Han Sooyoung (13 Years Old) (asshole): Oh My God Why Do You Keep Harrassing Me About This Dumb Plagarism

Who's excited for Fortiche's new series based on the hit show Third Life? 😋

upper management

it’s doksoo week and i’m thinking of how the endless loop starts and ends with kdj on a hospital bed and hsy looking over him

he could do this all day with him

morning scribbly to get in the mindset

Shen Yuan who glitches in his transmigration, but the original Shen Qingqiu still dies of a qi deviation.

So the System still needs someone with narrative relevance to throw Luo Binghe into the Abyss. In a fit of desperation, it contrives circumstances after Shen Qingqiu's death to move Luo Binghe to An Ding Peak (not that difficult), and then the System makes Shang Qinghua be Luo Binghe's new scum master who casts him down.

Airplane's thrilled, really. Cultivators aren't supposed to get ulcers but damned if he doesn't come close to one anyway. Between Shen Qingqiu and then just a while later Liu Qingge both dying from qi deviations, and Shang Qinghua looking like a stiff breeze could take him out any day now, poor Mu Qingfang is also just about at his wits' end.

But it's not all bad news! On An Ding Peak, Luo Binghe actually finds himself surrounded by the kinds of people who are accustomed to being bullied by the rest of the sect. So they're pretty sympathetic to him, and it's easier for someone with basic laboring skills to advance on that peak too. His chores don't decrease too much, but he actually gets rewarded for doing them well, and no one tries to kick him out of the dorms or anything. Shang Qinghua doesn't either go out of his way to bully or praise Luo Binghe, correctly reasoning that his best shot at not getting a gruesome death is to just be a more forgettable bad guy than an abusive dirtbag or a heart-wrenching betrayal. He doesn't sabotage Luo Binghe's cultivation (no point, and it would just farm resentment later) but he also doesn't go out of his way to help him improve (not gonna arm his inevitable maybe-probably-murderer with better weapons!), so Luo Binghe's situation sees an overall improvement but not the zero-to-hero treatment he'd have got with Shen Yuan either.

When Shang Qinghua shoves Luo Binghe into the Abyss (he just full on picks him up and tosses him like a sack of beans, better to rip it off quick like a bandage), LBH is upset, but he's not especially surprised or dismayed about Shang Qinghua's part in it. Later on he'll be kind of confused, because he just assumed that of course the righteous sect cultivator would abhor the demon, but it turns out Shang Qinghua has been working for a demon since before Luo Binghe even came to the sect? But then it still kind of makes sense because a Heavenly Demon would definitely pose a risk to Mobei Jun and to Mobei Jun's rule. Shang Qinghua, he supposes, is just really loyal to his specific demon.

Luo Binghe's subsequent revenge quest is also somewhat mitigated by the Abyss actually not being that bad.

The Abyss is not actually that bad thanks to the glitched out Shen Yuan having been camping there for several years now.

So when Shen Yuan's transmigration failed it failed because he "woke up" during the process, realized where the System intended to put him, was like no way in goddamn hell am I being that guy about it, and actually kind of won the ensuing tug-of-war. The System couldn't put him in Shen Qingqiu but Shen Yuan didn't want to go back to his dead body either, so he ended up stuck in the nearest available space for lost interdimensional beings. Which was the Endless Abyss.

Luckily Shen Yuan's quasi-transmigrated imparted an equivalent cultivation level as Shen Jiu's to him, and the glitch made him able to sense and manipulate certain extra-dimensional energies, so he manifested as this weird godlike being able to manipulate and control aspects of the Abyss. So he set about transforming Airplane's Torment Nexus into a viable ecosystem (the current version would not be anything approaching sustainable were it not for divine/narrative intervention, and is constantly on the verge of destabilizing into unlivable ruin that would only be fit for some particularly hardy microorganisms).

It's still like, a monster land full of demonic creatures and terrifying phenomenon, but with Shen Yuan's assistance it becomes something more like a demonic wildlife reserve than a dimensional horror plane. Though it is still a dimensional horror plane, and Shen Yuan is its chief dimensional horror. He treats it sort of like those dungeon building or wildlife park sims, figuring out how to keep everything in balance while still preserving all the interesting parts. A lot of the extreme survival issues of the Abyss are more of a result of it being environmentally unstable than a result of its actual denizens, and once he smooths out a lot of the messy dimensional edges and creates stable vents for the fluctuating energy run-off, the demonic inhabits start behaving less like horror movie monsters and more like animals. They're still wild and dangerous and prone to killing one another, but also more cautious, and able to access enough stable resources that they can even start to be picky about what they pursue.

