Literature / Virtuous Sons: A Greco-Roman Xianxia

The most epic bromance you will ever see.

Virtuous Sons: A Greco-Roman Xianxia is an original work by Ya Boy Striker (also known as Y.B Striker on Amazon and Ya boy), and it is Exactly What It Says on the Tin (well, almost). The most current updates can be found at SpaceBattles.com (here) and Royal Road (here) but the earlier chapters have been pulled for the Kindle release of the first two books.

In the twilight of the eighth Olympic Century, the Free Mediterranean is largely at peace. Mortals toil and strive while the mystikos, initiates of the mystery cults seek enlightenment and progression through the pursuit of virtue, performative excellence. At the pinnacle of these sects stand the Tyrants, men and women of intense personal refinement and immense influence.

Lio "Griffon" Aetos is the son and heir of the Tyrant Damon Aetos. And he is bored.

Solus is the last known survivor of the fallen city of Rome. And he is a slave.

By a crook of fate, what started with an impulse to see the wider world drops both of them squarely in the center of a power struggle of mythic proportions. Also, the Olympic Games are starting soon. These are related topics.

Ya Boy Striker has a Patreon for the story.He has also released the first book of Virtuous Sons on Amazon as an eBook and paperback on October 6, 2022 followed by a hardcover and audiobook release later that month.

He has also released the second book of the series Amazon as an eBook currently (with audiobook and paperback + hardcover to be released later) on April 6 2023.

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This work provides examples of the following:

• The Ace: Even in a world of mythological superhumans, some stand above their peers.
  • There is only one rule: Damon Aetos is better than you. He ascended to the Heroic realm still in his youth, and the Tyrannic realm not long after that. He swept through the Free Mediterranean with such force and vigor that twenty years later people still invoke his name with caution. He rules as kyrios of the Rosy Dawn cult of greater mystery and undisputed lord of the Scarlet City Alikos.
  • Griffon, even at his current low power level, is just impossibly good at everything he attempts and invariably finds a way to turn contests into something he can win.
  • Sol has, throughout the story, managed to do the following things: fool most of Olympia to think that he is a Tyrant in disguise, throw two Heroic cultivators through a building while he was a first-rank Sophist, and make an alliance of four Tyrants to act in his favor, and in that way influence the brewing civil war over the Indigo Throne of Olympia and the Raging Heaven cult. He also brewed nectar, the drink of the gods.
  • The late kyrios of the Raging Heaven cult of greater mystery, the Tyrant Riot Bakkhos made a habit of collecting other Tyrants to establish dominance.
• Alchemy Is Magic: Alchemy is one of many scholarly disciplines in the Free Mediterranean. While it's not yet been explored extensively, among its potential products is divine nectar.
• Amazon Brigade: Most mystery cults have a mix of male and female mystikos. The Blind Maiden cult, in contrast, is composed entirely of women. Because they're the Amazons.
• Anatomy of the Soul: The setting employs Plato's tripartite soul, given as Reason, Emotion, and Hunger, in its understanding of pneuma and cultivation.
• Ancient Grome: Not a bit of it. Striker makes a point of delineating differences between Greek and Roman culture, philosophy, priorities, and even bathing routines.
• Animal Motifs:
  • As his namesake, Griffon is associated with lions and eagles (Lio means lion, Aetos means eagle).
  • The Tyrant Elders of the Raging Heaven employ a number of agents to undercut each other as they struggle for the vacant Indigo Throne. Naturally, these black-clad midnight agents are referred to as crows.
  • Following a series of altercations where they preyed on the crows, both Griffon and Solus are associated with ravens.
• Arc Words:
  • The world is iron now. ^note There is a recurring theme of the world being lesser than it once was, whether by stagnation or manipulation.
  • Ivory or horn. ^note First mentioned during the visit to the Orphic House; ivory represents falsehood, horn represents truth.
