Like, the politics affect how well protected he is, how much he will be investigated, etc. Its not a mere matter of her having the right to do it, it affects her ability to do it.
And if he can put up a fight, even a feeble one, it makes it even harder to do it quietly, so his ability to progress matters for that too.
That could be decades from now, or centuries. It is still interesting to know how he is doing now.
But she's still going to do it, and she's certainly going to do it before he hits Cyan. Once you reach Cyan and start creating pearls you get a lot harder to kill, she's not going to let him get there. I also never said she had the right to kill him? No matter what the political situation is (barring extremes like him going the Yan Renshu route), she's never going to have the right to murder him. She's just going to do it and do her best to get away with it.
The political situation can effect how careful she needs to be, but she's still outright told us she's killing him no matter what, and I have faith she can manage.
Lot of risk for essentially shit talking when you were dumb teenagers. But I suppose that is the Bai way, vengeance even when it becomes self destructive.
Though that does create an interesting plot hook on what if Meizhen botches her assassination attempt decades down the line. Particularly in Ling Qi's case when your best friend is now stuck between gears of the law.
Do you throw your political and negotiating power to aid in mitigating her sentence or get her off? Would be quite hypocritical for one of the hands of the Cai scion, would it not?
Lot of risk for essentially shit talking when you were dumb teenagers. But I suppose that is the Bai way, vengeance even when it becomes self destructive.
He brought up her dead mother in an insulting way. Even outside the Bai, in this culture that's the sort of pretty severe insult that will cause an extremely severe response.
Eh, we'll see? Maybe Bai Meizhen will care in a few decades, maybe she'll just sublimate that into trying to politically ruin it and his entire family for three generations without killing them.
She's not going to do nothing, but whether she's going to leap towards assassination anytime soon (even within decades) depends on circumstances I think.
We're still only two years out from the end of that crazy year so.
The Duchess Cai was tall, taller than Gan Guangli in his base state, taller than Elder Zhou. She did not have the doll-like proportions of a traditional beauty, but instead a generous and statuesque figure well displayed by the scandalous garment she wore.
[...]
There was no pupil or iris there, only pits of burning colorless light in the shape of human eyes, portals through which something vast and terrible peered from behind a shell of human skin.
Behold the Tyrant of Radiance. I believe one chapter mentioned that she'd invented the qipao in this setting. Yrs called it a good one, so it should be at least a bit accurate.
Lot of risk for essentially shit talking when you were dumb teenagers. But I suppose that is the Bai way, vengeance even when it becomes self destructive.
Though that does create an interesting plot hook on what if Meizhen botches her assassination attempt decades down the line. Particularly in Ling Qi's case when your best friend is now stuck between gears of the law.
Do you throw your political and negotiating power to aid in mitigating her sentence or get her off? Would be quite hypocritical for one of the hands of the Cai scion, would it not?
Oh, its not only that. She is one of the key Cai allies and one of the key players to the Bai reform (in that she is arguably the heir to the reform faction, even if she is too weak to be the heir to the clan, and their main diplomat to the Cai). She was instrumental in containing the effects of the Meng disaster to Bai-Cai diplomacy.
Forget Ling Qi. CRX being put in a situation where she has to punish her or ignore the law is heart demon material.
Oh, its not only that. She is one of the key Cai allies and one of the key players to the Bai reform (in that she is arguably the heir to the reform faction, even if she is too weak to be the heir to the clan, and their main diplomat to the Cai). She was instrumental in containing the effects of the Meng disaster to Bai-Cai diplomacy.
Forget Ling Qi. CRX being put in a situation where she has to punish her or ignore the law is heart demon material.
unlikely to be Sect business, we officially left the sect last turn, so the only way that would hppen is if she killed him on sect ground while he's still a disciple himself, which strikes me as too stupid for our gal pal to do.
unlikely to be Sect business, we officially left the sect last turn, so the only way that would hppen is if she killed him on sect ground while he's still a disciple himself, which strikes me as too stupid for our gal pal to do.
Behold the Tyrant of Radiance. I believe one chapter mentioned that she'd invented the qipao in this setting. Yrs called it a good one, so it should be at least a bit accurate.