Turns out that a lot of creatures in the Abyss actually don't like fighting and dying and being brutally injured on a regular basis, even if they can heal from it!

Shen Yuan has even discovered that some like chin scritches (he's not terribly worried about habituating them to people, given how rarely any people actually access the Abyss, but also because he's not really all that people-ish himself these days).

This means that one of Luo Binghe's first encounters with the horrible creatures of the Abyss, is in fact a pack of wolf-like monsters thoroughly avoiding an actual fight with him. In fact most of the denizens of the Abyss just avoid him. They can smell the Heavenly Demon energy rolling off of him, and given the current abundance of alternatives to dealing with that, virtually none of the monsters actually choose to challenge him. There are still a few that will go after anything that's bleeding, but that problem stops once Luo Binghe's physiology heals his wounds, which takes like... a couple hours, max.

Despite the stories he's heard, Luo Binghe is relieved to find that the Abyss is not quite so terrible as all that. Normal survival skills suffice for seeing him through much of it. He's able to hunt for food, scavenge for tools, and even finds potable water fairly easily. After a few weeks, he also comes across a ruin which seems to be inhabited.

The being inhabiting it is plainly a god, although he demurs and refutes such assertions whenever Binghe is too frank. He's a strange being, at turns looking like some queer approximation of a human, at other times blinking and winking in and out of existence, in patterns of strange lights and oddly geometrical fire. But he's surprisingly not hostile, letting Binghe rest in his residence, and even directing him towards points of interest. Accompanying him, too, though he seems to think that Binghe doesn't notice the odd almost spiderweb-like patterns that appear on things which he's influencing. The god calls himself The Peerless One, or at least that's what Luo Binghe infers from some writings on the ruin. The Peerless One offers instruction, seemingly without thinking about it, and gets flustered at being addressed by title, so Binghe also begins to refer to him as Shizun after a while.

one thing i enjoy about orv is how morally grey kim dokja is, especially in the beginning. during the beginning of the novel kim dokja seems to have almost no empathy for the people around him, and his number one priority is progressing the scenarios with himself being a secondary priority and saving others coming later. he does undeniable good, like saving jung heewon and caring for lee gilyoung - and he does some much more questionable things, like selling his food for coins knowing that it will disappear soon and people need the coins to survive.

this part of orv gets ignored a lot and chalked up to kim dokja's self-hatred, which i disagree with. yes he hates himself and yes he's an unreliable narrator who paints his actions in a worse light because of it but sometimes he just does objectively bad things. and it's interesting when he does! particularly in the beginning, he is focused completely on self-preservation and often steps on others in the process. his actions force you to ask questions like how responsible is kim dokja for those deaths on the subway car, or at that first subway station? is he obligated to try and save the people around him? how strong is that obligation? is it right of him to use his future knowledge the way he does, to decide who lives and dies? they're fairly basic questions, and orv doesn't particularly insist on answering them, but i enjoyed thinking about them nonetheless. the fact is kim dokja was often cruel, to strangers and his companions both, if different types. and you lose these questions when you ignore that. and thats not even to discuss the parallels between his exploitation of yoo joonghyuk's story and the way constellations gobble up incarnations while enjoying their pain. even if yoo joonghyuk eventually decides he considers it worth it, kim dokja still subsisted off of a living being's immeasurable pain for years, and that's a fucked up thing!

and to ignore kim dokja's less-than-moral actions also ignores kim dokja's character arc! kim dokja feels guilt at the end of orv for actions he wouldn't have thought twice about at the beginning and that is because he has changed and matured over the course of the novel and pretending he was always that way erases that. and i dont see why you would want to!! his journey towards seeing his companions as human and learning to care about the 'extras' he previously discarded and coming to understand the damage he inflicts with his self-sacrifice is interesting to watch and discuss. i've seen the stark contrast in empathy from early kim dokja to later kim dokja chalked up to sinshong not being quite sure how to write him yet and while i think that may have played a role i also think they did a good job of building and showing these changes through arcs like the demon world arc, the fruit of good and evil arc and the journey to the west arc

i think i lost my point somehwere but in summary kim dokja does some fucked up shit and some of it is basic edgelord apocalypse murder and some of it is genuinely interesting to contemplate and all of it is important to his character

i think it's about time i release those into the wild

Xisuma is forced to play hit video game That’s Not My Hermit by Evil Xisuma every day

so... wild life, huh?