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Questioner

More meta, but which Path or Iron Body would you choose?

Will Wight

As for which Path I'd choose, that's an interesting question. I initially thought I would go with the Path of the Cloud Hammer, because it is a force-based Path with fairly easy aura to cultivate and many broad applications. Plus, they can run on air.However, since then I've realized I'm lazy, and I would prefer a Path that required me to move less. There are summoner-style Paths that involve manipulating construct puppets, and I'd probably choose one of them.

Questioner

I find it more interesting to delve into what Suriel and the Abidan court actually is... are they "gods" or "architects" ???Will we ever know? 

Will Wight

They're like rulers and guardians of an interdimensional system that's sort of like a government, designed to keep the Iterations under their control safe, separated, and as free from outside intervention as possible.

Avinash

Been waiting for a new post to ask somethings

So finding out abidan archives was an info overload and I felt kinda like what dross must have felt on trying to integrate the Aurelius library. So I have a few questions/confusion.

1. Regarding Monarchs Will said that there are 8 active monarchs in cradle and at the end of underlord 7 live ones are mentioned Akura malice Seshethkunaaz, (dragon one) Sha miara Northstrider 8 man empire , counted as one, Emriss silent born ,The monarch remnant, Reigan shen , who apparently killed a monarch recently (possibly the Aurelius )

Now I am not counting the Aurelius monarch as he's been dead for a few years (~6) and Will said active monarchs.So the question is is there an unknown/hidden monarch?

Am I missing someone's name or is eithan the aurelius monarch and is hiding/repowered?

2. Of Markuth

I believed he was abidan level but he was confirmed to be sage at most, so I can get how he can travel off world maybe using portals or something like a Stargate but looking to fight the 4 dreadgods together or even one at a time when even monarchs cannot handle them alone seems unbelievable.Remember how malice was on the verge of retreating after 3 days and the blood Phoenix was still good to go but it retreated (maybe the influence of makael judge 001 ) wore off.

3. A few random musing

i. Who is judge 007 cause the reaper is 008.

ii. Is a ward key like a battery or an amplifier

iii.Do u have to die and be reborn(leaving ur remanent behind) to ascend/touch the way , this would explain the death of sage of endless sword.

Will Wight

This is a lot of questions, and these blog comments aren't a great medium for an in-depth discussion, but I'll do what I can.

1.) There are eight Monarch factions. Currently seven living/active Monarchs.

2.) He was an Archlord (or similar level) when he ascended from Cradle, but he has advanced beyond that in a different magic system after leaving. When he came back, he believed himself to be more powerful than anyone in the Iteration. Maybe he was, who knows? Maybe he was just prideful and Northstrider would have beaten the crap out of him. But he was definitely not more powerful than Suriel.

3a.) Zakariel is Judge Zero-zero-seven.

3b.) No, it's like a passkey that lets you walk in and out unharmed.

3c.) Maybe! That would be a spoiler.

Reddan

(1) So the Ghosts manage fragments of worlds that died naturally, while the Reaper (Reapers, plural?) is called in when a world gets corrupted? Before Ozriel became the Reaper, were the Ghosts busy dealing with corrupted fragments too?

(2) Is there any overlap/connection between the Spider’s intelligence gathering and the Hound’s investigation of Fate?

(3) Does Suriel’s Presence draw information from the intelligence network of the Spiders, or is it capable of detecting all of it on its own?

(4) In your original post you said, “Any universe that the Abidan recognize as capable of sustaining human existence and living out a complete life-cycle.” Are there places that aren’t recognized by the Abidan (but are still capable of sustaining humans)? Are there any places that are excluded out of spite or other bad feelings among the Abidan?

Minor theory time:the Wolves are the combat arm of the Abidan (none of the divisions discussed so far seem well suited)the Phoenixes (Phoenices? Phoenies? Does anyone know the correct plural of Phoenix?) are the healers and fixers of problems, in line with what we’ve seen Suriel do so far.

Will Wight

1.) Yes they were! They actually deal with corruption and chaos more than most Abidan ever have to, as their job takes them far from the Way.

2.) Yes there is, but the Spiders kind of work with everyone.

3.) Suriel's Presence is capable of drawing and processing information on its own, but it is also (usually) connected to the Spiders' network. Right now it's disconnected, with results that I hope to show in Blackflame (I might end up having to cut the scene, but I hope not.)