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  • "Where do you stand among heaven and earth?" is used as a roundabout means of asking a cultivator's status; realm, level, etc. The phrase is turned on its head by Prometheus when he changes the context. Paraphrasing: "Do you stand with the heavens or against them?"
  • During the climax of the Olympia story arc, Socrates manages to slow Polyzalus by asking what, precisely, killing Sol and Griffon would accomplish when it violates the law, his virtue, and his own ethos. The man responds, from a place of grief and fury, "I don't care."
• Arranged Marriage: Both of the main characters have had arranged marriages to their names, Sol through his adoptive father ( Julius Caesar) to a girl named Luna, and Lio to his cousin Lydia from birth. Sol's wife dies and Griffon runs away from home, and thus the marriage. Scythas is also in an arranged marriage that he can't get out of because of two facts, one is that he likes his betrothed, and the second fact is that the father of the bride is the Tyrant Elder of the Hurricane Heights faction of the Half Step City Olympia, The Hurricane Hierophant, Aleuas Pyrrhos.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: The men and women with the most power, aka the most developed cultivation, are normally the ones that call the shots on the wider world. The fourth stage of Greek cultivation is even called Tyrant, and it runs off of Ethos, manifest authority and kingship. The price to become a Tyrant is steep, too, as it involves sacrificing your heart (literally). All Tyrants are former captains of the Heroic realm, and even a fresh Hero is capable of absurd feats, like leaping over a city and killing unkillable monsters.
• Awesomeness Is a Force: In more ways than one. We get hints of it in regards to Roman cultivation, but have more explicit examples in the Greek. A Hero's power is often called their Glory, and oracles additionally have their Majesty. The names are well earned.
• Bag of Holding: Greek cultivators can invoke paradox logic to create paradox spaces, which can hold anything from food to weapons ( and even entire corpses. And ships.) within the folds of their clothes.
• Bait-and-Switch: Given the association with storm, sky, and lightning, the reader would be forgiven for assuming that Olympia and its Raging Heaven cult would be built on the legacy of Zeus, a.k.a. the Father. In truth, it turns out the Olympian husk buried beneath the Kyrios's living quarters belongs to the Mother. Given Hera's temper, at times justified, and the bad blood between her and Zeus's by-blows, like Heracles and Dionysus/Bakkhos, this makes considerable sense.
• Bare-Handed Blade Block: In his last stand against the Carthaginians, Sol catches a enemy's blade with his bare hands before forcing it back against them.
• Bash Brothers: Sol and Griffon are potent martial cultivators with a strong sense of loyalty to each other. They even trade oaths supporting each other's goals.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: All of the fights against the heart demons of various cultivators, such as Scythas, Sol, and the Butcher of the Burning Dusk, happen within their soul's grand monument to the ego. If the body inside the soul gets damaged, so does the outer body. Others cannot see inside the soul unless invited.
• Benevolent Precursors: As per Classical Mythology, Prometheus taught humanity various civilized arts in addition to stealing fire from the gods. Upon encountering the bound Titan at the heart of the Storm That Never Ceases, he balances Griffon's and Sol's humors for an immediate power boost. When Griffon asks why the Thief of Flame would help them, he responds thusly—
  Prometheus clenched his eyes shut, blocking out the light of the sun, and when he spoke his voice was distant. As if his mind was elsewhere, chained up just as his body was here. He shook his head.
  “Why have I ever needed a reason? Some things exist apart from explanation. Some truths are plainly known.”
  Lightning flashed overhead and the Titan Flame grit his gold-stained teeth in pained frustration.
  “My children are freezing. My children are blind. What else was I to do?”
• Beyond the Impossible:
  • Adamant is supposed to be unbreakable once forged, yet the statue of Heracles the Champion holds one of the adamant chains that bound Prometheus in its hand.
  • Sol and Griffon have done the impossible and started to burn their heart blood. Something that should only happen once one reaches the Greek heroic realm; they are only third-level sophists.
