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mardy-quief

So I just finished reaper (again) and I noticed something. Lindon's shiny new arm tried to eat Eithan a little at the end - but the question is how? I know it sounds like a dumb question but bare with me. Consider the following

a) His old arm he could eat people because of the binding in it which he got from the transcendent ruins

b) His new arm comes from Subject One a Dreadgod which only have one giga binding (which Shen stole)

c) Lindon isn't a real hunger artist as dross points out.

So my question is how did he use consume on Eithan at the end?

Thanks in advance :)

Will Wight

It’s a basic property of the madra.

Bindings are crystallized techniques you can use just by running madra through them, but Lindon knows how to use the Consume technique. The arm itself has the power for it.

But even without that, hunger’s basic property is that it devours, just like fire madra burns. The Consume technique is a refined way of doing that and bringing it into your spirit effectively, and Lindon’s modified Heart of Twin Stars helps separate and process the energy.

Without a technique, you’re just kind of gulping down everything all at once and you have little control over where anything goes, or whether you get it or the arm does, or whether it gets incorporated into your advancement, etc.

Questioner

Given a person has two cores of the same madra type, such as Lindon did before blackflame, could one not internalise the “forge a scale, cycle to replenish core, take in scale to expand” by just cycling madra out of one core, closing it off and using the madra now cycling the body to expand the 2nd core, rinse and repeat?

Will Wight

No, that only works very early in your career as a sacred artist, when expanding your core is most of what matters. You'd lose more by splitting your core than you'd gain from that technique.

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.

fscada

Are there offensive paths that use traditionally non-offensive madra (Like life madra?)

Will Wight

Yes, definitely. There are a lot of paths like water or life (that do that). Although it isn't presented like this in the books, around the world blood madra is considered a non-offensive path because mostly people use it for therapy and medicine. The only ones who use it for combat are bloodthirsty crazy people. So (in cradle) you don't think typically of blood as a combat path, unless you're reading the books because then you see it all the time.

Questioner

Are remnants capable of having a society? Is there anywhere with particularly intelligent remnants and what do they do on a daily basis

Will Wight

Some of them are intelligent enough and capable of forming a society, yes. However, they're still Remnants: they're bound by the nature of their madra and the impulses that drove them when they were formed. So they don't interact as naturally as people do, no matter how intelligent they are.On a daily basis, they pursue "food," or compatible madra suitable to maintain their form and advance them. Some of the more intelligent Remnants have renewable sources of madra--which means human communities--where they can get their power, either from stealing scales or from making deals with humans.

Questioner

Who was the last person in sacred valley to reach gold before the events of the story?

Will Wight

That's a great question, but unfortunately I can't answer it accurately without getting into why the people in Sacred Valley aren't Gold anymore, which is a spoiler.I will say that one of the founders of the Heaven's Glory School was a sacred beast who achieved Gold; a golden-scaled dragon that breathed light and heat. Legend says he's still sealed beneath Mount Samara, ready to defend the School in its hour of need.

Daniel

We could suggest rediculous path names and you could write wrandom blurbs about them. Like the path of the tap dancing tigersOr the path of puff the dragonOr the path of the zesty zebra Or the path of the soulless spiritOr the path of the drunken master

Will

>Path of the Tap-Dancing TigersA Path whose Enforcer techniques are designed to combine the ferocity of wild beasts with the precise steps of a dance.Its practitioners tend to mumble the name of the Path, to avoid public mockery.>Path of Puff the DragonThe sacred artists on the Path of Puff the Dragon have combined cloud madra with fire madra to build a whole set of skills revolving around clouds of blazing heat and light.>Path of the Zesty ZebraA sad attempt by an ancient crackpot to channel the power of language into a Path, relying on alliteration to evoke the force of the spoken word.Alas, all attempts aroused annoyance alone.>Path of the Soulless SpiritA mental Path focused inward, on controlling the practitioner's thoughts and feelings. Its adherents can endure the most difficult and painful training without complaint, producing unparalleled discipline and control in its disciples.However, sacred artists on this Path tend to wander around with lifeless eyes like zombies. It can be disturbing to the uninitiated.>Path of the Drunken MasterI have to drink before a fight, you hear me? Can't throw a punch until I've emptied a bottle. Hand me that.What? Does the alcohol make my movements harder to read?Uh...sure, let's go with that.

Reality Spasm

We've seen a couple different techniques involving shadow, but what kind of alterations does shadow madra cause in other aspects?

Will Wight

Shadow Madra is difficult to detect. It's kind of subtle, so it's got kind of a veiling effect, so it hides things like you would expect shadow to. And shadow also affects the spirit more than a lot other aspects do. It's kind of insidious, it seeps into you. And so, it's not real great for dealing physical damage, to use a video game term. So, it doesn't really hurt you that much; it's not good for breaking boulders. But, it is pretty good for shredding peoples souls and scripts and whatever.

elliotrdweck

Is it possible for you to sell signed books on the will wight store?

