Indulgence V1.0 Text Only

Indulgence
Version 1.0 “Clarity”
By Savestate

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You have 1 Cobalt and 5 Silver.

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You Are:

The powers in this section represent unbounded developmental potential, exponential or hyper-exponential growth, expressed through their own particular lens. If you are uncertain as to what a description implies, default to higher-end interpretations.

Options here cost 1 Cobalt and 1 Silver.

=Beloved=

You have the unconditional, all-transcending love of a concept.

Not some specific embodiment or expression of this concept, but the concept itself, as written into the bones of the multiverse. There is nothing it would not do for you, but a great cosmic bureaucracy restricts what it can do for you. You may receive one Greater Boon and three Lesser Boons from your admirer, and nothing more- not without attaining such absurd power these Boons are as insignificant trinkets. You need not call upon all your Boons immediately, and indeed may benefit from preserving a few against future need.

A Boon can be used to obtain any benefit that lies within its power; as such, the examples presented below are far from all-encompassing. Boons may provide novel forms of supernatural power- a summoned Ally might take the form of a brilliant archmage- which may be transmissible.

Ally
Allies provided by your Boons will be eternally loyal, with a thorough comprehension of your self; they will walk the perfect middle ground between blind obedience and unreliability. So long as you live, no death or maiming will adhere to these allies for long.
Lesser Boon:
● Generate an ally approximately 200 times as powerful as you currently are, with limited developmental potential.
● Generate an ally as powerful as you, who will grow more powerful at a 1:1 ratio with your own progression.
Greater Boon:
● Generate an ally more than a million times as powerful as you currently are, with near-zero developmental potential.
● Generate an ally as powerful as you, who will grow more powerful with the square of your own progression.

Power
Lesser Boon:
● Amplify all basic parameters and future increases to said parameters by a factor of 20.
● Accelerate all future development by a factor of 5.
● Assume new powers whose sum total does not surpass your existing powerset.
● Amplify an existing power and future increases to said power by a factor of 50.
Greater Boon:
● Unlock a new ability with developmental potential on par with another You Are option, but significantly inferior progression.
● Develop a new, universally-applicable method of progression, well-suited for clever exploitation and explosive growth.

Comfort
Lesser Boon:
● Acquire a measure of plot armor.
● Tweak all of reality out to the limits of your perception in a largely ‘cosmetic’ sense, akin to porn physics.
● Create a private realm well-suited to provide both great luxury and opportunities for safe development.
Greater Boon:
● Generate a new infinite multiverse, rooted entirely in the single concept that so admires you, under your absolute control but regarded as Unreal by those forces that defend the cosmos itself.

Immortality
Your admirer interprets the Boons you request in the manner that best serves your interest.
Unless you do something absurdly stupid, you won’t reach an inescapable end.
Lesser Boon:
● Guarantee lossless reincarnation to cosmically distant realms upon death or worse-than-death.
● Become that which springs to life full-formed wherever its name is spoken above a whisper.
Greater Boon:
● Acquire absolute immunity to all harm.
● Become fated to never encounter that which would see you harmed.

=The Inheritor=

You inherit the absurd creative power of some far-distant fallen smith. With a few minutes’ work, you can Record upon the substrate of your power a perfect schematic for any ‘created thing’ you have the opportunity to observe. In a similar timeframe, you can create a new schematic to fulfill a specific function, plagiarizing from your recorded schematics to create as optimal a design as is theoretically possible. If you have only recorded aircraft so far, a car you design might run off a jet engine, but it will be the best possible jet engine powered car.

Given two hours of work, you can Refine a single schematic. This increases its derived performance in a specific area by a dramatic margin- doubling the speed of a computer, or doubling the durability of a truck. You cannot use this to directly decrease cost, complexity, energy or fuel usage, or so on; neither can you directly increase the sources of performance, i.e. boosting the tensile strength of a phone rather than its overall hardiness.

In a similar timeframe, you can Reinvent a single schematic. This alters the basic rules of its function by several degrees. Taking a sailboat, you might change it from a device that allows safe travel over water into a device that allows safe travel through the void of space, still driven by wind and sail.

Your research and development efforts see hourly results equivalent to a full year’s productivity. This takes into account, and compounds, all available resources. Two hours with an investment of fifty dollars and a buddy joining in for half an hour partway through sees results comparable to a project with a budget of $400k and 13,000 man-hours of development time. Such development efforts will never produce the effects of your Refinement or Reinvention, but can and do yield the fruits of actual scientific progress.