• Big Damn Heroes: During the climax of the Olympia arc, who should sail in to pick up Griffon, Selene, and Sol but the motley crew of freedmen they twice earlier told to take the Eos and go. Not an ounce of cultivation among them, and they voluntarily chose to sail back toward a city recently redecorated by eight walking natural disasters on the off-chance their patrons needed a lift.
• The Blank: For some reason or another, every depiction of the gods in the Free Mediterranean has a blank face and no one can remember their names. When Lio and Sol visit a temple in Olympia it's clear from the description they're looking at the famous Statue of Zeus in Olympia, with smooth ivory where his face should be.
• Blow You Away: The hero of the Scything Squall, Scythas, and in general, the entire Hurricane Heights' Howling Wind Cult, uses the wind for various purposes. One is to cut their enemies to shreds or manifest a giant hurricane.
• Bluff Worked Too Well: The ridiculously escalating messes Griffon and Sol blunder into when they arrive Olympia. They keep surviving things they shouldn't through a combination of (nigh-divine) luck, stupidly high pain tolerance, excellent acting skills and being good at punching above their weight — which leads to them acquiring allies and enemies on whose radar they have no business being.
• Bolt of Divine Retribution: Once the Greeks stop being mortal (up to the Sophic realm's Captain) and start becoming Heroes, the heavens take sufficient note to strike them down with hungry tribulation lightning. Those that survive the ordeal are remade into Heroes.
• Brutal Honesty: Griffon's direct method of communication has mixed results, but it usually makes others hate him because of it.
• Cassandra Truth: Given the twisty and lethal nature of politics in Olympia, no one believes that Griffon and Sol are mere Sophic realm cultivators. This creates further misunderstandings as people try to suss out their backers, motivations, and goals.
• Cast from Lifespan:
  • Turns out the Heroic technique of "burning your heart's blood" is literally trading future lifespan for a burst of power in the present. Fortunately, Wizards Live Longer so cultivators have plenty of lifespan to cast from.
  • This ability isn't just restricted to Heroes and Tyrants, as Griffon and Solus as Philosophers are able to ignite their hearts with the ichor given to them by Prometheus.
  • The King's Curse offers incredible power, but if the wielder is not acknowledged by the weapon, drains millennia off their lifespan in a matter of seconds.
  • A Greek Tyrant loses the ability to burn their heart's blood upon ascension to the Tyrannic Realm, but gains the ability to burn the heart's blood of those that they dominion over.
• Casting a Shadow:
  • Solus and Griffon learn how to manipulate their shadows during their run-ins with the covert agents of the Tyrant Elders. They can be "worn" as a full-body disguise, obscuring not just appearance but also the wearer's concept of self identity, or mingle with another person's shadow to pass messages. The latter provides Griffon and Sol a convenient method of private communication, right up until they learn Anastasia can listen in.
  • An interlude chapter shows an Egyptian cultivator's shut, their shadow, move, talk and more.
• Central Theme: "Cultivation makes us more of what we are."
• Child Prodigy: Many of the series's characters are current youthful prodigies or adults that started there. Myron Aetos is particularly notable; he's not yet ten and has nearly entered the second realm.
• The Clan: The Aetos family, currently led by Damon Aetos, serves as the central fixture of both the Rosy Dawn and the city of Alikos. With most of them following martial paths of cultivation, they also qualify as a Badass Family.
• Cool Boat:
  • The Eos^note Dawn was crafted by the combined efforts of the four Aetos brothers and serves as a worthy vessel for a cultivator. Each plank and beam was inscribed with truths to keep her sound. Griffon steals it during his and Sol's escape.
  • The Alikonia is a massive oceangoing monstrosity designed by the Sand Reckoner himself and hidden in his robes until needed.
• Cool Old Guy: Socrates may be a surly old cuss, but his insistence on taking Tyrants to task is one of the few things that keeps them in check.
• Crapsack World: Invoked by the phrase, "the world is iron now." One of the visions Griffon and Sol experience in the Orphic House shows the perceived degradation of the world through its successive ages: it begins golden-bright, and ends dull as iron. But at the end there is a hint of gold.
