[NR] Not A Force Of Good - Chapter 758

Rosha sighs, “NeoRealm is a ‘swords and sorcery’ type of game. The fact you’ve managed to wrap it around your finger and warp it to suit cultivation? It simply shows how free-form the game can be.”

Jason laughs, “Just look at mythology across our world. Even what a ‘god’ is differs from culture to culture. You would think the most powerful beings in a cosmology would share more things, yet that very much isn’t the case.

“From an individual omnipotent deity, to the dysfunctional heavenly family, up to an entire celestial bureaucracy. Both the quantity and actual power of individual deities can vary wildly. Then you have NeoRealm. The System certainly tries to keep things in the realm of classic swords and sorcery. Yet even then, it doesn’t manage it on the most basic level. Go to a kingdom heavy with sapient goblins and there’s steampunk and a bunch of other ‘punk’ techs and towns.

“Because in the end? NeoRealm is just another world. How we use the powers that exist is up to us. I mean, right until even after the fall there were uncontacted tribes out on their little islands. And that was despite the corpo nonsense. It was only when a natural disaster, though how much you can call the weather ‘natural’ at that point is up for debate, was barreling down on their islands. The natives were extracted, and a good thing too as there wasn’t any plant life left on their islands afterwards.”

Courtney, “So what does this mean for cultivation? Or rather, you seem to have some idea of what things mean and are relating them to cultivation. Using things we would understand, what does level 100 represent for us in NeoRealm and irl?”

Jason frowns, this was a bit of a blind spot for him. While he had read more than a few books on mythology and fantasy. He simply had mostly translated things into cultivation terms instead of taking them as is.

The silence extends for a while before he finally comes up with what he wants to say. “That’s hard. It would be simpler to build on what you both understand of cultivation, even if it is fantasy cultivation and not what I’m teaching you. Though speaking of that, we’re getting to the point were we should gather in a private room and continue our lessons soon.

“Anyway, I would compare level 100 to, hmm, dang it, I had an example and now it’s gone. Um, level 100 is like...

“I give up. Even the example I had wasn’t all that good. Level 100 is a qualitative change. You are going from water to ice. Or rather, the temperature of the water that represents you is being lowered below the freezing point. With the temperature being the quality of your spirit.

“Most people can’t manage this since the System doesn’t actually guide you to a spiritual awakening. It provides a quest that hopefully guides you down that path and with many? It probably adds things on this side to force crystallization before your spirit hits ‘freezing’. Though even then, most people don’t manage spiritual crystallization and are stuck at level 99 as the quests are likely designed to require it.

“And all of that wrapped up in the understanding that the qualitative change to your spirit isn’t actually turning it into a crystal. Some sects used the crystal metaphor and their higher-ups tended to get stuck in their mindsets in a way that was quite detrimental.”

Rosha, “Wait, if the System is adding something on this side to force the issue, why don’t more people manage to break 100 or get a concept?”

Courtney sighs, “It’s the limits placed by not allowing the System to overly alter our minds.”

Jason nods, “Which is a good thing. Consider, if a person’s mind is at level 95 and the System is allowed to push them over to 100, are they fully themselves anymore? Especially when that 1 point which gets you to 100 is worth more than just a single level? And then you extend that out to hundreds of levels? Well, eventually you’re more System than who you started as.

“It was a common trap left by malicious elders who felt they died early. After all, why take death sitting down when you can try to revive yourself by replacing an ignorant child’s mind with your own and then having your soul called to the new body?”

Rosha, “That’s nasty!”

Jason shrugs, “Cultivation isn’t some force of good. It simply is a method to gain and use power. Think of it like money and the harm that caused irl. I’d say in the past, but it certainly still causes issues.”

Rosha, “How wasn’t your previous world a hellhole?”

Jason laughs, “It could be! Didn’t I tell you how I died? A literal dark lord style idiot needing a divinely inspired hero to take down. True top of the power curve, planetary threat nonsense!

“Except, most things are kept in balance. Because while those at the top have the power to do world-shaking actions, they’re held in check by others and the fact that you can have some spunky punk with a hope for justice who comes up out of nowhere. And that doesn’t even get into the whole concept of ascending to some higher plane of existence.”

Courtney, “Wait, what? You didn’t mention ascension. That is a common theme in cultivation novels, but I thought that was another fantasy thing.”

Jason waves the worry off, “Don’t even think about it. In a world where people can literally live until they’re killed? There were no good records of it. And given what I learned between lives? Chances are it is actually a form of apotheosis into being a deity. Not actually ‘ascending’ into a new plane of existence.”

Rosha, “So what can we do with this? And does you having a core mean you don’t get bottlenecked at level 99?”

Jason hacks out a single laugh, “Oh goodness gracious no! Firstly, the System would allow that. Though secondly and more important is that a core doesn’t represent a qualitative change in spirit, but rather I believe it is simply that once the change happens, forming a core is second nature, especially with the System’s guidance.”