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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   2770 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 21, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

Still on G. Kirilenko and L. Korshunova's What is Personality? Also going through some Gramsci essays.

Reaching the final third of Reverend Insanity, @self_made_human please clap.

I found that it is easier to tolerate the "light novel with Chinese characteristics" narration style if I imagine I'm reading a folk tale. The same formulaic language, the same bombastic emotion display (particularly bystanders marveling at someone whipping out particularly strong techniques). Not the kind of tale you'd read to your child at bedside, though. Truly, the profundities of human path are opening up before me.

Claps very hard, it took me 6 months to finish it the first go around, 4 on my second!

I will return to overdosing on copium, on the basis of author interviews from a few years back where Gu Zhen Ren said the story was far from over, he's got a lot more material, and there might be a road map to getting it unbanned and published one day.

While so far it's been okay that the novel doesn't instantly infodump the entire power scaling system onto the reader, at the moment I'm miffed that despite Fang Yuan being one rank away from venerable, it still wasn't explained what makes the third myriad tribulation so hard that only 10 people ever made it. I wasn't under the impression that those things grew in power exponentially within a single tribulation category, and as far as I understand there were many rank eights who were stuck at two out of three.

I presume you overlooked the fact that not just anybody can even begin the tribulation to become a Venerable. Normally, it takes the support of Heaven's Will and Supreme Grandmaster status in a path. The latter is incredibly rare, remember there were only 3 SGs in Refinement path over 3 million years! The former is a deal-breaker for most, if Heaven/Fate doesn't want you to become a Venerable, you can cross as many Myriad Tribulations as you like without attaining it. If you do, then you keep becoming stronger due to Dao Marks, but even then it's not the same. I think it was some combination of the destruction of fate and the availability of Primordial Domain that let FY, who wasn't supposed to become a Venerable, still manage in the end. Also, the actual final tribulation involves battle against Chaos, which is so difficult that even actual Venerables struggle and survive by a thread each time. Even the normal Myriad Tribulation is shit hard even for the strongest Rank 8s!

At the point I'm at, I think the only thing that was mentioned was that every Venerable was a supreme grandmaster - not that it was a hard requirement to cross into the ninth rank, although in retrospect it would be a reasonable assumption. In particular, I saw the scene of Red Lotus immediately after ascending and I do not recall anything other than the tribulation being mentioned.

Oh dear, my bad, I had thought you had finished the novel entirely. I'm sorry about the spoilers, but they're not that big, and you raised a valid question about why we don't see more Venerables!

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