• Cultural Posturing: The citizens of the Greek Free Mediterranean have a strong sense of cultural superiority. Centuries before the beginning of the story, Alexander the Conqueror, a Macedonian, repeatedly tried to earn a welcome place at their collective table and was likewise repeatedly rebuffed as a foreigner mimicking civilized behavior despite his immense personal power and incredible achievements. Similarly, when Solus expressed confusion at the lack of response to the fall of Rome, Griffon responded that the average Hellene did not care.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: During his preparation for the Olympic Games, Griffon baits Alazon, one of Olympia's local Young Aristocrats, into a pankration match. Despite Alazon's advanced Heroic cultivation and superior speed, Griffon definitively crushes him with grit, tactics, and experience.
• Death of the Old Gods: The Olympic pantheon is largely dead or missing, and cultivators use their corpses as a source of truly incredible mystery faith to enact their will upon the world.
• De-power: In Stavros's flashback, Aristotle voluntarily breaks his own cultivation when confronted with evidence that his views were mistaken. Out of the ten truths he used as foundation for the monument of his soul, he only keeps one: that there is nothing in this world that cannot be understood.
• Doomed Hometown: The City of Rome itself is sacked, burned, and salted by a demonic army wearing the armour of Carthage.
• Dying Curse: A cultivator's Last Breath when they die is a 360-degree shockwave of power. The stronger they are, the bigger and more lethal the explosion. A Hero's death can level a building. A Tyrant's death can destroy a city.
• Enemy Within: A Heart Demon is an obsession, trauma, or negative sentiment hindering a cultivator's progress in their Enlightenment Superpowers. If a Heart Demon becomes severe enough, it can take on a life of its own and drive the cultivator mad. We see examples of such a thing in the Butcher of the Burning Dusk cult, an eighth-level Hero, in Scythas, and in Sol himself. In all of these examples, the heart demons within have tried to kill the person hosting it; which given their roots in guilt, PTSD, and similar negative emotions, should come as no surprise to anyone.
• Enlightenment Superpowers: Philosophers can invoke truths, whether universally understood or exhibited by lived experience, to affect the world around them.
• Fantastic Rank System: The ranking system of Virtuous Sons is different for every culture, as every culture has its understanding of the way to the top of the divine mountain; for example, the Greeks have four realms (Civic, Sophic, Heroic, and Tyrannical) with ten sub-levels in each realm. And so forth and so forth for every culture on the planet.
• A Father to His Men: Sol provides direction and emotional support to the heroes he has gathered beneath his banner and was the same as his legion when they lived. Caesar was much the same way when we see his last message to his soldiers in Ivy's memory.
• Foreshadowing: There are several hints that Griffon Is the son of the comatose Scarlet Oracle, Calliope.
  • The sunkissed blessing can come from the sun god itself, or from a parent, and Griffon was never kissed upon the brow by the sun god's corpse. However he was still blessed by the sun god when the corpse laid its hand on Griffon's face as an infant.
  • Damon and Polyzalus both hate each other.
  • Griffon knows that Selene is not the Scarlet Oracle when he first sees her.
  • Griffon can withstand the full majesty of not just one but three Oracles as a Philosopher.
• The Gadfly:
  • Griffon routinely needles people to see how they react or put them off-balance.
  • Appropriate to his historical character, Socrates regularly showcases a profound talent to get under people's skin with a pointed question. After all, he is the gadfly.
• Giant Woman: The Amazons of the Blind Maiden cult pride themselves on being bigger, stronger, and faster than everyone, especially men. Their Tyrant is at a gigantic height of twelve feet tall.
• Gravity Master: Sol's usage of Gravitas, while carrying far more complex metaphysical connotations, is still basically this, a massive and versatile gravity-manipulation attack.
• Have You Seen My God?: The Olympian pantheon is recognized by various titles—Zeus the Father, Hera the Mother, etc.—but no one in the Free Mediterranean can remember their names, their respective oracles cannot hear their voices, and the various examples of art and statuary have their faces excised. The only exception to the above would seem to be the Muses, who are known, recognized, and very much appreciated by cultivators who manage to contact them. Although the events surrounding the melee that destroys Olympia imply that even the Muses have their own agenda.
