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

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
I was leaning towards CDE... but whatcha gonna do.

On a unrelated note, anyone else interested in hitting up the archive for some comb related arts?
 
[X] Curious Diviner's Eye

CDE is actually the stealth option, not SCS. Aside from speed, SCS's upgrades this round are all combat related. Meanwhile, the duration increase of Seeking Moon's Eyes means we can have it up all the timeinstead of just when we're actively looking for it, greatly increasing our ability to spot and evade people who could catch us before they see us.
 
Ling Qi glimpsed a tall and androgynous figure dressed in robes of glimmering silver. Where it's face and head should have been was only a cloud of shimmering mist, and when she squinted at it, trying to see through to the face beneath, she only found herself staring back into her own eyes.
Liao's spirit, a fairy of the Reflective Moons. He uses it as a flurry, letting him do multiple things per 'action'. I wonder if they also act as an amplifier, as Sixiang does for Ling Qi's Music and Wind arts?

It was almost enough for her to miss the patch of blackness slithering across the ground to merge with the shadow pooled at his feet.
A spirit merged with Liao's shadow, which does something that Ling Qi couldn't perceive. Probably a debuffer, if it was targeting the constructs but not inflicting visible damage.

Was she a bad person then?
The core question Ling Qi has been dealing with, from the second section of Zhou's test — is she a coward? is she a murderer? She rejected that she was a coward and murderer then, and then started to fumble towards being a good person — as defined by a person who sticks with her friends and family instead of abandoning them to die — but now that she has killed somebody she couldn't unperson, the old doubts are spiraling up in a newer, more age-appropriate form.

The thrust of the past few updates have been that Ling Qi has to construct a moral paradigm for killing internally — she can't adopt an external paradigm. Though, she can probably fusion them into something she can accept.

Ling Qingge never killed, her offered coping mechanisms Ling Qi won't accept. Which is important, since that defines a negative space from which Ling Qi can extract an acceptable paradigm.

Cai Renxiang sees killing as a result of the flaws of the system that is society, and therefore a necessity to be done before she approaches the true task of fixing the flaws. This a totally alien mindset to Ling Qi; she thinks in terms of personal relationships, and her paradigm should be the same.

Meizhen approaches killing from the perspective that, as a spirit-blooded carnivore and Imperial cultivator, her whole life is built on the murder of countless people. It doesn't help, but it does point Ling Qi towards considering when she is ok with killing.

Liao Zhu thinks killing in terms of utility — how well does the particular act of murder accomplishes his goal of promoting and instating his ideals of virtue and justice within the Empire. Ling Qi's goals are not entirely dissimilar, but she'll probably have to modify how to judge utility to square with her own goals before she can adopt such a paradigm.

This is a pretty great update — it's reiterating a character act from basically the beginning of the story and leaves the answer off explicitly for later. With the decision to join Renxiang, the question of justice is likely to become a running theme, so narratively, I'd expect to establish some sort of answer when Ling Qi establishes her Way, and then the finalization of the paradigm to occur once she ascends as a Great Spirit.
 
, I'd expect to establish some sort of answer when Ling Qi establishes her Way, and then the finalization of the paradigm to occur once she ascends as a Great Spirit.
That going to be a long long time coming. Currently we don't really seems to be in that trajectory unless alot of stuff happens.
 
@yrsillar : How often do White cultivators become great spirits? I would imagine that it would be even less common on average then prisms becoming Whites.

I have no idea how many stages there are in the White realm, but I expect that there are quite a few of them and that they aren't small. Also the advantage of one more stage as a white is likely to be rather minimal and even those minimal advantages are only useful against other whites when fighting other whites leads to wastelands.
 
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I was gonna go for SCS but it seems like such a landslide now that I feel like voting for one of the underdogs lol. Ofc I'll rethink it if the votes even out but I kinda doubt that'll happen.

[X] Curious Diviner's Eye
 
@yrsillar : How often do White cultivators become great spirits? I would imagine that it would be even less common on average then prisms becoming Whites.

I have no idea how many stages there are in the White realm, but I expect that there are quite a few of them and that they aren't small. Also the advantage of one more stage as a white is likely to be rather minimal and even those minimal advantages are only useful against other whites when fighting other whites leads to wastelands.

The majority of white cultivators top out and eventually pass away without ascending yes. I can't give you exact numbers, because at that point the numbers are so small that minor variation in either direction badly skews the ratio.
 
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