4.) There are pseudo-Iterations (and there should probably be a name for that status) where fragments combined but not fully. In that case, they wouldn't be a full universe, or the fragments would have combined in such a way that the universe will be unable to support life.

--Phoenixes. Also, in my head but nowhere else, Phoenii.

Questioner

When it is said that Northstrider drains a dragon of their latent authority, is that just authority associated with his dragon icon, or is it just a neutral flavor of authority?

Will Wight

No, it's dragon icon.  So it's dragon icon authority.  Dragons are multi-iteration representations of strength and power, all sorts of stuuf, elemental control, all that kind of thing.  And therefore, when he drains them, he expands his authority and his connection to the dragon icon.

Daniel

Last question for now. Would a powerful enough remnant be able to operate like a human since it would retain most of its memories? Or asked another way, will we ever just see a remnant wandering around just minding its own business and interacting with other humans like it was still alive?(albite less powerful)

Will Wight

Yes, to both.

Remnants can cultivate, and as they do, they become more intelligent...and also more human.

That's why they crave human madra just as much as they do vital aura.

Sufficiently advanced Remnants are effectively weird-looking people. However, they are DIFFERENT people than the ones who died and left them behind.

We'll get into it.

Sari-Not-Sorry

Is the Unknown Wanderer mentioned in Of Dawn and Darkness Valin? If not, will it be revealed who that is later?

Will Wight

It is!

Sari-Not-Sorry

Is it more of an Easter Egg or does it have potential ramifications of him visiting (and escaping from!) that iteration?

Will Wight

It's an Easter Egg, but it did still canonically happen.

TheWanderingBeard

Does the Arelius bloodline power become obsolete after monarch?

Or will Eithan be able to see/hear even further than other monarchs if/when he makes it that far?

Will Wight

Spiritual perception and the Arelius bloodline power work differently. Spiritual perception is able to feel spirits, madra, and aura; basically spiritual powers. The Arelius bloodline power extends your physical senses.

Questioner

What's another absurdly weak or isolated place on Cradle and what would their Lindon look like?

Will Wight

There's an underwater, sealed-off city at the bottom of the Trackless Sea that's surrounded by much more prosperous civilizations of aquatic sacred beasts.

The human population inside this city has developed mostly independently, just like Sacred Valley. Their Lindon would be anyone who, for whatever reason, couldn't master water aura and the Ruler techniques required to go outside the city.

That person would be like someone in our universe who can't use a car...not just someone who can't drive, but someone who is unable to get inside an automobile.

P_Tigras

According to the second sentence of Underlord, Sector 99 like Sector 100 has been abandoned:

Pariana was the last Abidan stationed in this nameless world. Sectors Ninety-Nine and One Hundred had been completely abandoned, but they still clung to Sector Ninety-Eight.

But....according to the second sentence of the same book's epilogue, while Sector 100 had been lost, Sector 99 was under attack, but not lost, at least not yet:

The Abidan were under attack all across their border worlds, from Sectors Ninety through Ninety-Nine. Sector One Hundred had already been lost, and the others were soon to follow.

So was Sector 99 temporarily retaken without comment by the Abidan during the events of Underlord? Or do we chalk this up as another number-related oops?

Will Wight

My intention there, which I obviously didn’t communicate clearly, was to show that the situation was different between the prologue and the epilogue. In between, people like Suriel are going around to reclaim lost territory and contest Iterations that are up for grabs.

Hjorth

If a sacred artist had a child in another iteration, would that child have a core and be able to use the sacred arts?

Will Wight

Probably not, but there would be some individual exceptions.

Akrasia

Do remnants exist only on cradle? theoretically, if suriel were to die on cradle, would she leave a remnant?

Will Wight

Great question! Puppet Master is indeed correct: practicing the sacred arts is essentially nurturing a Remnant inside you, so when someone from Cradle dies anywhere, they leave a Remnant. Not if someone from outside dies on Cradle.

If Suriel did practice the sacred arts, she would advance absurdly quickly, and her Remnant could potentially eliminate all life on Cradle. But it wouldn't. It would heal people and fix decaying structures and prop up failing governments until it eventually ran out of energy and dissipated into aura.

Questioner

If a person breaks an oath and is strong enough to influence aura around them, are the consequences permanent, or temporarily manifested where the oath is broken?

Will Wight

Technically permanent, but there are ways to mitigate or avoid the consequences over time.

Questioner

Where in your collective works would I go for the spiciest dish? As a corollary, how much trouble am I in for?