Your personal capabilities, including basic attributes, knowledge, skill, and more esoteric forms of ability, will always be minimally sufficient to eventually recreate any schematic from your records. This cannot prevent your death, but can and will preserve a portion of your faculties against even the most thorough forms of annihilation. Basic tools are obsoleted by this factor of your power: you need no fire to refine ore, nor hammer and anvil to shape it, nor wrench and pliers to assemble it. However you may come to obtain them, raw materials are no less necessary than for any other creator. Stripped of body and mind and soul, cast into a true void, you might persist in some sense, but be imprisoned nonetheless.

It is within the abilities of others to use, study, replicate, and even modify your creations, including those that function by blatant nonsense. Preventing such subversion is not difficult- a relatively minor effort of Refinement could blackbox your work effectively against the scientific efforts of whole planetary civilizations- but crucially, it is not automatic. Neither does your work inherently function in realms with strange or lacking physical laws, no matter how loosely it is rooted in any one realm’s laws. Guaranteeing reliable function even in a place of raw chaos is, again, a relatively minor effort of Reinvention, but not automatic.

=A Wound=

The aftershock of a might cosmic weapon has left a wound upon reality shaped exactly like you. It sits above thought and perception, the player behind the character, the actor behind the role, truer to yourself than any part of you trapped inside reality could ever afford to be. Your wound-aspect cannot be destroyed or diminished, for what weapon could make a wound less severe? Neither can it be remedied or healed away, as this is merely destruction with extra steps.

Initially, you have exactly one Thread. In 24 hours, it produces one point of Action Potential, equivalent to 20 minutes of conceptual ‘activity’, and it can store a maximum of 10 points of AP. As time passes, the wound-aspect of your self steadily and continuously expands. Each objective day, you develop one additional Thread, and your individual Threads increase in productivity and relative storage capacity as their numbers rise. You may accelerate this natural progression without limit by absorbing any phenomena that ‘deteriorate reality’ in some sense. Your wound-aspect provides an innate faculty for such absorption; if you managed to make contact with its event horizon, you could eat a black hole.

AP may be directly spent to fuel a kind of impossible haste, super-speed. Any amount of AP may be spent over any timeframe for proportionate results: 20 seconds spent over 1 second for a 21x multiplier, 1 minute over 10 minutes for a 1.1x boost, 20 minutes over half a second for a brief 2401x surge. Few of the natural consequences of extreme speed apply to your haste; it manifests most similarly to time dilation, and the fuzzy edges of the effect actively mediate interactions in countless ways for your convenience. As but one of these conveniences: metabolic byproducts within your body are actively regenerated into useful compounds, mitigating the expected increase in nutritional requirements from experiencing more time in a given day. Generally, expect no hidden dangers and few exploitable side-effects. An attack you make while accelerated is no more or less potent; an attack upon you while accelerated finds its impact diffused over time, but not outright reduced.

You may additionally spend AP to execute actions instantly, bypass restrictions on action, and empower actions. Executing an action instantly by spending AP sees results equivalent to spending the corresponding amount of time on it. The amount of AP required to bypass a given restriction may be derived from the amount of time required to work around it. Ignoring an hour-long cooldown would take 3 AP, while stabbing an opponent in melee from half a mile away would cost fractional AP, rounded up to the minimum increment of one. Where simply working around a restriction is impossible, the cost of bypassing it is instead a multiplier to effective AP cost. Spend twice as much AP to include another person in your instant three-hour training session, or five times as much to include the starfighter you pilot in your instant journey, etc.

Empowering actions with AP increases their effectiveness linearly with regards to AP spent over baseline cost. That is to say, investing 40 minutes worth of AP into empowering a minor spell you could cast once per minute indefinitely would be expected to amplify its results by a factor of 40. Actions with any degree of empowerment acquire a degree of conceptual ‘effectiveness’, the difference between natural healing and regeneration.

Your Wound-aspect persists past even the most thorough annihilation of your lesser self, but is at least theoretically reliant upon your capacity for action. Theoretically. By spending ten times the normal AP cost, you may take an action as if it were a preexisting contingency- made in advance by some prior iteration of yourself, held suspended since. If you are cursed to always fail, you might continue to act at full effectiveness by deciding all your actions are preparations made by your prior, uncursed self. Death of body might be recovered from by deciding you did some healing ‘in advance’. This is not, in any real sense, a retroactive effect.