• Healing Factor: Cultivators can mend wounds much more rapidly than ordinary biology would allow, but are still vulnerable to lasting injury and death by violence. Monsters, with divine ichor in their veins, aren't. Presumably, this would also apply to the gods, which raises the question of what happened to them.
• Height Angst: Ivy, the daughter of the Amazon tyrant Minythyia (otherwise known as Thalestris) and the Conqueror Alexander, has a severe case. The Amazons have been conducting their own eugenics program for generations and expect each daughter to surpass her mother in stature and strength, especially the line of queens. Ivy broke that chain; she topped out at five feet tall at age twelve when her mother was seven feet and still growing. Years later, Ivy still has a severe complex about her height.
• Heroic Build: Most of the cast; Greek cultivation encourages improving one's body, mind, and soul in equal measure, so a balanced philosopher is likely ripped. Additionally, every Greek cultivator of the Heroic realm and the Tyrant realm has grown far bigger than any mortal man can ever be.
• History Repeats:
  • Griffon and Sol witness multiple cycles of history during their visit to the Orphic House, potentially from the viewpoint of previous incarnations of Bakkhos, the Tyrant Riot. The world is seemingly worn thinner with each cycle.
  • In their youth, the brothers Aetos—Damon, Anargyros, Stavros, and Fotios—took to the sea in a ship of their own making in pursuit of glory. One generation later, Stavros's second son Myron does the same.
• Hungry Weapon: A certain sword proves to be more than just a sword.
• Jerkass Gods: The Muses, one of the few remnants of the Olympian pantheon seem to manipulate the Greek Heroes under their care. Complicating matters, they might not even be a united front; Scythas personally encounters two different iterations of his own Muse, Urania, and despite sharing a name and face, they act very differently.
• Ki Manipulation: Every cultivator's energy to enact their mystery faith and be a cultivator is named pneuma (vital breath); every action a cultivator takes is made with pneuma to enhance it.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Griffon turns out to have been this all along. as every opinion he ever had in the start of the first book is proven completely wrong.
• Last Stand: When Solus and his men receive the news that Rome had been destroyed, they resolve to face the enemy with everything they have left.
• Last of His Kind: Solus when we first meet him is the last Roman after the demon legions of Carthage burn and salt Rome to the ground and his own legion is massacred in the last fight against the dogs. Averted somewhat with Caesar's Edict, where we see that Caesar has opened a hole in the sky and scattered the Roman legions to safer shores to cleanse them from the crows in their ranks, so Sol isn't the only Roman left anymore.
• The Legions of Hell: The army that destroyed Rome is described as a dog-faced demonic horde wearing the armor of a dead nation, Carthage. Solus was unnerved to witness that they, too, have access to cultivation.
• Living Memory: When Griffon draws the King's Curse, it (eventually) summons an echo of the Conqueror. Whatever its true nature, the similarity was enough to distract Ptolemy.
• Magic A Is Magic A: Multiple cultivation styles exist throughout the Free Mediterranean and beyond, each with its special take on the ascent toward divinity.
  • The Greek "stairway to heaven" focuses on personal refinement and expansion of influence, from Citizen to Tyrant.
  • The Romans had the Cursus Honorum to coordinate and empower groups. The city's loss makes it unclear how this path would function.
  • Roman legions encountered cultivators among the Gauls.
  • Solus mentions some details regarding Egyptian cultivation during the visit to the Orphic House. Mummification is a component.
  • The Macedonians call their cultivation "the hitching of the stars." It's similar enough to the Greek method to allow Ptolemy to stand among Tyrants, with the foundational difference that unlike a Tyrant, Ptolemy still had his heart.
• Magical Society: The Free Mediterranean is de facto ruled by the cults of a greater mystery, organizations of cultivators built around, well, anomalous things that lack sufficient explanation to be readily comprehensible. There are also cults of lesser mystery, often founded on the acts and legacies of Heroic realm cultivators.
