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Green0Photon

Can you explain what's going on with Madra being pure, dense, deeper, etc.? What does Madra quality/density mean? For example, low gold Yerin was better than random Sandvipers (besides skill), or the parasite ring did *something* to improve Lindon's quality. I don't understand what that is. Just a short off hand explanation is fine, we can get something deeper later, not on voice chat.

Will Wight

So the idea of density is really what you are asking about. So really, your madra is kind of like water but you can make it have the consistency of honey, for instance. So, there's purity, there's how dense and potent it is. So, how much one drop...using the liquid analogy, how strongly flavored it is. So what that does, is a little bit of madra goes a longer way than somebody else's a lot of madra. So that's sort of the idea. I kind of mixed answers there. I did both the texture and the effect. But, basically what it's talking about is when you convert aura to madra its kind of loose, it's not very potent, and then you concentrate it. And so, the density of madra has to with the concentration; how concentrated it is.

mido_sama

In soulsmith we saw Eithan giving Lindon madraso why not give the ability to Lindon ... like what if Eithan saw Dross and thought Lindon could handle the family ability and poor madra into him and to push his pure core to true god as well. Man that'd make Dross into BIG BROTHER

mido_sama

Will may have give that answer before skysworn ... because both Jai Chen and the underload gained the ability after absorbing Eithan's madra.

Will Wight

Just noticed this, so I'm popping in: Jai Chen and Jai Daishou got the ability temporarily by draining power from Eithan. They didn't gain it permanently. It's not their bloodline power now.

DruidDeadnettle

How temporary are we talking? Would it wear off in hours? Days? Years? I got the impression that it had become a permanent part of her but that she had to actively expend Madra to make it work.

Will Wight

Her madra has permanently changed, but her bloodline hasn’t. And at the point where Jai Chen leaves, she still hasn’t stabilized her madra yet, so it hasn’t settled into its final composition.

This isn’t even its final form, if you will.

Hjorth

Would it be possible for a sacred beast to have pure madra? And if so, can it happen naturally, or does someone have to purposefully nurture a sacred beast to have pure madra?

Will Wight

It is not possible for a sacred beast to have pure madra. Pure madra is uniquely produced by humans (and named by humans, otherwise it would be called “human madra”).

Questioner

It has been confirmed by Will that Lindon does not need his pure core to offset the blackflame madra degeneration of his madra channels, as Lil'Blue can heal the damage caused

Will Wight

I may have said this, but it’s not entirely accurate/complete. With Little Blue’s help, Lindon could replace his pure Path with another random Path and not be crippled from damage to his madra channels. However, he would have to play around Blackflame damage by intentionally limiting the amount he used Blackflame. Basically, he’d use his other Path as the default and Blackflame as backup.

Whereas with pure madra, since it causes almost no strain to the madra channels and even somewhat helps cleanse impurities, he can lean on Blackflame harder.

Point is, he could learn another Path if he wanted, he’d just have to be intentional about managing his madra.

Questioner

Pure Madra as a building material in the emperor's palace?

Will Wight

Pure madra is an unreliable building material. It breaks easily, and it's so impressionable that placing it next to any other Forged madra will cause the two types to mix, changing both of their properties. However, it is used decoratively. Sometimes it is used to substitute for stained glass; you Forge a pane of pure madra and then stain it in spots with madra of different colors and properties. The other madra spreads like paint through the glass, creating a moving, swirling, blending canvas of living power. You just have to be careful about how long you let it sit and how much power you put into it, or it might randomly create a powerful effect.

TransEmo

What is the madra type of the Wei testing bowl?

Will Wight

Pure. It's pure madra scripted to behave in a certain way. But, it's really just scripted to enhance the normal reactions that pure madra would have to their spirits. 

Questioner 2

Where would they get that much pure madra?

Will Wight

Kids.

Questioner

If humans are born with pure cores, what are sacred beasts born with?

Will Wight

If you're born a sacred beast, you are born with whatever madra your species has. You just have that naturally. So you're always born with aspected madra. So it depends on what you are. If you're not born a sacred beast, if you're just born a regular animal, you absorb ambient aura over time and slowly develop aspected madra. But since of course there is no pure aura, you can never develop pure madra.

RMvice

Does Lindon need to cycle aura/madra specifically for dross or can dross live off of pure madra (follow up Q:So dross can be sustained off if blackflame madra?)

Will Wight

Dross can live off his pure madra.. In fact, Dross lives off his connection to Lindon, so his madra wouldn't even need to be pure. Dross is tied to Lindon's spirit now. As long as Lindon is healthy, so is Dross.