=The Progenitor=

Your ‘bloodline’ is linked, through you and through an infinitesimal crack in the walls of reality, to a better realm. Each day, three droplets of dark quintessence leak inside, and become available for your use. You may imbibe this quintessence to acquire supernatural abilities and to augment those same abilities. Any ability acquired in this manner is shared amongst every member of your bloodline at full strength, undiminished should it be spread out amongst even uncountably infinite numbers of bearers.

Any creature born from or sired by a member of your bloodline becomes part of it, bound by blood. You may freely banish these bloodbound from your line, stripping from them all of its power. This may be performed automatically, and even in response to complex conditions, such as the decision to betray your goals.

You, personally, may induct any willing creature into your bloodline at no cost. This, again, may function automatically, and in complex ways: you might visit a galaxy populated by quintillions of people and immediately induct all among them who are righteous and noble. These oathbound may not then be banished from your line by any means; they will retain its power forever.

The powers obtained from quintessence may alter and improve the bearer, enhance the manner in which they act upon the world, bestow specific abilities, and generate undirected phenomena of grand scale. These categories might be usefully named Attribute, Ability, Panoply, and Domain. Using a particular category to acquire a particular advantage is more a matter of efficiency than necessity. Ten droplets invested in Attribute affords physical might twice that of a realistic peak human. Ninety invested into Ability might unlock some minor magic system, such as a kind of potion making. Sixteen in Panoply could grant the power to throw fireballs comparable to modern grenades; the same into Domain could allow full-scale hurricanes to be called down upon one’s location.

Used crudely, the power of the Progenitor offers a quadratic progression curve. Clever synergies between powers, especially the purchase of unrealized potential in addition to immediate strength, may yield something approaching exponential. Fully harnessing your bloodline, there are multiple potential routes to hyper-exponential growth of personal power.

As long as your bloodline exists, you have an easy route back into reality. At any time, you may choose to incarnate yourself within any member of your bloodline. They awaken to the fact that they were you all along, that any semblance of independence was merely a lie put up by the world. You are restored to the peak of your power, and regain the full and unblemished truth of your identity. Technically speaking, there is no strict limit to the number of incarnations that may exist simultaneously.

=The Nexus=

You are the core of a unique form of magic. This magic system is tautologically capable of generating any effect that has been generated with this magic system. This includes effects generated by indirect, incomplete, or grossly inefficient means.

The substance of your magic, its basic building block and fuel, is abstract potentials. Any thing containing some non-zero quantity of your magic’s potentials serves as an avenue for the passive, free harvest of more potentials. (This harvest does not actually deplete whatever you gather potentials from, only incidentally interfering with precognitive effects.) Rates of collection scale directly with the amount of potentials contained within the thing, allowing for exponential growth up to the limits of its magic capacity. Potentials are generally a fungible resource, but do vary in kind- energy potentials, power potentials, etc. The kinds of potentials harvested from any given thing relate to the kinds of ‘expenditure’ it could enact; basic energy potentials are thus the most common by far.

Your magic responds eagerly to your will and desires with all of its ability. (The idea it could ever be used against you is laughably absurd.) Raw potentials can naturally spend themselves to fuel compatible processes; this is an extremely effective method of expanding the magic system’s functionality. Lending a bit of energy to a gust of wind could grant aerokinesis suitable for generating flesh-stripping wind blades within minutes of acquiring Nexus. Even something as grandiose as the charms of a Solar Exalted may become replicable, if only you can convince said Solar to draw upon your essence potentials.

Your magic improves, permanently and globally, as it is used and produced. When it is harnessed to generate an effect, it becomes more efficient at producing said effect. Anything saturated with potentials becomes a better storage medium. This is in most cases not a matter of specific objects- any person full of potentials increases the capacity of all persons, and as such for any other kind of thing. The growth itself is an unbounded linear increase in output per unit of input, and can be accelerated without limit. A civilization of ten billion mages improves your magic at least a thousand times as rapidly as one of ten million.

Where your magic can replicate the behaviour of a thing with only the potentials produced by said thing- i.e., duplicating the explosive properties of gunpowder with only the magic naturally produced by that gunpowder- it can subsume those behaviours. The subsumed behaviours are no longer natural functions of the contaminated object. They are then magical effects, under your control no less absolutely than any of your magic’s other behaviours. You might tell gunpowder not to explode, or with more thorough subsumption, tell it not to exist. Someday, you might end universes as easily as one would terminate a program.

