Beyond the Mortal Realm

Begin as a mortal tempering your body, and climb the realms of cultivation: refine qi, survive heavenly tribulations, master techniques and treasures, and enter secret realms to defeat the beings that guard the keys to your next breakthrough.

 The path of cultivation

You start in Body Tempering with a Jade Slip, an in-game guide that tells you what to do next, lists every recipe and pill formula, and records the creatures you meet.

- Gather essence from the world: glowing Spiritgrass, Spirit Stone ore, new biomes, and the creatures you defeat.
- Meditate to refine essence into cultivation. Each realm has three stages, and each stage fills as you refine.
- Break through when you reach a realm's peak. Each breakthrough asks for something different: an insight and a preparation, then trials of lightning, and later a key won from a secret realm's guardian.

The realms so far: Body Tempering → Qi Condensation → Foundation Establishment → Golden Core → Nascent Soul.

Heavenly tribulations

From Foundation Establishment, every breakthrough calls down a storm.

- Foundation: plant Formation Flags around your seat to turn the bolts aside.
- Golden Core: halfway through the storm your heart demon rises, a shadow of you with your own weapon, and you must defeat it inside the ring.
- Nascent Soul: the clouds wind into a vast eye. Your Golden Core shatters into nine lights that land all around you, and you have 20 seconds to run and catch them while the lightning hunts you. Catch seven to succeed, all nine for a flawless soul. The lights you caught gather above you into a small figure of gold light: your newborn soul.

A tribulation can fail, but it never kills you outright, and you never lose a realm you have reached.

Techniques

Each technique grows stronger as you rise through the realms.

- Surging Step: a burst of speed. At Golden Core it cuts everything you dash through.
- Qi Strike: a bolt of focused qi. At Golden Core, hold it to release a golden beam.
- Spiritual Sense: see ore, herbs, spirit veins and creatures through the ground, and find hidden seals.
- Flying Sword: your natal sword, born from a fallen sect's relic. Strike with it, or step onto it and fly.
- Sword Formation: swords rise from your back and strike, in widening rings as you grow.
- Golden Core Domain: a golden field where your enemies slow and your techniques cost half.
- Soul Projection: your soul leaves your body to scout, passing through walls.
- Dharma Image: a 15-block giant of gold light rises behind you, and every swing of your arm becomes a slash of light across the ground ahead.
- Soul Escape: once a day, a killing blow is refused. Your soul flees and re-forms your body on safe ground.

Secret realms and their guardians

Each secret realm is its own dimension, with its own sky, music and dangers, and you can always find your way home.

- The Fallen Sword Sect. A ruined sect among pale, shattered peaks, where colossal swords stand at the ends of the gashes they cut into the land. Its stone Guardian holds the Heart of the Fallen Sword.
- The Thousand-Beast Grotto. A vast cavern-jungle lit by glowing fungi, home to Moonweaver Spiders and Rocs. In its grove waits the Ancestral Qilin, which takes to the air when wounded and guards the Qilin's Golden Flame.
- The Ashen Immortal's Garden. A dead immortal's mountain estate under falling ash, its disciples kneeling in stone. Some of them are not statues. On the summit, the Ashen Immortal hauls itself out of its pavilion: a giant of ash and pale light that slams, sweeps, calls a storm and, at the end, tries to tear your soul from your body.

Alchemy, treasures and a home

• Alchemy: refine pills in a cauldron and tend its fire for Fine and Flawless grades. There are pills for recovery, breakthroughs, tribulations, taming beasts and more.
  - Treasures: the Spatial Ring, the house-sized Mountain Seal, the Golden Bell Shield, the Earth-Splitting Axe and the Heaven-Swallowing Gourd.
  - Talismans: paper charms of fire, thunder, binding and sealing, an escape talisman, and a jade substitute that breaks in your place.
  - Your sect: meditation cushions, sword racks, a sect gate stone, and arrays: Qi-Gathering, Killing and Teleportation formations, built from flags around an array core.
  - Robes: six sets of cultivator's clothing, each with its own bonus.

A living world

- Spirit veins for meditation, rare herbs and spirit materials (Moon-Glow Grass that blooms only under a full moon, and a thousand-year ginseng that runs when it sees you).
- Creatures that warn before they fight and telegraph their attacks: Ironback Apes, Spirit Serpents, Jadehorn Deer.
- A Nine-Ember Fox companion, which grows new tails as your bond deepens.
- A Bestiary in the Jade Slip that fills in as you observe, fight, befriend and study.

 Coming next

The mod is in active development. These are planned, though details and order may change:

- Soul Transformation, the realm after Nascent Soul, with a new secret realm, the Inverted Sea, and its guardian, the Hollow Leviathan.
- Ascension and a higher world: the end of the mortal path, and a world beyond it, Broken Heaven.
- Giant boss hunts: roaming colossa; creatures such as the Worldroot Colossus, each dropping materials for a legendary weapon.
- Lore and exploration: technique jade slips, treasure-map fragments and inheritance stones left by those who came before.
- More creatures: spirit tortoises, earth dragons, beast eggs and evolution.
- Sects and their people: missions, characters to meet, and founding your own sect.