GL

Does Lindon create his own weapon with the soulsmith things he took from pyramid? Cause so far he hasn't used a weapon beyond a spear.Does being a soulsmith require a specific talent in madra uses? 

Will Wight

1.) Read and find out!

2.) Essentially yes. We touch on this in Blackflame a little bit, but you have to have madra that's compatible with a lot of other aspects.

For instance, the Fishers make good Soulsmiths because they have madra that mimics gravity. So it binds two things together. Not a whole lot conflicts with that.

But if you were a Sandviper Soulsmith, every construct you made would be poisonous or acidic, so it would either hurt the person holding it, fall apart, or neutralize the madra you tried to use to build it.

Daniel

Huh so the greatest soul smith would theoretically have to have pure madra because that would conflict with nothing. Unless their is a path of anti madra somewhere

Will Wight

Not necessarily pure, just widely compatible.

Questioner

Is Ozriel's madra still pure?

Will Wight

No. No, its not pure madra anymore. Although, right now he could pretty much mimic any Cradle power system he wanted. He could kind of do the effects of whatever he wanted, but its not still pure, no.

Questioner

Would it absorb madra launched at it? A forged pane of pure madra would be very cool for Lindon to learn how to do if it could be used as a defense.

Will Wight

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Technically it would intercept any madra thrown at it, but most of the time it would just shatter. Sometimes it would actually make the technique MORE powerful for having passed through and absorbed the pure madra.There could be ways to fashion it into a defense, but they're almost all hugely impractical. It would be much easier to just have a regular wall and carve a script into it.

Questioner

Pure madra has multiple characteristics that can be selectively emphasized. Do other madra types have multiple characteristics as well? It seems like shadow madra and dream madra do.

Will Wight

Yeah.  Yes, so, one of the things I've called them in my notes, and I think maybe I've referenced them in the books a couple of times, is I call them lesser aspects.  So what they really are, is while they are not types of aura on their own, it is a characteristic that a type of madra can be programmed or cultivated to possess.  So, the Fisher path, like Fisher Gesha, is really just force madra; it's force madra that pulls and binds together.  So connection madra is not a thing, it's not a major aspect, but it is something that can be activated in force aura.  So it's sort of similar to how sword aura is really just an offshoot of force aura, and cloud aura is an interaction of wind and water aura in a unique pattern that appears in a cloud.  And as you learn to sense that particular pattern and cultivate it in your spirit, train your spiritual perception, you can sense that more clearly and it feels like one complete aspect to you, even though technically it isn't.  So yeah.  There's lots of... All madra aspects have this.

Mike

I would like to know about the different types of madras. Do they have weight or density or other physical characteristics other than color? Are sacred artists taking in pure madras and converting it or do they need a source of that type nearby. For example, can you use sword madra if no weapons are nearby? And does sword madra work with blunt weapons or piercing weapons?

Will Wight

>Different physical characteristicsYes, and this will be explored in Blackflame.

>Can you use sword madra if no weapons are nearby?

I know it can get confusing, but this is the distinction between aura and madra. Madra is YOUR power, which you have slowly stolen from the world by cycling aura into your soul. Vital aura is the power of the world around you.

A Ruler technique controls aura to make a change in the natural world.

So, could you use sword madra if no sword are nearby? Yes. Could you use a Ruler technique without a sword? No. If a sword is sitting on a table, Yerin can manipulate the aura to cut the table in half without the sword moving at all. If there's no sword on that table, she needs to blast her madra at the table in order to cut it.

...I'll explore it in more detail in Blackflame.

TheLostReader

What would be an effective death madra path?

Will Wight

The weirdest thing about death madra is that it's kind of like blackflame madra in that it's not really healthy to interact with. Like pure destruction madra, which everybody of course thinks is gonna be the best cause it sounds awesome, it doesn't do well on it's own, so it usually needs like a physical medium. So therefore you would see a lot of destruction fire, destruction wind, death wind, death fire something. Something that has a physical form. Cause otherwise it's kind of like you're projecting radiation at your enemy, and they're just like waiting until they die. So an example of an effective death madra path would be off the top of my head like a death sword path so that you could really focus it and it would be very focused and then you could like, try and cut off somebodies life with a slice. Now, would that be necessarily any more effective than actually just straight up sword madra? Not necessarily, because one of the things that we're gonna get into, I mentioned this mechanic a little bit earlier, but everybody's got life madra in them, everybody's got life force in them, they all generate cause you're alive. So you generate life force, so you've got kind of a life line, so you've got a life line. So therefore death madra has to sever or erode away that life line in order to kill someone. So it's not as completely overpowered as it seems.