The method by which Nexus would grant you immortality should be obvious.

=Ascendant=

A time traveler, however limited, can be described as one step beyond someone who merely experiences time. You are at least two full steps beyond that.

Your most basic abilities are the power to reset and rewind. When you first acquire the power of the Ascendant, the status of reality is recorded. At will, you may revert the multiverse, and every point along all its timelines, to this recorded state. Your ability to rewind is similarly straightforward and supremely effective. There is no limit to the amount of times you can reset or rewind, no price to be paid, no external threat that can escape the effect.

Ascendant, your consciousness exists partially outside of time. No effect can prevent you from taking purely mental action, and you may change your perceived timerate at will. Neither resetting nor rewinding breaks your continuity of consciousness, and your mind and memories do not decay. Even if you rewind reality to a point where you do not exist, your self will endure undiminished in the outside. Most kinds of psychological assault are ineffective against a mind like yours.

Time is no longer the primary constraint on your growth and progression. With the power to save and load, you may undergo arbitrarily great degrees of development in arbitrarily tiny amounts of realtime. Almost anything you could properly conceptualize may be recorded and reinstantiated, even across resets. Both saving and loading incur a price. ‘Timelessness’ is generated as you reset and rewind, in proportion to the magnitude of temporal variance lost to your power. The amount of Timelessness required to save or load a thing scales directly with its significance. Saves are permanent, but resetting or rewinding away something you have loaded does refund its price.

=The Player=

You gain the benefits of a modified Gamer system. Killing any creature grants you xp in accordance with its power. Gathering sufficient xp- ten times as much for each subsequent level- allows you to level up, awarding you one stat point, one skill point, and a compounding fivefold multiplier to the effectiveness of those points. Stats and skills augmented with points see a number of benefits. Beyond the obvious additive enhancement, they receive an increasing degree of supernatural effectiveness and convenience as well as boosted growth rates and developmental potential. There are no strictly defined areas you can or cannot invest stat or skill points; a stat point could be added to Strength as easily as Body or Arms, but broader subjects see their benefits outright lessened in addition to being spread thin. Skill points, in particular, can provide significant amounts of knowledge outright, or unlock abilities no amount of training should be able to provide. One skill point, used well, could grant you access to an entire magic system- or create one from whole cloth.

The system integrates and refines all lesser abilities. Your physique is translated into a number of level-boosted stats, your competencies into level-boosted skills, any training you undergo into ‘free’ stat and skill points. Various reserves of energy, mana and stamina and yet stranger, are distilled into a single pool of universally applicable Energy. Even the mundane medical benefits of bandages or caffeine are converted into direct healing or temporary stat boosts. This never diminishes what is converted, and will usually improve it by a significant margin. At level five, piloting a small mechsuit capable of lifting one ton, you could lift hundreds.

You are the Player, at least as much as you are the character. Whatever happens to your character(s), this game cannot really harm you save for in a limited emotional sense. Accessing the character panel, you may swap between, create, and delete your characters at will; your character(s) need not make any motions nor utter any command phrases for you to access your various menus. Though the multitasking required is not trivial, you can even control multiple characters at once if necessary. New characters are designed with a number of build points limited per-character, to establish backstory, appearance, and initial abilities, and are inserted into the world upon creation. ‘You Are’ and ‘You Have’ powers are part of you, the Player, rather than part of your characters.

You have access to an endless list of quests and achievements. These are constantly created in response to your current circumstances and dismissed as they become invalid. In addition to bonus xp and system-created loot, these can provide player-level benefits: extra stat, skill, or build points for all your characters, soulbound treasures, potentially even rare upgrades to the system itself. The difficulty of questing scales only imperfectly with your own level of ability. A week of the worst, most inefficient questing would see you earn at least six stat points, and it can only get faster and easier from there.

=Beastly=

You become something that logically extends from lichhood. Your body is converted into an immaculate phylactery. With a simple crafting action, you may convert the remains of almost any once-animate thing- corpse, broken robot, disenchanted intelligent sword, crashed starship, etc.- into a new phylactery, anchor and defensive shell and projector alike for your mind and spirit. So long as even one of your phylacteries remains intact, you are immune against assault upon any aspect of yourself less shallow and inessential than physical form. Every second, a pulse thrums out through all your phylacteries, restoring every one from even the most thorough annihilation.