The Emerald seas seems unique in this mainly due to being the primary setting of the story. The other provinces are simply less developed overall narratively, but if you dug down into any of them there would be pre imperial groupings. The Sage had to unite the many tribes of the Peaks before expanding out for example. The Bai are really a splintered series of castes with various influences from the pre-imperial locals, the Jin have their seaborn and hillborn folks, the Xuan really are homogenous thanks to the fact that they've always had a small populationbut its been hinted that there was infighting early in their history. The Zheng certainly have multiple groups within their province. Only the golden fields really doesn't and thats more due to the Death of the Sun obliterating the old lines very thoroughly.
Haha, no thank you. I did have one in particular in mind who was sent to blue mountain and would have been Meizhen's 'rival in the inter sect tourney. She may still appear if Bai storylines advance. As for the others I imagine one or two were suppressed badly enough to damage their clan standing but I think most muddled along and endured.
I did not intend you to fail outright but it was possible to be in a much worse, more tense position than this. Which would effect all the arcs going forward.
Hm, I'd say maybe a third would end up local threats, that is severe threats to a single barony, maybe half of those become viscount level threats and like a tiny percentage would become sovereign level threats. Maybe four fifths total become unorthodox cultivators at all but most of these are like bandit or criminal level threats.
It is the sight of a very very old site sacred to the Hidden Moon and the Rising Sun, with others added through the ages. So its been a site of pilgrimage and worship for longer than the empire has existed. The Cloud might have other storyies to tell though which I wont necessarily spoiler here
What if Prince An had discovered the fact that the Hui weren't just negligent, but were actively aiding Ogodei's invasion.
It would have certainly broken things open and probably gotten an outright punitive imperial force sent down, as that is outright treason if you can prove it, those are imperial subjects after all not just yours. Even the Bai probably wouldn;t be against it though they'd fight tooth and nail against any imperial effort to gather power from the incident.
If any Gu have tried to retool their arts to follow the Sun Crow Way, since a Crow has reached Violet.
Some have tried but no one has managed to take it to Sovereign yet. The main line arts will mostly reliably get you into cyan if you have the ambition for it after all, and yes there is a large degree of cultural ancestor worship meaning that the number who diverege that hard is always small.
What if White Sky hadn't been informed and later warned.
They would have been much less forthcoming with help at the end, and there would have been a few infiltrators going off among their people too
you also avoided outright internal... not rebellion but noncompliance by pushing high land claims and such keeping your people satisfied and on side
She does apply some regional variants based on the wang matriarchs preferences, but she does lean toward the imperial side of thought when given a chance. Though there have not been too many huge infrastructure projects outside of Xiangmen backed by the Cai she spent a couple centuries just fixing the awful mess the Hui had made of the capital remember.
She is no longer active, the Bao still have shrines and festivals dedicated to the treasures under the earth but she no longer directly communicates or acts outside the bounds of her rites and priests. There was no interference in their civil conflict
She is a pure spirit which inhabits and basically is the primary Bao Mining labyrinth complex under their capital lands
The Ministry of communication got hit hard by the audit, with a number of arrests and firings throughout the hierarchy. There was some investigation into the Liu but I don't want to spoil more in case it comes up
Some people did just genuinely lose their jobs and get permanently blacklisted from trying further ministry exams
not everybody ends up a bleached skull
oh commerce yes, my mistake
Stripped of his position, placed into indenture to serve out a term in the cities remaining copper mines.
The Bai agreed to some more generous trade deals than they would have otherwise, paid up a sum to repair the damage and increased their internal border security. They were allowed to save face by the Cai acting as middlemen for their payments.
the problem here is that there is not really any under rug sweeping possible
Only BINO and his archers were directly Bai, the rest were an actual bandit group from the region
who basically got Shanghaied into it
they were quite a successful bandit network previous to that staying relatively dispersed and only striking at low heat targets
They weren't aware just how hot the target they'd been forced to go for was until they saw the Cai's seals on the container and at that point it was way too late.