Will Wight

Cradle. There's a pepper that grows in chambers beneath active volcanoes, where fire aura is most intense.

Even if you just took the plant out of that area and brought it to the surface, you couldn't go within five hundred yards of the pepper without the heat being so intense it would make you turn back.

This is what those above Archlords use to season their food.

Michael Johnson

What path would you follow if you lived in Iteration 110?

Will

I'm not sure, but probably the Path of the Cloud Hammer. We haven't explored it much, but it's very versatile.

Patrick

Sorry, two more questions: Now that Ozriel is around, what does the wolf division do exactly? Are they actively on the borders of the abidan space attacking threats or are they the one's who dealt with the Elder's before they were bound or ?

Will Wight

We'll get into that much more as the books progress, but the bottom line is that the Wolves fight against rivals of the Abidan. So yes, unbound Elders, yes rival organizations, and yes people who ascend out of their Iterations and don't listen to reason.

Daniel

Is there room in the willverse for an iteration that is populated entirely by nonhuman intelligence? And what about AI? Do they add stability to they way or do they not count cause they are "artificial"?

Will Wight

This is one of the sacrifices I had to make in designing the Willverse, which I still think is a hilarious name: truly artificial intelligence doesn't exist.

In theory, as we understand intelligence in our world right now, we should soon reach a point where artificial intelligence starts increasing exponentially until it changes the world entirely.

Well, in the Willverse, developing civilizations eventually discover a hard limit to artificial intelligence. The same X factor that ties the Way to human consciousness also means that non-human entities can never be truly sentient.

A pure computer in the Willverse is never going to beat a really good Turing Test.

However, you CAN manipulate human consciousness to get around the intelligence barrier.

A Presence is an AI built out of what you might call human souls.

***

I had to make this decision because, if hyper-advanced AI is possible in this multiverse, then *that's* what would be running the Abidan. Not the Judges. Human decisions would be overrated, since an AI could come to the optimized conclusions a billion times faster and without emotional bias.

It also kind of fits the premise of a multiverse where human will is intrinsic to existence. If it's that fundamental and important, then it can't be faked.

Does mean that existential questions about what it means to be human are easier to answer, though.

(You also asked about nonhuman intelligence; bottom line is, non-humans gain intelligence by stealing or copying or otherwise transferring it from humans. So as they become more intelligent, they also become more human.)

Daniel

Huh. Well I'm glad that you wove a reason as to why AI doesn't work in your universe. Makes you greater than most in that regard.

Will Wight

Years ago, I got to a point in this system's development and I realized I was pretending they didn't have AI. Which they would obviously have, as advanced as they are.

So I got down into it and realized that having AI violates the one core tenet of how this multiverse works: humans are important.

"Humans are important" is a key rule in the Willverse, because I wanted room for as many characters as possible. I wanted it to be people from the ground up, so that when you get up to the very apex of the universe (the Judges), you're not dealing with a bland personification of the will of the universe, or a hyper-advanced AI, or an unknowable alien god. You're dealing with a person, who might be incredibly advanced and powerful but is still human deep down.

So instead of humans being one sentient species on one insignificant planet in one insignificant system in one insignificant galaxy in a vast, uncaring universe, we are (in my world) a crucial part of the machinery of reality.

Many stories PRETEND humans are important, but how many of them hard-code it into the way the universe functions? HUH? HUH!?...anyway, since AI makes humans less special and unique, I built a set of rules that precluded AI. Sad to see them go, but I think it makes room for some interesting stories.

Will Wight

For clarification:--When I say AI, I mean advanced sentient AI. Obviously they do have some level of artificial intelligence.

--Here's the REASON I wanted all those humans: characters are what make a story interesting. An AI isn't relatable, and gods don't have flaws.

I wanted to be able to give every significant force in this multiverse a personality, a backstory, and a relatable motivation.

Not to mention cool powers.

...plus, it's kind of neat to have a universe where everyone, even on a cosmic scale, earned their way there.

Questioner

 I’ve always been a bit confused about what makes a talented sacred artist advance faster than their peers? They just refine madra better?

Will Wight

Yeah, that is part of it.  It's really a... How I think of it, is it's more like a madra talent, a talent for madra control, so it's something that just sort of clicks better for you.  So that's one aspect of it.  Another aspect is maybe you understand your techniques better or faster.  So that's one thing.  Another thing is some people seem to have a deeper connection to certain types of aura than others.  so if you are born into a clan or sect or something that only practices one path, your talent is determined by how compatible you are with that particular path.  Which may bot be the thing you are really best at.  But you would never know, because you are only ever exposed to one path.  So that's another factor of talent.