Your phylacteries act as a source of ‘shadowflesh’, the quantity and nature of which is determined by the materials used in the specific phylactery’s construction. Shadowflesh naturally exists as formless darkness, but can take shape at your command, instantly assuming the substance and structure of anything its nature encompasses. A phylactery made from the corpse of an ordinary human soldier could produce a good kilogram of shadowflesh per second, which could shape itself into immaculate copies of the same soldier and their kit, or specific pieces of their equipment, or a skinless humanoid ghoul, etc.

When shaping your shadowflesh, you are not limited to wholesale copies of the original subject. Emaciated corpse becomes phylactery generates shadowflesh that most naturally takes the form of frail, emaciated limbs, but your freedom to arrange these constituent materials is only limited by your own mental faculties. Layering bone atop bone for a larger, denser, sturdier frame is trivial, combining multiple strains of shadowflesh into hybrid forms is simple, using flesh derived from obsolete warmachines to create bleeding-edge technological marvels is well within your reach. Brains and similar formed from shadowflesh may be used to seamlessly expand your own memory, mental speed, and multitasking ability without discomfort or constraint.

Shadowflesh is an extension of your body, under your complete control regardless of distance or seperation. It is only ‘false’ in that it is and remains component to your body, and in that it retains the power to gradually revert to unshaped shadow. Actually destroying shaped shadowflesh is fairly difficult. Once it has shape, shadowflesh requires no less fuel or sustenance than the structure it imitates. Shadowflesh’s capacity to revert to unshaped substance and assume new shape largely mitigates this problem. Depleted blood can reform into fresh and hearty ichor, discharged batteries into fully-charged cells. Unless throwing away mass for ammo or wasting energy profligately, neither fresh shadowflesh nor normal sustenance will be required.

With experience, more can be integrated into a phylactery than the physical. Mind, if its container remains somewhat intact. Spirit, if it has yet to fully depart. All these inclusions character the phylactery’s output, and may be expressed through it. Recreate the flesh of a defeated mage, and graft it into your forms to empower them with wizardry. In time, some semblance of even wholly external abilities may be preserved into your newest strains of shadowflesh.

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You Have:

The benefits in this section represent tools. Not actual physical implements, but all the same: solutions aimed at specific problems.

Options here cost 1 Silver.

Wealth
When you desire a specific good, you may manifest a golden weight on a nearby unoccupied surface. This weight’s weight, in pounds, is equal to the cost, in inflation-adjusted 1999 british pounds, of having the desired good be purchased and delivered to your current location. If the weight is successfully lifted at least three feet above its original location, the desired good appears on a nearby unoccupied surface and the weight vanishes. If the weight is at any point not held stably, it immediately vanishes. The weight does not function in environments without a consistent gravity or pseudogravity of at least 0.9 g.

Understanding
Upon perceiving any manner of signal, you immediately receive knowledge of both its meaning and the intentions behin it. Not only will you know if you are being lied to, you will know if you are being manipulated by someone speaking only the truth, and to what ends. This does not require clear perception of the signal (you may use this ability to read even if you are mostly blind), and nor does it require a mind capable of processing the signal. The knowledge this ability provides will never cause you harm, even if it really should. At will, you may attach this ability to any signal you produce, allowing it to be understood in the same way by others.

Change
With a touch, you may cause a willing or helpless target to be encased within a large spherical shell. The shell is several thousand times as durable as its occupant, but if it is broken, the target is released unchanged as if no time had passed. Otherwise, the shell opens on its own after five days, the occupant altered in accordance with their wishes. This can produce almost arbitrary cosmetic and sexual changes, but only limited ‘practical’ benefits. Any bodily injury or affliction can be restored perfectly, including aging, genetic flaws, and stat loss; outright augmentation is incapable of anything beyond the equivalent of one year’s diligent physical conditioning.

Pockets
You have an inventory to which you may send any object in your grasp (or from which you may recall stored objects) with a simple mental command. Your inventory has no maximum capacity, being unbound by space, and objects held within do not experience time. Conscious beings may resist being sent to your inventory without trouble, but otherwise you may store away anything you could lift. You will never have trouble sorting through your inventory, either keeping track of the contents or locating specific items. With a minor spiritual effort, you may grant any container a sub-inventory, capable of storing a quantity of stuff proportionate to its abstract ‘usefulness as a container’.

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You Can:

Complications here grant 1 Cobalt.

Travel
You discover, activate, and take command of an ancient device of unknowable origin. This device allows for safe, stealthy, and extremely far-reaching multiversal travel; it can take you from one wholly independent infinite multiverse to another, and conceal your intrusion from even the local omnipotents. Locating a specific reality is beyond it, as is making more than a handful of multiversal transitions per day.