Will Wight

At some point I'm gonna be selling signed books, yeah.

Altonahk

Is there such a thing as Gravity Aura, or is it just Force Aura? If there is: are there gravity paths? If it's force aura: do any force paths cycle it?

Will Wight

I actually had a real difficulty about that! When I initially came up with the Fishers, they were using gravity aura, they were using attractive force aura so it was effectively the power of gravity. That's what they were doing because gravity was a constant power....so I ended up saying no, what they call connection madra or whatever was just directional force madra. So I ended up saying no on that, sometime in development that's what earth power was going to be, was just gravity, kind of like the dresden files where earth magic is gravity magic, but I steered away from that.

Polycore

Hey Will, we were wondering how would Lindon's Iron body stack against Bai Rou's madra? and can you tell how a Highgold Lindon (how he will be in the future when he reaches that stage) would fare against him?

Will Wight

Lindon's Iron body would help against Bai Rou, but not entirely, because Bai Rou's madra has a dream component that would attack the mind. It would be difficult for Lindon to defend himself, so he would have to rely on overwhelming attack.   Which would be possible, thanks to Blackflame, which Bai Rou can't do very much about. Except that Bai Rou is a Truegold in Skysworn armor, so he would be able to defend himself, counter, and beat Lindon with his counterattack.   As for how Lindon will fare at higher advancement, you'll just have to wait for Ghostwater, won't you?

Broshinsky997

If lindon did the Sacred Valley bowl test with the madra thing right now, what would happen?

Will Wight

Whatever he wanted to happen. He could control the madra freely.

acog

So we saw DreadLindon tank a Monarch's blow like it was nothing:

Shadow madra Forged into blades and swept at him, but he weakened them with the Hollow Domain. Then he allowed them to land. They cut his body and his spirit together, but he healed as fast as she damaged him.

Yeah, it was weakened with the Hollow Domain first, but it's still a Monarch's melee-range attack. We've seen that same level of attack obliterate mountains. So clearly Lindon's Iron body is now healing at hyperspeed.

-Varya-

Lindon was also helped here by Malice's own madra and bloodline ability strengthening his healing powers as he was consuming it.

Will Wight

^ This is what I was going to point out.

He can’t tank Monarch hits forever without a source of Monarch-level energy to Consume.

PlaceboJesus

Even with how much he expended healing himself, he did come out ahead in that exchange right?

Like how large an elixer are we talking?

Will Wight

About this big:

\ ___________ /

Questioner

What is the most reviled and infamous person in Cradle History?

Will Wight

One of the most well-known and reviled criminals in the history of the Blackflame Empire was a man named Gan Lo Zin, who operated the most well-known Remnant factory to be taken down and exposed.So-called Remnant factories kidnap children at Copper, then strap them to scripted devices and force-feed them scales. Their madra is cycled by force through scripts and madra devices, which is often inefficient, painful, and leads to long-term spiritual damage.However, this doesn't tend to matter. Because as soon as the children reach Jade, and thus leave stable Remnants of a high enough quality, they are slaughtered. Their Remnants are sealed and captured in boxes, to be categorized and sold to large organizations with a need for great quantities of bindings, dead matter, or Remnants for Lowgold bonding.When Gan Lo Zin was exposed, it caused a public outcry. It's estimated that he was responsible for the deaths of as many as thirty thousand people.However, when captured and questioned by the Skysworn, he maintained that he was far from the only one to operate such a facility. Outside the boundaries of the Empire, and even on other continents, he claimed that many large organizations ran their own Remnant factories.They were, he said, the inevitable price of progress.

Mike

If the world is so large.... does gravity not work the same way in this universe?

Daniel

The planet may be hollow or it may be made of less dense matter or the gravitational constant could be significantly lower in the universe or yeah it could be magic. Though if humans exist it must have some relation to the basic model or they wouldn't be human.

Will Wight

Daniel's right.Part of the answer is "magic," and part of it is how this world developed differently because of magic.

a few moments later....

Two users now argue at length about the subject of the physics of such a large world.... we skip to Will's next comment.

Will Wight

Since it looks like this has become a real discussion, I'll give a real answer!

I made Cradle very big. Why? A few reasons.

First, a lot of wuxia and xianxia stories do it so they can scale up to ridiculous numbers. Where first the character thinks a huge city has ten thousand people, later a huge city has ten BILLION people.

Also, they're so special they're not just one in a million, they're one in a TRILLION! And they go from crossing a thousand miles in a single step to a hundred thousand miles!

So in part, it's an homage to the genre.

In part, it's so that I can set other stories in the same world and they've never even heard of the people, places, or events in Lindon's story.

