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

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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Hmmm wood would be my favourite, but I feel it does not suit Ling Qi as a "main" element. It is certainly a good supporting element.

Darkness I feel might be powerful and has bad connotations. Zeqing has described it as the absence of things (iirc) and here it is described as covetous and anxious to clutch things close. I would like to think that Ling Qi has grown beyond that. On the other hand, Ling Qi is quite at home in the darkness / night. Interesting that Moon is not a choice here.

Wind is of course the first element Ling Qu has an affinity for, and it fits Ling Qi quite fine. Water is also often used, and I like it thematically, persistence is a good thing, it fits her drawn-out endurance / attrition style of fighting, and wind fits the music obviously.

I think for me it is a toss up between wind and water.

Edit: what is approval voting (relatively new here...)?
 
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I feel like Wind might be the most important simply because it's the one that our sense of joy is most attached to. The other three elements all have a certain solidity and seriousness to them, so Wind provides the necessary levity and motion to keep them and our personality with them from stagnating.

Also, given that our primary instrument is the flute, it has the most direct connection to Music.

There's also the disconcerting way we seem to be dismissing a bunch of stuff as trivialities and thus unimportant, when those trivial things are what gives a person a life rather than just an existence. A bit more Wind should help us regain the knowledge that things don't have to be important to be worthwhile.
 
Pretty cool update Yrs, really captured that feeling of a being that lives life in cycles with full awareness and persistent memory.

Very interesting seeing that the Great Spirits are not just Great Spirits of the Empire, and it really makes one wonder how you interact with things at that level. Are they just giant blobs of energy sufficiently separated from existence that they have to shove themselves through certain perception shaped holes to get a chance to poke around?
Who knows.



As for the options... I'm thinking Wind.

I don't particularly want any of them due to our choices thus far, but wind seems like the least onerous pick here.

Darkness leans a bit too much into that neurotic feel, and while that isn't necessarily bad in a character it limits more stringently what players can really choose to do in the future while remaining in character. Still within workable limits most likely, but I value flexibility.

Water... we've basically never picked this, and while I don't actually have a problem with water I don't want a core tenet coming from something that just kind of... hopped on without much major consideration. Basically every other prime element of our build has been argued to death, picking water just doesn't feel right.

As for wood, I feel sort of similar to how I feel about water. We got our big ticket wood art (and our only wood art) from an outside source. While the art is SO GOOD we basically couldn't help using it, I'd rather not have one of our core arts come from someone else. This is kind of a questionable feeling since basically every art we've continued with showed up because of someone else and most of the arts we went looking for ourselves just kinda got muscled out, but it is what it is.

So if I had to make a tier list, Wind > Wood, Water > Darkness.
I'm going to think this over for a bit and consult with other players, but if nothing changes I'll probably be going []Wind and []Wood.
 
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Wind is an important element, I think many of us thinks so. But the most important one? Not anymore I think.

Probably gonna vote darkness, as I like that part of LQ character. And like LQ has removed that parts of darkness that she does not like just as much as she has for wind.

If it was two elements you could vote for this would be much easier. But really do not want to drop darkness. That would be a win for those assholes that started the "Darkness makes you chaotic evil" lies back in the first thread.
 
[jk] Banana
[jk] Salt

These elements will help us the most, Banana's because they are rich in potassium and Salt so we gain power the more salty we make our opponents.
 
Let us simply accept the inevitable and pursue our destiny as a water cultivator. Search your hearts, you know it to be truth.
 
I'm probably going to approval vote 'not wood' tbh. I don't like its thematics or tactics and we have a lack of interesting mentor figures unlike other elements.
 
To be clear this is not going to result in ling qi immediately dropping any elements or anything, its just answering sixiangs question of what you feel is most important right now
 
yrsillar said:
What a joy it was then, when a human had swept in, sending ripples through Dream with her potential! Sixiang could feel right away, that this was the one she had been created from. Grandmother sure liked playing around.
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Oh, so Sixiang was birthed from our dream? Oh god that's two kids we've got now!

Wish we would have known that when we met her though. Then when Meizhen saw us waking up the next morning...

"Wait, Meizhen, it's not what it looks like! This is actually my kid!"

Actually... Yeah maybe us not knowing was for the best.

yrsillar said:
Because the leviathan was herself only a single scale of something greater. Stretching out far beyond her perspective, Ling Qi beheld the Dreaming Moon whole, and found herself insignificant in its face. If Cai Shenhua had been a mountain of impossible vastness, the reality of a great spirit dwarfed even that. One could comprehend reaching the top of a mountain, no matter how high, but this… it was if the world had flipped upside down, and the whole of the earth loomed overhead.