• Mark of the Supernatural: Sun-touched individuals are marked by their blonde hair and red eyes. Griffon has both, as does the Scarlet Oracle Selene. And so did Calliope, the young oracle rescued by the brothers Aetos in Stavros's flashback sequence. As Selene and Griffon's mother, this only makes sense.
• Master-Apprentice Chain: Socrates taught Plato ("the Broad"), who taught Aristotle, who taught Solus, Alexander, and Damon Aetos.
• Meaningful Name:
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: Variation; when Griffon and Sol don their raven's shadow-mantles, they forget their names and become "the raven on the left" and "the raven on the right."
• My Greatest Failure: Sol's heart demon is wrapped up in the guilt he feels in leading his men to their deaths in his last battle against the Carthaginians following the fall of Rome.
• The Needless: The higher a cultivator ascends the divine ladder, the less his bodily functions matter to him regarding food, water, and sleep. Greek Tyrants even sacrifice their own hearts. However, everyone still needs to breathe.
• Never Found the Body: Alexander the Conqueror may have disappeared into India centuries prior, but that does not prevent the average Hellene from worrying about his return. Hence when the memory of Alexander marks Griffon as his heir, it paints a target right on his back.
• Not Quite Flight: Heaven strikes down anyone who succeeds at true flight. Cultivators being cultivators, this doesn't stop anyone from trying.
  • Scythas, as a powerful wind-bender, comes closer than most.
• Old Master: Socrates, Aristotle, and other great Greek philosophers remain influential figures in the setting, as well as remaining alive and potent years past their historical death dates through the benefits of cultivation.
• Painting the Medium: While he has the King's Curse drawn, Griffon can read significant developments in other's cultivation; e.g., Scythas returning to the field with stone Urania in his shadow and a sickle in hand becomes Scythas Reaps the Whirlwind; meanwhile, Jason leaping into the sea that brings him such dread in order to rescue his comrades becomes Jason Goes Down with the Ship.
• Perception Filter: Socrates and Aristotle can use two versions of that ability, one is to separate the user from the reputation that he has garnered but otherwise leaving the person still there as someone that can be debated with, while the second one just deletes you from the perception of others.
• Perpetual Storm: The Storm That Never Ceases is, as the name says, a storm filled with tribulation lightning that condemns man's hubris. The Greek world's premier mystery cult/sect (the Raging Heaven cult) takes its name and initiation rites from it. The Storm is a prison in which Prometheus the Flame is kept, a tribulation prison he got stuck in after molding the human race by The Father of the Gods. And so because of that, he is currently the only known living divinity on the face of the Greek world.
• Person of Mass Destruction: While martially inclined Heroes are armies unto themselves, Tyrants are an order beyond. This is demonstrated during the aftermath of the Olympia Incident, i.e. Polyzalus understandably losing his temper after his wife's death. He and the other seven Tyrants Bakkhos had dragged to Olympia turn all their might and skill against each other. Thousands of people die, mortals and cultivators alike, as the city is torn apart.
• Pieces of God: The eight cults of greater mystery are so named because each of them has a foundational object or phenomenon that provides divine inspiration and direction along the path of cultivation. The Rosy Dawn's mystery is one half of the bisected corpse of the sun god, with their counterparts in the Burning Dusk holding the other.
• Punched Across the Room: A particularly favorite trick of Socrates. Usually, his opponents don't even realize they've been hit until they try to move and find themselves stuck in rubble half a mile away
• The Queen's Latin: On the audiobook, Solus, a Roman, is given a Mid-Atlantic/British accent by Zachary Johnson, while the rest of the cast, who voice Greeks, use American accents.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: As the Fifth Legion pressed further into western Europe, they started recruiting locally to replenish the ranks. Somewhat downplayed, as the Celtic recruits were considered Roman and treated accordingly.
• Raijū: The Storm That Never Ceases is infested with lightning-fleshed tribulation hounds.