Questioner

How did Ozriel develop two different madra types, one destruction, one pure?

Will Wight

He reset. So, when he reset his new body and came back to Cradle his madra type once again started as pure, like everyone does. Therefore, he this time he decided to keep it there because he didn't want to do destruction again. He was like 'alright, this is another aspect that is compatible with my path, but its not destruction because I don't like that guy.'

Azqa

I think you'd stopped reading comments by the time I posted this one on a different blog post, so I'll copy it below since it seems relevant to me.

UnsouledCopperIronJadeLowgoldHighgoldTruegoldUnderlord

Lindon finds badges of other materials - "The first row contained a badge each of copper, iron, jade, and gold. That much he expected. But the second row moved from halfsilver to goldsteel to materials he couldn't identify. One of them was a deep, fiery red, and the other a blue so rich it was like a Forged slice of the sky."

Does the description of the power scale change at Underlord, or is that one term an aberration? Will we see people at Halfsilver / Goldsteel level, or is Underlord [now the ___Lord range of levels] simply represented by one of those?

Heck, I was wondering if Underlord was more a political title than truly an advancement-in-the-sacred-arts label.

If Halfsilver is used for the ___Lord stage, then what about "Silverlord"?

Will Wight

The materials motif changes after Gold, reflecting the fact that improving the quality of your madra alone is not how you advance. You could technically get all the way to Truegold just by cycling and refining your madra, it would just take forever.

I actually like Silverlord a lot, because it sounds cool. It seems kind of random in sequence, though: Underlord, Silverlord, Overlord.

Chris646

You’ve said that Sha Miara counters/controls other people’s skills. Would this work as well with pure madra or could someone sufficiently powerful just disperse everything she does?

Will Wight

Questioner

When Ziel showed Lindon the Tablet on pure madra in Ghostwater after lecturing him, was that always his intention, or was that only after Lindon explained he was advancing to protect his home from a great disaster?

Will Wight

I don't understand that question exactly.  When Ziel showed Lindon the table on pure madra in Ghostwater, was that always his intention?  I don't understand it.  I think the question means did Ziel intend to help Lindon, or was he persuaded to help Lindon when he heard that Lindon had a good cause.  And the answer is, he was persuaded by Lindon, finding out that he, starting to know Lindon as a person a little bit, and then when he did, he was like all right, I'll help you.  He did not intend to help at the beginning.  So I hope that answers your question.

Questioner

Many paths seem that all they need to do is hit somebody with one hit and the person dies, ex. Heavens Glory. It seemed like if somebody was hit, they die. What keeps underlords, sages, from being just one shot K.O. by a Jade or lowgold?

Will Wight

Within your body, your madra holds sway. This is why non-pure madra can't be effectively used in an Empty Palm style technique, because you can't just "inject" your madra into someone and expect it to do anything. It's also why fire Paths don't just set the air in their opponent's lungs on fire and walk away.The reason why a Heaven's Glory Jade can't just gun down an Underlord is an expansion of this principle. If your madra is sufficiently more powerful than your opponent's, it becomes hard for their Striker techniques to even hurt your skin. Often, the madra is simply dispersed when it touches you. The same is true for Forged madra--it can be dispersed by the natural madra of a more-advanced opponent.Ruler techniques will work equally on anyone, so they're usually what you use if you have to fight a more advanced opponent. However, there are some drawbacks.First of all, not every Path has a battle-ready Ruler technique. Second, Ruler techniques often take a long time to implement; you have to gather up compatible aura in the area and then activate it in a specific manner.It's also expected that an Underlord will have more powerful Ruler techniques than a Truegold, or will sense what is happening and dodge or disrupt it.As for Enforcer techniques, they of course work fine against higher-level opponents. But usually, someone more advanced than you will also get better results out of their Enforcer techniques. ml

Ira

How did they make it to the island on the ship without crashing.

Will Wight

When they were making it to the island on the ship-I assume you're referring to the chapter one of Underlord-they made it to the island on the ship. They had enough fuel and cloud aura and cloud madra to make it there no problem. And then they were making it back and none of them had any cloud aura, which Renfei did. So they didn't have a reserve of cloud scales or anything, she just powered it herself. So therefore, they're flying black without Renfei, they only have pure madra, blackflame madra, sword madra, and shadow madra on board. And none of that powers [the ship? buckshit?]. There you go.