And inpart it's to illustrate that this isn't Earth. The Iterations are Narnia-style "worlds," not different planets, but since it's a whole new universe each time, they are ALSO different planets.

I wanted a way to show that without putting a second moon in the sky, so "greater surface area and population" it is.

***

As for the mechanics of it: I said "Magic" earlier, but that basically boils down to "This is how vital aura works."

Vital aura is the power of the world that sacred artists harvest and use to strengthen their madra. It's the spirit of the world, basically. It makes what would otherwise be an uninhabitable planet, habitable.

The planet IS less dense than earth, but because of its huge volume, it's more massive. Gravity is much greater. Humans are supported by madra from birth in part because otherwise they wouldn't be able to adapt to the gravity.

You have other problems too: does this less-dense core spin fast enough to create a magnetosphere? Wouldn't continents bigger than Earth's just be massive deserts everywhere except immediately along the coast? Wouldn't the surface of such a planet be wracked by storms?

Vital aura!

I'll get into it later in the books, but for me building this world, aura served a couple of functions. First, it allows people to adapt to what would otherwise be very harsh natural conditions (Sacred Valley and the immediate surrounding areas have, so far, been very mild. Conditions will accelerate as we get deeper into Cradle). Second, vital aura is generated by natural forces AND it changes natural forces.

I'll continue showing how it works in future books, but the bottom line is that aura allows me to have thriving ecosystems where everything is fire-aspect: trees with burning fruit pollinated by insects with wings of flame, and so on and so forth. Same in the depths of the ocean and on the tops of clouds.

It's magic. But it DOES work consistently according to a set of rules, and it DOES interact with physics.

However, I'm not as attached to real-world physics as Brandon Sanderson is. He enjoys figuring out the physical implications of every nuance in his magic systems. I do not enjoy that, so I will not be doing it.

If there's a gap between real physics and magic, I'll be filling in that gap with magic. Not physics. Just a personal preference.

Jeremiah

You may not enjoy figuring out how magic interacts with and is subject to physics, but I would feel sure you wouold enjoy the fact that Sanderson has done so.

Will Wight

Jeremiah, what I like and appreciate is all the thought and planning that Sanderson puts into developing his magic system, and how clear the rules usually are. AND what an impact they always have on the surrounding society.That's cool, and I know from experience that it's very hard to do.But as for him figuring out all the details of how his magic interacts with physics...no, I don't really care.Harry Potter magic doesn't interact with physics, and yet each individual book in the series has a very tight magic system (the series as a WHOLE doesn't, because some magic introduced in a later book could have solved problems in an earlier book, but each book on its own is very consistent).As long as the rules and abilities are clear to me, great! I don't care if they're consistent with known physics or not. Where does the extra mass go when Professor McGonnagall turns into a cat? Magic.

April

I may be weird, but yes, things like that bug me. Less in fantasy as the author can say "because magic" and it works (though some take that to an extreme, which usually is enough to turn me off from a book) but in sci-fi that is a definite deal-breaker)

Will Wight

Apparently that's a pretty common view, April, and that's fine!

I'm just saying that MY tolerance for physics-defying shenanigans is pretty high, as long as it's consistent within the work. If a character survives getting hit by a tactical missile and then is threatened by a knife, Will is not happy.

But if we're getting into the realm of "Dragons could never grow that large because their bones couldn't support their own body weight," or "A conjuration spell could never work because it adds mass to the universe," then I don't care.

It's fantasy. Magic > Physics.

Questioner

How did you begin planning for the Cradle series? And who was your first character that you envisioned?

Will Wight

So, I talked about this a little bit earlier.  Cradle, the elements that made it into Cradle, came from a number of different places, but two in particular.  One of them was an Abidan story line that I had planned out to be a completely universe spanning story from the beginning.  And one of them was cultivation fantasy knock-off.  So, it was really when I fused those two together that Cradle came into being.  So, one of the first characters I came up with was Lindon.  Definitely, I did him first because I need to know who the protagonist was.  Then Yerin I kind of came up with, because I was like, if it was a normal cultivation series, there would be a few powers that the character would have, and one of them would be a sword path.  But what I really did, was I made Yerin sort of the standard cultivation novel protagonist, except she's a woman instead of a man.  So that's it.  That's really where she started, then I need a unique way for her to speak.  And a connection to the outside world, so I fleshed her out in that way.  