The reason why it is poorly defined in the book is because there is a number of things that people mean when they say talent.  And I found that to be true in a number of the cultivation novels I read.  They would talk about talent, but it would be unclear exactly what talent was.  So either they would have something like talent is effectively your XP gain modifier, or how fast you level up.  Or, they didn't really define talent at all.  Some people were talented because they were good at weapons, other people were talented because they were good at magic, and other people were talented because they learn really fast, and so on and so forth.  And I like that a little better; that felt kind of real.  Some people are more talented at certain things because the logic of it just clicked for them  Other people are more physically or mentally suited to the task.  You know, that kind of thing.  And it felt good to me.  So that's sort of where I've been.

Cash4Golda

Are there aspects of madra aligned with emotions? Like anger or happiness madra, or would those be derivatives of dream madra?

Will Wight

They would be derivatives of dream madra. So one of the things I did not do a great job of conveying at the beginning was how the world works, like what aura is, and I wish I had. So I initially didn't want to limit the types of madra because I didn't want to limit myself, I wanted to be able to use any cool powers I thought of. But what I wished later, because what I've effectively done is I have created an elemental system, so wish I had just names the ten or twelve elements that there are on Cradle, and the ten or twelve common aspects of madra. I didn't because its environmental, so maybe in some places...like again, sword madra is effectively just force madra, but it's so distinct and so concentrated that people can cultivate with it, and make sword paths and so on and so forth.

So I liked the idea of it being mutable like that and being culturally different and different people having different paths based on where they've come from and what they've learned, and they're environment and all that stuff. But what I wish I'd done was have a certain number of static elements, because you can mix and match. I think that's the more compelling part of the magic system, is you go "what would a sword/dream path do? what would a sword/storm path do?", and that's cool to think about, that's cool the picture. Where as when your trying to figure out, is there emotion madra? is there leaf madra? is there metal madra? that becomes confusing, because you're like " so okay, my path is not sword and....eyeballs..." and it's like, "thats...play...well, that's not a thing", but it makes you think it might be, and I didn't give a reason why not. So that's one of the regrets I have about developing the system, was I wish there had just been twelve elements, or whatever. 

Questioner

"What are prisons like in Cradle?

Will Wight

On the Iceflower Continent, far from the Blackflame Empire, there's a buried chamber chiseled into the heart of a halfsilver vein. Madra is dispersed as soon as it touches the air, and thirteen layers of script repel all aura. There are twenty cells, and no more than twenty prisoners. Imprisoned here are those who cannot be executed.

Questioner

What path is the best later on in the stages but sucks early in your advancement?

Will Wight

Path of the Starseed.

Practitioners gather aura of light and heat into a tiny ball of madra that they keep inside their spirits. They can manifest it, like a tiny star in their hands, but any power they use is taken away from the Starseed's growth.

As they advance, they also advance their Starseed, but it's far less useful than any similar Paths (like, say, Heaven's Glory) until they reach Underlord. Once the Starseed is bathed and forged in soulfire, it becomes another level of existence entirely.Now practitioners can use their Starseed to melt through stone, and as it gets larger and more dense, the sacred artists become deadlier. If they continue to advance, their Starseeds can eventually burn cities in seconds after manifesting.

TallerLindon

If Eithan died when he was Underlord and under the veil… would he die for good?

Will Wight

Under no circumstances could anyone with Cradle-limited powers have truly killed him, but they could have “killed” him. Meaning destroying his body and forcibly ejecting him from the Iteration.

The others would have seen him die, and it would have looked real to them. Body, Remnant, everything.

Meanwhile, his real self would reincorporate in the Way around Sector 11 trying to figure out a backup plan. Origin Shroud intact, because mere physical violence can’t do anything to an artifact on that level.

If he had been killed in this way, his current life in Cradle would indeed have ended, and at best he could try to avoid detection and start over with another incarnation.

Which he very much wanted to avoid.

If an attack on a higher level had been used, like hypothetically if someone had used Penance on him or if the Mad King had hit him with an attack, then it would have forcibly bypassed his restrictions and revealed his power.

Which, for him, would be the worst-case scenario. “Dying” is bad, but having his power exposed would bring the Abidan.