If there was a plan at all it was probably like... disappear into the fens and become swamp hermits, or cross the western border and hope to sign up with the sun or some other fairly far fetched fantasy lol
They were simply the most powerful by weight of cultivators and percentage of war ways, and the Ao wanted the mess in the south subjugated and put in order NOW because everyone was exhausted from the strife. I don't have an exact timeline on how long they took.
She did for a period of over a century. Though the public facing 'service roles had people trained up the fastest. In the end though every person in Xiangmen knew the face of their Duchess though.
even low culti Shenhua's a pretty terrifying though, the same way seeing her zooming by in the upper stratosphere is.
If you look into her eyes or stay in front of her too long most likely
like I said its best analogized to distance
its not necessarily that a red shenhua is less shenhua, its that being close to a red shenhua is like looking at Shenhua from a very great distance
and now her name doesn;t sound real lol
If any Mu has tried to romance the sleeping owl in order to get spirit blood into the clan.
I'm sure some gothy mu youngster has doodled their genderbent stolas fantasies in the corners of their study scrolls but that has not happened no, and its not even really possible under current world conditions.
When the "spirit beast buffs others of its kind" effect starts.
I think so yes, I'd say its based on the cultivation tier, cyan is where shen starts so they can help those in their immediate area up to green violet is the next tier and carries a much wider aoe of the effect with sublime being the last 'tier'
The Bai continued using their bronze well after most of the empire started using iron, because it was simply better, iron spread primarily because it was much easier to get and did not require you to pay through the nose to expensive Bai smiths, while not being that much lower quality. The Zheng broke open steelmaking when an eccentric blacksmith of their's ascended and released his methods and processes across the empire for anyone to use.
it was both in that the ascension assured his method would work outside of his specific local conditions
Cultivation arts that don't require spirit stones and how good Ling Qi's original and current one are.
It is yes. Dukes all have them, most counts have them, below that it gets spottier, but all but the best of them function more to supplement stones rather than replace them entirely.
probably comital for epc with your remade one being top tier quality
There's a whole mythmaking for them there about how she represents the foundations of the Bai and thus is the patron of those who serve at the bottom, it's not really paid a lot of mind too in the more modern Bai's religious stuff, she's relegated to a pretty minor role these days.
By Bai myth she had no desire for children and wished to focus on the building of Zhengjian, in reality who knows
Most likely that was the sort of thing the auction at Xiangmen is for, taking up that middle spot in the economy before things become pure barter
Probably Count or duke only for running them though to have the required authority and ability to back up your promises on the safety of the goods.
It definitely does
high realm crafters jealously guard their reagents and will go quite far to get more
Oh yeah
well for a high end example you saw what Shenhua traded for a single vial of scale shavings right?
yep
like that was an absurd amount of white crafter kit, and the Bai were still having chunks of their upper caste infuriated by the deal
and it wasn;t entirely crazy pride
What happened to the last head of the Imperial Archive.
The institution was dissolved as a semi independent structure and folded into the larger ministry system and sect system. So he was removed from the position and firmly told to retire.
If there was any warning before the Purifying Sun went boom.
There was a some warning, in that the sun went black in the middle of the day, things started getting real spooky, and only then did the purifying sun detonate
it was emergency measures only warning tho
An and Jiao's task force during Ogodei's invasion.
Mm, it would not have been a task force that included sovereigns it was officially an inspection force, so probably one or two more indigos and a handful of cyans with a bunch of greens tops. Maybe a hidden protector violet given he was still an imperial prince.
Ash zombie motivations since Ao Longshen is extremely dead.
Not questions that can be answered. they hate the oasis network and try to attack and dismantle it wherever they can, scholars believe they are guided by the remnant echoes of Longshen's final commands, which are basically explore expand exterminate writ large
they consume because consumption leads to growth, they grow so that they can further consume
The Bai don't do a lot of external trade so there has never been a heavy push for it before, though there are plenty of villages and small towns along the coast
which are being surveyed to decide which ones might be expanded
and the north has always been a bit of a backwater in the thousand lakes
Snakes are outside the caste system, or rather you can think of them as their own fairly wibbly caste.
when they intersect with the human Bai they are generally given respect based on their partner and immediate lineage
If it's possible to create a new celestial body like the sun or moon.
