other provincial nobility that Ling Qi talks to.

Xiang on the other hand, really has just about fuck-all to compare to this that I'm aware of; the Celestial Peaks nobility are engaged and interested in what she's doing, even if they challenged her to a degree up until she hit White, but her presence has been nearly entirely absent from the Empire at large otherwise. Every time the Empire as the Empire has come up in a way relevant to us, it hasn't been Xiang, or Xiang's institutions, it's been An's institutions - and she's not early on in her Way either, she's White. If her goal is to seriously structurally reform the Empire, I would really expect to see some... structures out of her. But instead we're at the point where the empire just straight-up Balkanizing due to central neglect seems entirely reasonable.

Secondly, if the conclusion that she reached is that "Virtue and the Sage's Empire cannot coexist", but she made it part of her Way and continued cultivating instead of letting it break her like Jiao, then I don't think reformism is fundamentally compatible with that Way. Even if you reform the Sage's Empire, it will still be the Sage's Empire - after all, it isn't exactly like the Empire now exactly matches the Empire of the Sage himself, it's three dynasties, millennia, and loooads of politics and catastrophes in. There's no way to reform it until it can escape the inescapable rot that Jiao An and presumably Xiang all saw and become virtuous instead - Virtue and the Sage's Empire cannot coexist.
 
Honestly, while I am not sure if Shenhua is able to ascend, but I think that Revolution is a viable path for ascension, since its just applying an Ending to nations.
 
Powder Miner said:
Secondly, if the conclusion that she reached is that "Virtue and the Sage's Empire cannot coexist", but she made it part of her Way and continued cultivating instead of letting it break her like Jiao, then I don't think reformism is fundamentally compatible with that Way. Even if you reform the Sage's Empire, it will still be the Sage's Empire - after all, it isn't exactly like the Empire now exactly matches the Empire of the Sage himself, it's three dynasties, millennia, and loooads of politics and catastrophes in. There's no way to reform it until it can escape the inescapable rot that Jiao An and presumably Xiang all saw and become virtuous instead - Virtue and the Sage's Empire cannot coexist.
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Yeah but the thing is these people are all deeply Peaks-centric in their perspective. When he says "Virtue and the Sage's Empire cannot coexist" I don't really think he's taking a principled stance in favour of provincial independence - the concern is the fundamental values of Imperial culture and how society is organised, from perspective largely formed by the Peaks. This may be reflected further out throughout the empire, but fundamentally it's about the Peaks imo.

From this we can also see a reason why Xiang isn't bothering with a lot of the provincial stuff as much - she realises that trying to do everything at once isn't helpful, and may be taking the position that there's no point in trying to centralise all imperial power across the empire if the foundations haven't been fixed first.
 
Yeah - for sure Jiao was operating from a Peaks-centric perspective (poor Ling Qi when he just casually goes "lmao yeah no the Sects were just meant to extend Imperial influence and the commoner thing was kind of just a casual thought I had"; I think he's actually kind of underselling An there considering how much of it seems to be a response to Ogodei) and for SURE he wasn't taking a principled stance in favor of principled independence. But I guess I view the "Virtue and the Sage's Empire cannot coexist" as an admission of defeat from Jiao's part - an admission that the Empire can never be turned virtuous; Jiao admits he can never see that process to that end, but he full-out burns out, gives up, and leaves to a sect with An gone and few links to Xiang.

The question I then think about is how that becomes something other than an admission of defeat - and it's a big question. Part of the assumption I'm making here (and it's a big one stacked on other assumptions) is that Xiang has something similar to "Virtue and the Sage's Empire cannot coexist" as a driving tenet rather than, say, the core goal of her Way being to seal that gap. Leading off of this set of assumptions, the Empire is sort of something built off of subjugating powerful and relatively independent lands and peoples via the power and perceived draconic superiority (which has sublimated over to Peaks cultural superiority, I think). Admittedly, given that this is all feudal monarchy, most of these fiefdoms are built this way, but the Empire are REALLY built this way, given the origin of the duchies as independent lands. Since a lot of these rulers seem like they sort of don't need the Peaks all that badly as long as they can work out other agreements with each other, I don't think the Empire can reform out of the most core thing it has kept throughout the millennia - dependence on that same subjugation via strength and perceived power by heritage (incidentally the only two things the core Imperial succession mechanism really cares about). If Xiang were to reform out of that, she'd have to end the Empire to do it - and, incidentally, create something else for Virtue to coexist with.
 
ReignTorrential said:
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Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny) Original - Users' Choice!

One would imagine that it would be an easy thing, to track the ascensions of the greatest cultivators to the status of great spirit, that the ripples of their profound insights would be wholly unignorable. Yet it is fact that many scholars of cultivation only notice a small change to the...
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See this sidestory "Echoes of Ascension".
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Having read that, I'm still not seeing any. There are a bunch that ascended from thrones, which makes sense given the need to focus resources from an enormous base for materials to help ascend, but all of them established laws and principles and orders of spirits. None of them made thrones. The sage emperor died rather than ascend.

So I think establishing revolution as a principle is going to effect the entire world, the open question is how. Or, alternatively, who kills Duchess Cai before she can? Because I think it's one or the other, with the moonshot of Renxiang building a revolution-resiliant order that breaks her way philosophically.

Powder Miner said:
Since a lot of these rulers seem like they sort of don't need the Peaks all that badly as long as they can work out other agreements with each other, I don't think the Empire can reform out of the most core thing it has kept throughout the millennia
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The peaks have the main sources of spirit stones, called out early as the mines of Mount Tai, and the imperial methods of cultivating requires them to awaken and nurture talent until methods of cultivating environmental Qi can be learned. So I think there is a lot more the duchies have to lose than you laid out. I don't think it's enough to challenge your conclusion, but it's going to be an incentive to reconsolidate quickly.

(I'm doing reread because I wanted better grounding in the world, and this is from the first half of Threads)
 
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Oliver_Twister said:
So, next turn, what feels fixed to me is:

Personal: House of Ling, probable Six reconciliation action
Professional: Imperial Menagerie, A Land Most Dark and Cruel
Retainer: Event Roll
Cultivation: Thief of Names
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You left out Ice and Dust, because we need to continue FFS, and whatever action is required to resolve our damaged/stressed Sincerity insight and Truth concept.
 
Erebeal said:
I don't think so. Rather, similar to us she sees that the only path is major systematic and structural reform. The empire must change.
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She doesn't seem to do much reforming from what I remember about her.

Erebeal said:
Jiao and An were I think limited first in they were largely focused on clearing out corruption... They weren't really builders per se
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Source? Do we have any idea about An's politics and projects beyond the mess with the Sun & Bai and the Sects?

Edit. Saw this questions were already asked before, my bad.
 
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Varder said:
She doesn't seem to do much reforming from what I remember about her.

Source? Do we have any idea about An's politics and projects beyond the mess with the Sun & Bai and the Sects?
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We know quite a bit about her systemic social reforms in the Peaks region, which have actually been pretty extensive. Unfortunately, it's mostly been in offhand comments so I can't give you a specific source off the top of my head. I'm sure someone has that information, though.

She's been very hands off outside the Peaks for the most part, but she's been doing a lot within that area.
 
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