And, to her growing incomprehension, she found that this was only the face which looked upon the empire, a spike of pain shot through her mind, and she saw in the blurry distance; a green skinned man of with beard bound in a strange stiff coil, holding a strange golden scepter in his hand, another with gleaming silver helm and shining ruby who soared through the stars, and beyond even that an androgynous figure with eyes of purest flame that danced in cruel merriment, and...
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This has interesting implications.

Presumably, these are the incarnations of dreams for other cultures, so the Dreaming Moon is in a way either a smaller part of the larger Dream concept, or they are one and the same just wearing a different face, with these other people being other fragments or faces of Dream.

Now, if this is the case then does that mean Great Spirits which share concepts are in reality the same beings? With the way the Emperor ascended to become a part of Death and as can be seen here, it seems maybe. Are all concepts like this?

Certainly, the phases of the moon (or is it just the phases of Moon?) are likely to be similar, if Ling Qi had instead turned her head metaphysically left instead of right, would she have seen the other Moon phases? This is just speculation, but if so there seems to be some sort of continuous consciousness thing going on with Great Spirits. This could mean you could take Random Green Skinned Man, who is the same person as The Dreaming Moon, who is the same person as The Bloody Moon, who is the same person as Other Cultures Blood God, who is the same person as Other Cultures Death, who is the same person as Death, who is the same person as the ascended Emperor.

There's no proof this is how it works of course, but if they are literally the same being as opposed to just fragments, then how far does this web of Great Spirits go? Are all Great Spirits really the same being, an incarnation of existence, wearing different masks, and all ascending does is make you one with this being?

Again, no proof, mainly just a cool thought I had, but who knows. Maybe we're getting proper eldritch up in here and this is both the truth and not, with the complete, exact truth being incomprehensible by human minds.

yrsillar said:
[] Wind
[] Darkness
[] Water
[] Wood
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Mind breaking natures of eldritch beings I can tackle, but I'm not touching this with a 10,000 year old heirloom stick.
 
Black Noise said:
[1] Plus Zeqing exists as living proof that heavy-dark aspect beings can be fine, not to mention Jiao/Meizhen/Liao Zhu.
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Do remember that all of those folks have Ender Wiggin's levels of interpersonal problem solving and enemy management.

The only reason Zeqing tolerates us is because she sees in Ling Qi a way for her not to eat her daughter. And she's become human enough not to want that, after god knows how long. If we didn't make friends with her kid and the Moon, she would not tolerate us. And her idea of Art advancement tests are quite literally lethal under the opinion: "You are going to die anyway. I might as well not hold back. Rise to the challenge, or perish."

Meizhen's example is one where she adopted Ling Qi as a pet, then had feelings for her, otherwise she is a snake, like her family. Darkness, like every element, is fine, in moderation. But spec too hard in it, and you go bonkers. We've speced Dark/Wood/Water a bit much recently, we need Wind for the Balance, and that means we also need a Wind art, pronto. Luckly we have a couple we can learn, like Harmony of the Dancing Wind, Audacious Fairy's Lark, Mysterious Night's Obscurity or Darting Labyrinth Shadow.

Basically, we need a Green Wind Art. At least one for balance. Dark/Wood/Water will make Ling Qi into a Swamp no one leaves, haunted by spirits and frozen winter, and a mad carnival. No one wants to hang out with folk like that, except other eccentric loners.
 
yrsillar said:
To be clear this is not going to result in ling qi immediately dropping any elements or anything, its just answering sixiangs question of what you feel is most important right now
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It'll give an enormous rhetorical advantage every time an argument about what art we learn or otherwise invest in comes up, even if there were no actual IC repercussions.
 
So we just learned interesting things about the Dreaming Moon and Great Spirits in general. Like the fact that they have several avatars ( interconnected ascended spirits and cultivators?).

And for a defining element for Ling Qi, I think wind would be best. It's connectivity and obliqueness are important to Ling Qi Domain and personality. I also just like the element in general. It's a very fun one.
 
FallenPears said:
Certainly, the phases of the moon (or is it just the phases of Moon?) are likely to be similar, if Ling Qi had instead turned her head metaphysically left instead of right, would she have seen the other Moon phases? This is just speculation, but if so there seems to be some sort of continuous consciousness thing going on with Great Spirits. This could mean you could take Random Green Skinned Man, who is the same person as The Dreaming Moon, who is the same person as The Bloody Moon, who is the same person as Other Cultures Blood God, who is the same person as Other Cultures Death, who is the same person as Death, who is the same person as the ascended Emperor.

There's no proof this is how it works of course, but if they are literally the same being as opposed to just fragments, then how far does this web of Great Spirits go? Are all Great Spirits really the same being, an incarnation of existence, wearing different masks, and all ascending does is make you one with this being?
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I think we had a Discord loredump a while back, where while Cultivation ends at the Great Spirit level, there are certainly ranks of Great Spirits, and they're all tied up in some incomprehensible web of interactions. It's just not really relevant to humans because you only see the Great Spirit that cares to interact with you, in the face that your culture has for it.