It would be very difficult but... maybe? You'd probably need a few ascenaces to get something that big to enter reality, probably all united in a defend from the stars thing or something
it wouldn;t be something one cultivator could achieve
What if Great Spirit Law implementation becomes difficult.
The simple thing would be that in this scenario a new THEY would have to be generated within the WE and thus resumption of the law would occur, once a sufficiently deviant grouping was identified(actual deviation may be microscopic) Its probably wrong to assign the idea that Unity of Blades 'wants' this as its more like saying gravirty 'wants' things to fall down. Small avatars and actors dedicated to the law of Unity may act with more conciousness though.
Normally you're looking at a least a decade of manuever before anyone makes a serious contract, so he probably isn;t feeling too rushed, but he's not blind to the competition either
Generally spirit beasts all cultivate more slowly, based on their lifespans, shortly lived beasts can cultivate faster but have lower caps as a general rule
yes, human bond partners throw this all out of wack
They accepted refugees within what they could handle, and offered some under the table aid when sending force that way to beef up their own borders which no amount of Hui complaints could stop them from doing when there were flying mongols rampaging around.
It is very much down to the judgment of the authorities. Generally imperial law is not as crazy as actual ancient chinese law on this not going beyond two degrees of separation
for a mortal family like the yan though there is not much protecting them the way the Meng still have enough force to cause great problems if things were interpreted maximally
and Shenhua eschews all of that and tends to only evaporate the guilty
It does have a lot of factors. If you stick them in a -hah- white room one one fight with only their standard equip loadouts Shao wins that fight, Shenhua could perhaps win in certain scenarios but Shaos way is better at military and fighting.
and as a fellow white cultivator there is not much for her truth to expose. You may disagree with his choices, but Shao is not deceiving himself. What he has forgotten and lost are things that are no longer part of him.
Difference between corpse immortals and spirits of the dead a la Huisheng.
How Sun Liling pissed off the Golden Fields group in the outer sect.
Honestly, he probably tried to make some martial boast comparing the great warriors of the east holding the dead to the warriors of the west holding against the jungle. Liling would have said something sarcastic and caustic, aout how fighting dusty mindless corpses is nothing to dealing with jungle gribblies or something
Drunk White Serpent Bai at parties.
I am now picturing the legend with white scales.
Who the Hui fucked with the most except the Diao.
The Bao were probably heavily interfered with due to wealth and power base yeah, probably the dead count clans too, with the Meng getting the least due to being so isolationist to begin with
I can;t give names but a significant chunk of sovereign forces came with the Bao and Luo splinters, and a lot of the remnants in the south from the thousand wings incursion would have turned out maybe another half dozen which are probably court clans or just singular powers nowadays
violet, but they probably have like a half dozen or so even if most are very fresh by sixth realm standards.
They are basically all the immediate relatives apprentices of the Builder and Orator, and got the ol' conflict boost during the civil war
which they rode to violet during the last couple centuries
He could sometimes be cruel if he was very angry, he made the Face eater suffer for example, and he wasn't afraid to do cruel or underhanded things if it would make him win faster or better.
Yao's original character seed was roughly based on Soichiro Kuzuki from FS/N He has been heavily mythologized, but he was generally a pretty serene sort of guy. He liked vibing with his wife and looking out over the lake, he genuinely liked the challenge of hunting difficult prey. Had the humor of a particularly stiff wooden board though.
can't answer too much though as the founders being highly mythologized figures is part of the point
That is Luo's 'hat' in that they have arts based around having whole packs of bound spirits and temporary summons contracts and stuff
I'd say its probably more an indivudual cultivator phenomenon though since a cultivator finding so many matching equivalent rank spirits is ever more difficult the higher you go. I think Ling Qi will remain a rare anomaly sort of thing
Why Meizhen called Weilu parties indecent cavorting.
Some of the Weilu style festivals and dances are really hrm... wild. This is generally due to social restrictions being waived on certain festival days particularly those dedicated to the Dreaming Moon.