Then I came up with Eithan not long after that.  I really wanted to get to him in the first book, because obviously he is fun to write, but I didn't make it that far.  So, Eithan was very early.  And the judges.  I had the judges fleshed out long before they appeared in the books.  So, I knew who Suriel was.  I knew who Makiel and Gad...  Makiel, Gadrael, Ozriel, and the ghost, whose name I don't like pronouncing.  Those characters were very vivid to me.  One of the scenes I really wanted to do was... So, when Cradle was initially just the Abidan story line, was that Gadrael was going to be super against whoever the main character was, who ended up being Lindon.  So, he was just going to be super prejudiced against everything he does, and then the more Lindon adhered to the rules, the more he was reluctantly on Lindon's side.  And he was just like, "Yes, I still hate you, but you are correct."  Because he's just a very rules-oriented guy.  So that was one of the things I looked forward to, and that helped me flesh out Gadrael's character a lot.  Which is funny because he plays virtually no role in the Cradle series.  At least so far.  So, he's like, "Yeah, I hate him because he breaks the rules.  So, to the degree that he doesn't break the rules, I don't hate him."  So that's kind of the arc there, I guess.  So, I fleshed out the judges quite a bit, even before I started writing Unsouled.  

So, this is a little bit of a tangent, but as I was fleshing out the system of Cradle... [delivery from off-screen] Ooo, I have more tea!  As I was fleshing out the magic system of Cradle I got some more tea.  [Rebecca says something unintelligible]  Ooo, it's Star Wars tea!  It's a Mandalorian mysterious black tea.  [Rebecca cheers.]  Not sponsored.  If this was Yorkshire Gold, I would grow Super Saiyan hair, and instantly beat Stardew Valley.  That's the next cup.  I need the power of Yorkshire Gold.  [Will sings: Yorkshire Gooold....]  Uh... Anyway.  What was I going to say.  Oh yeah, when I started fleshing out Cradle, one of the first things I wanted to figure out was the magic system, so I had tried out a bunch of different thoughts.  I thought about, I wanted to do a unique spirit thing, and I wanted Lindon to start off weak, so I considered animal spirits, totem animal spirits.  I would tie into icons, and of course the Judges are at the highest end of that.  And Lindon was going to have a rabbit or a little baby deer.  I considered a squirrel, which is one joke that Yerin makes in book 2.  So those were all things he was going to have.  I thougth about tools or weapons being spirits, and everyone was going to have some really cool weapon, and then Lindon was going to have like a shovel, or a little hammer.  Some little practical thing.  Or a bucket.  That was one of the things I considered.  Something with utility, but the opposite of an awesome thing that you would want.  Because I just thought it would be funny.  A few things I thought of there.  And then when I was coming up with the series, I was then of course doing the dual-control thing, I was trying to go, ok, what would be two cool things I could pair together?  But I ended up going with what my initial gut instinct was, which was destruction and, not creation, but more like order based.  Cleansing.  So, there you go.

Questioner

Im starting to realize you cant kill Suriel. Anything you throw at her she can banish it. I guess Suriel is too strong. I wonder whst Path she follows.................

Will Wight

Well, she's immortal.

That said, there are entities that threaten her and the rest of the Abidan, but at that point you're dealing with specific power interactions. She draws her power from the Way, the force of pure order that keeps time, space, and reality in the universe on track. There are beings that draw from pure chaos, disrupting that order. There are also entities that could cut off her access to the Way, or out-predict and maneuver her into a situation where she could be destroyed.

...but all that comes in later books.

Questioner

Are there any madra viruses in cradle? Like the same way a virus in real life is basically a random peice of DNA which uses cells to replicate itself, are there techniques which implant themselves in someone’s spirit and force a copy of themselves? And if so, would they differ by stage and advancement?

Will Wight

There are techniques like this, but they aren't as overpowered as you might think thanks to a simple rule: your own spirit is sovereign within your body.

It's the same reason why a water or blood artist wouldn't just stop your heart instantly. They can't. Your spirit is far stronger inside your body than anyone else's madra.

You can overcome that by a huge difference in power: a Herald could stop a thousand Underlords' hearts all at once. But techniques that insert themselves into enemies' bodies tend to degrade very quickly and do limited damage.

Tristan

Not sure if this has been answered already, but does madra regeneration get affected by the size/depth/whatever HEPW embiggens of a core? Eg does Eithan take the same time to refill his oversized core as any other Underlord given identical conditions or does he have to wait a proportionally longer time for his madra to refill?

Will Wight

A bigger core takes proportionally longer to refill. Someone else asked how Eithan refills it. Good question! Unless I cut the scene, you find out in Underlord.

SofaKing

Thanks for sharing your crazy stories with us. As for my question do you have any plans for D&D like handbooks to come out for your universe? Also do you plan on ever coming to the Pacific North West for a book signing? 

Will Wight

D&D like handbooks... maybe. The coolest thing about D&D handbooks is the art and I would have to buy that, so it would be expensive. But it would be fun. I really like those. I just really love D&D handbooks, they're great. Will I do a signing? I mean I guess. I've done a couple. I don't do them regularly and I probably won't ever do them regularly, but I can't say that I won't ever do one. I do them at Dragon Con, if you want to come to Dragon Con in the fall.