Now active, the device is obviously flawed- either incomplete or severely damaged. Its engine contains something utterly inimical to reality, to existence; you are safe from it, but the world is not. After three cumulative years in the same cluster of worlds, the local multiverse will begin to collapse away into nothing. The first sign of collapse is the loss of growth, as populations can no longer expand, at best holding steady. Unless you leave, other concepts follow.

The machine can be repaired and/or completed, given work by someone with the right set of abilities. If you lack those abilities, and cannot find anyone else to do the job, the device will point you to suitable artifacts in any world you visit. All of its parameters may be improved; in time, its destructive influence may be contained completely.

Fight
Over time, new rooms will appear randomly in the doorways of any world you have visited. This is rare on an individual basis, but common on the whole, occuring an average of once per five years for each doorway. These additions represent more doorways, and so the total number of rooms rises exponentially without limit. New rooms are patterned off of their neighbours- an extra set of cubicles in an office building, another kitchen on the other side of your house, etc. Beyond the imperfection and gradual mutation inherent to this mindless iterative copying, every new chamber will be slightly more dangerous than its surroundings.

These rooms exist outside of normal space, each slightly ‘deeper’ than its predecessor. They branch off outwards, but never loop back on themselves, and can be cast adrift by ruining the doorways that keep them anchored. Blessedly, the deeper you move into this nullspace, the more difficult it becomes for anything like a person to be created. Even at the most shallow layer, the potential millions of direct copies of humans generated each day will utterly lack consciousness.

Generated rooms contain objects patterned off the contents of their neighbours. Thus, they can be looted. In the most mundane sense, how much could you get from selling off the contents of a spontaneously-generated second kitchen? As rooms increase in danger, there is a roughly proportionate increase in ‘potency’. The mindless copying that forms them cannot create clever traps or advanced technologies, so instead you see hazards empowered supernaturally. And an imperfect replica of a hazard may well be not only safe but useful.

Share
Seven imperfect clones of yourself appear. They possess all your memories as of their creation, but are distorted in personality. Together, they represent you at your cruelest, your kindest, your most lustful, your most gluttonous, your laziest, your proudest, and your most paranoid. Crucially, they are no more cruel, or kind, or so on than you yourself may sometimes, however briefly, become. However, they can never escape or diminish their particular ‘mood’.

Each clone has power equivalent to one third your own, growing and diminishing as you do. This is not to say they have your abilities at one third intensity. Each clone has its own distinct powerset, largely unrelated to yours, and it would take at least three working together to match you. You have no special control over your clones, but they have no special drive to hurt you. They may be killed, permanently, at least as easily as you yourself could be.

Incidentally, you may lend out portions of your power to others, diminishing yourself by equal margin. Energy, stats, abilities, etc., in whole or in infinitesimal fractions. What has been lent cannot be kept against your will, and any growth made by what you lend away is no less yours. ‘You Have’ powers are not diminished by lending; you could share Change with everyone.

Grow
You are isekaied to a xianxia world on the brink of catastrophe. A demonic cultivator has risen to the peak of power, such that no being remains in this world that could ever defeat them. They are in the process of consuming the world itself to break through to the next stage. Already, one of the elements has been subsumed: all the metal in the world is but an extension of this monster. Unless you interfere, in fifteen years time all remaining life will dissolve into silver centipedes. Ten years after that, they would break free into the wider multiverse, arriving first at your own world of origin.

This particular xianxia world is typically vast but very much finite. It is made up of dozens of layers stacked vertically, each wealthier than the last. With a habitable zone in each layer some ten thousand miles across, even the relatively primitive local civilization represents hundreds of billions of people. There are societies vast enough to get lost in, there are entire armies of mighty cultivators that you might recruit to your cause.

The cultivation system of this world is rooted in force of personality, in charisma and willpower. A cultivators basic parameters converge towards one megastat, strength and speed and intelligence and more multiplied together. A similar process magnifies upon skill as it is cultivated into dao. Your enemy- and they very much are your enemy, however you might feel about it- has refined themselves down to two aspects and one dao. They are APOCALYPSE SUN // SILVER CITY // LORD CENTIPEDES. The dao they wield is third-order, equivalent in breadth and conceptual potency to one of the five elements, and they possess raw power sufficient to liquefy mountains or crack continental plates.