Ah, probably not quite that wild (Karthak note: no Elfquest style orgies)
But probably with some not terribly secret uh rendevous going on throughout festival time
Generally they are very mercantile, if you can make it or convince someone to sell it too you you can wear whatever you like. It is considered gauche for parents to give children reagents too far beyond their cultivation though, and there are certain secret stones only available from the primary Bao mining complex which are restricted only to the clan head and their immediate family.
They only use them for official regalia like for example the clan heads battle gear
One was sent to the dukes of ES when they were raised to Counts though and is still part of the official courtly regalia used for certain festdays
Yup. the Wu he didn't have perfect surprise but he managed to use his other starstone arrow for a fairly crippling snipe that made the fight lopsided in his favor though.
What Ao Longshen was like and if the Mu truly failed at apprehending him, or if there was a faction that helped him escape.
Lost to history. All contempary documentation shows Longshen as an arrogant, high handed man with a terrible temper and no patience for being defied though. Nobody at court liked him no matter how talented and powerful he showed himself to be.
My basic idea for him was that guy. You know that guy, the one stemlord butthead who thinks his supreme mastery of his fields means he is also a mastery of yours hers and theirs and everyone elses, and thinks he has all the solutions.
Ugh... well he predates mr musk going full mask off, but that kind of archetype yes.
Why Sun Liling, heir to a whole province, was so terrible at politicking in the Outer Sect.
it is partially down to the siege mentality of the western territory though, they basically already kind of consider themselves to be their only real friends on a cultural level
They (rightly) saw that help as entirely transactional coming from the peaks, and there is of course a bit of arrogance that comes from surviving in the jungle
I mean assuming yuri otome girl... I feel like LQ is the protag yeah, but assuming she's not... I think Meizhen? She's the 'scary prince' archetype genderflipped I suppose?
and that seems like the main guy in my limited experience.
if we're going traditional Otome...with actual guys... Dang does that make Kang the main boy?
gross
I think the Blues are the civil engineer caste, the ones which handle most of the infrastructure and maitenance work
I think Yellow would probably be like maybe a scholarly/beaurocrat caste, haven't fully nailed this down yet.
Yeah Smiths is actually probably better given the metalworking history
Yeah Lets go with smiths
What if the Sage Emperor fucked up during his conquest of the Emerald Seas so that the Weilu became convinced he wanted to destroy them, and awakened the Horned lord.
Yeah there's no way that ends well for everyone, even understanding that sublimes were somewhat weaker back then due to not having been around quite as long, it'd probably end up with a sublime vs' sublime throwdown and thus basically reset civilization in the area
I already answered, its based on professions so you cultivate being a mason or a wrestler or a farmer or a king.
There are definitely beasts but the island has two human tribes whose lands literally change places with the setting or rising of the sun.
The Land of Shadows surrounds the island, this is also true in the liminal and there is not really any difference between material and liminal there
And for Storyteller, the spirit courts are definitely modelled after the neighbors of course
not completely impossible but you're not gonna like the passage much and you're not gonna be in great condition when you arrive
If someone not of a Ducal clan partnered with a spirit beast of their signature species and managed to bring it up to Sovereign.
It hasn't happened but it would probably cause a lot of upset, the Zheng would be pretty chill about it, but the Bai would probably be violently offended, and the Mu would probably quietly suppress or adopt the owl partner long before it got to that point
Guo would just straight up adopt them them, their clan was already a bit more patchwork that way than is publically admitted
I know the Ling clan is already mucho packed with stronk potential spirits and beasts (especially if River Eel decides to set up permanent residence), but remember how salty some people were after Ling Qi's play where she portrayed herself as Tsu? And how butthurt they must have been when she discovered a spirit stone mine and people started talking about how this meant she had Tsu's favour, since he's the Bountiful Earth?
Now imagine how constipated they would be if we as the ultimate flex took in a deer and raised it to Violet. Who's your Tsu 2.0 Mommy now?
It's a cruel tyrant whom we need to stomp in order to liberate the snow leopards.
Although Zhengui does need to flex on the local beasts in order to establish himself as Spirit King. Maybe if he applied the Nanoha Friendship Through Superior Firepower Method on the moose...