• Reality Warper: Tyrants can manifest their ethos to directly control their surroundings. This is similar to a Philosopher's truths but comes from a perspective of overriding reality instead of comprehending it. While undeniably potent, there are limitations; Tyrants who forsake or countermand their ethos risk crippling their souls.
• Red Baron: Cultivators naturally accumulate sobriquets in light of their identity and achievements. Regarding the narrative, each point-of-view character has their segment introduced with such a phrase whether they're a cultivator or not. Some examples:
  • Lio Aetos, the Young Griffon ^note He prefers Griffon, which only makes sense considering his name is Lion Eagle. The Risen Flame
  • Solus, the Last Son of Rome
  • Elissa, the Sword Song
  • Scythas, Hero of the Scything Squall
• Refuge in Audacity: Griffon's modus operandi is to start with a seven in situations that might call for a three and keep ramping up from there. Pick a fight with a Heroic-tier Young Aristocrat in a drinking club his family owns? Sure, why not?
• The Scottish Trope: It is a rare Greek who is willing to call Alexander by name; he is instead referred to as "the Conqueror." This even extends to the city he founded in Egypt; rather than Alexandria, Greeks refer to it as "the Conqueror's Pearl."
• Sea Monster:
  • In Stavros's flashback the Aetos brothers fought drakaina, a tremendous Sea Serpent with a woman's features.
  • A piscine siren possessed by Melpomene ambushes the Eos while fleeing the smouldering ruins of Olympia.
• Seers: Somewhat averted. While there are several oracles in this world - seers of the gods and prophecy givers - none are functional seers because the gods have died, and so they can't tell their oracles prophecies anymore. The oracles are still the most divine existence on the planet other than the Muses, though.
• Sex Magic: Xianxia-style "dual cultivation" also exists in this setting. The Amazons use it to take everything from the other participant while only giving out a drop out of themselves as they drink deeply from the ocean that is the other, thus giving them the name man-eaters.
• Shaping Your Attacks: The ability to shape the breath you wield into intent is an ability that only the truly talented have; with it, you can make a sword, spear, arrows, and more. Only the best can make multiple of the same intent, such as Griffon or some heroes.
• Shared Signature Move: The hereditary special technique of the Aetos family is the hunting bird's breath, a series of pneumatic chambers carved out of one's bones that allow a cultivator to store extra breath for moments of extremity. Curiously, it was not taught to the younger generation until Myron learned it from his cousin Niko.
• Slashed Throat: Upon waking from her coma thanks to the healing power of nectar, Calliope cuts her own throat after Griffon introduces himself as her son.
• Spirit Advisor: Greek cultivators of the Heroic realm frequently contact the Muses.
• Spirit Cultivation Genre: As it says on the tin, the series takes all the conventional tropes of Chinese Xianxia and implements them through the lens of Greco-Roman Philosophy and Mythology.
• Unknown Relative: Hoo-boy. From the story's beginning, Griffon's identity as the son of the Rosy Dawn's kyrios Damon Aetos is an established fact, but no mention is made of his mother. She turns out to be the Scarlet Oracle emerita, Calliope, wife to Polyzalus of the Burning Dusk and mother to the current Scarlet Oracle, Selene.
• Uplifted Animal: Cultivation is not limited to humans. Animals that have begun to refine themselves are known as "virtuous beasts" and develop new abilities.
• Wham Episode: The Olympia Incident includes numerous developments of personal, political, and geographical importance in rapid sequence.
• With Great Power Comes Great Hotness: As one climbs to godhood up the mountain, they all refine themselves into the perfect shape they can ever be. There is no such thing as an ugly cultivator unless it comes through wounds.
• Wizards Live Longer: As one advance on the divine mountain, their age begins to slow down as one climbs higher and higher. A Civic Captain will not live longer than a thousand years. However, a Captain of the Sophic Realm will live for ten thousand years at most. That chain goes up by ten for every level you climb. So a captain of the tyrant realm would be able to live approximately a million years.

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