The highest ranked Great Spirits (Which I suggested get dubbed Sovereign Spirits) are the ones that are effectively universal ideas that are a thing even to a theoretical feral lifeform thrown out in the middle of nowhere with no thoughts and no life experiences. So "The Moon" and "The Sun" would qualify as such, as would things like "Death" With their individual faces (Such as Dreaming Moon, Purifying Sun, so on so on) are just elements of that greater idea that are something a human mind can grasp--and we saw it here how Ling Qi looking past the Dreaming Moon into the thing they were effectively an emanation of started causing her actual soul headaches
 
Hm. Based on general discussion so far, popularity ranking seems to be Wind>Water>Darkness>Wood. We know we're not going to be significantly changing our element/art lineup because of this by WoG, so that ranking method ought to give a decently accurate depiction of what Ling Qi's internal thoughts are. Maybe this should be a ranked vote rather than approval vote, to better depict that.
 
Alectai said:
I think we had a Discord loredump a while back, where while Cultivation ends at the Great Spirit level, there are certainly ranks of Great Spirits, and they're all tied up in some incomprehensible web of interactions. It's just not really relevant to humans because you only see the Great Spirit that cares to interact with you, in the face that your culture has for it.

The highest ranked Great Spirits (Which I suggested get dubbed Sovereign Spirits) are the ones that are effectively universal ideas that are a thing even to a theoretical feral lifeform thrown out in the middle of nowhere with no thoughts and no life experiences. So "The Moon" and "The Sun" would qualify as such, as would things like "Death" With their individual faces (Such as Dreaming Moon, Purifying Sun, so on so on) are just elements of that greater idea that are something a human mind can grasp--and we saw it here how Ling Qi looking past the Dreaming Moon into the thing they were effectively an emanation of started causing her actual soul headaches
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Yeah, this certainly shows something is going on here like that. What I find interesting is the fact that, for example, Dreaming Moon seems to be subordinate to both Moon and Dream, as well as what the exact Metaphysical connections in this web are, whether it's just 'you're my boss and these are my colleagues' or 'we are literally one... sometimes... or all the time, who knows?'

I was just commenting on the implications of a certain view.
 
I'll go :
Wind (favored)
-> Water (meh)
-> Wood (poor idea)
-> Darkness. (bad idea)
We really don't want a Dark!Six.
Wood's growth is ... not really her either, and besides we have Zhengui to cover it.
Water is okay-ish. Persistence is fine, but not really something we need (SV will never have a protag that stagnates...). It's imo the neutral option that doesn't give anything good, nor anything bad either.
Wind's traits are the ones we want more of. More specifically it's the traits we want Six to have for us.
 
I say Darkness or Water. Sixiang has free-thinkingness. She could benefit from having clearer desires and more persistence.

Also she might stop complaining that our dantian is gloomy.
 
Mmmh. My dream primary elements are, I think, Wind/Moon, with either Darkness or Wood as a third. Too bad there isn't either Music or Moon as a choice.

I'd say that with HDW this turn and hopefully MNO soon, and ENM in not too long, Ling Qi is well prepared to make Wind relelvant again.
 
FallenPears said:
Yeah, this certainly shows something is going on here like that. What I find interesting is the fact that, for example, Dreaming Moon seems to be subordinate to both Moon and Dream, as well as what the exact Metaphysical connections in this web are, whether it's just 'you're my boss and these are my colleagues' or 'we are literally one... sometimes... or all the time, who knows?'

I was just commenting on the implications of a certain view.
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the way I read the chapter Sixiang is the 'subordinate' of
[Grandmother/Emerald Dancer/Sister Brightsong/Dreaming Moon Local Avatar &*^*&%^(&)]
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. as the name Dreaming Moon Local Avatar says 'Grandmother' isnt actually the full Dreaming Moon.

Because the leviathan was herself only a single scale of something greater. Stretching out far beyond her perspective, Ling Qi beheld the Dreaming Moon whole, and found herself insignificant in its face. [...] this… it was if the world had flipped upside down, and the whole of the earth loomed overhead
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and here we see it, 'Grandmother' is to the Dreaming Moon what Sixiang is to Grandmother and the Dreaming Moon is huge.

And, to her growing incomprehension, she found that this was only the face which looked upon the empire
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and all what Ling Qi saw before was only the part of the Dreaming Moon that faces the Empire. But other cultures can see the moon and its phases too

so maybe
a green skinned man of with beard bound in a strange stiff coil, holding a strange golden scepter in his hand, another with gleaming silver helm and shining ruby who soared through the stars, and beyond even that an androgynous figure with eyes of purest flame that danced in cruel merriment, and...
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are faces the Dreaming Moon uses in other cultures?
 
Worth considering Darkness in context of that looming Zeqing trial. Not to the extent of deciding a vote of preference of course but how it would look like in hindsight of a complete story.
 
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