Fanfic / Sect

'I'm so fucking pissed off right now it hurts, Taylor,' Xifeng said in her thoughts. 'I'm going to fucking murder this bitch.'

— Xifeng

Sect, written by Ryuugi, is a Worm story set after Gold Morning, where Taylor saves the world, gets two bullets to the head, and wakes up in another world as something not quite a ghost, attached to a lost little girl who's been locked in a room and fed nothing but poison for all of her life.

Needless to say, this ends poorly for almost everyone involved.

Combining elements of Worm with the Spirit Cultivation Genre, Sect is the story of Taylor and Xifeng, two lost spirits with nobody else but each other to count on, as they rise up to challenge the current world order. For in a world where every cultivator can challenge the heavens, can there be any limits to the escalation?

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Sect provides examples of:

• The Ace: Xifeng, oddly enough. Despite her terrible childhood and continuing personal issues, Xifeng frequently manifests the sort of talent which would make her an absolutely frightening cultivator on her own merits. When combined with the support of her adoptive mother...
• All There in the Manual: The Information and Apocrypha threadmarks of the story contain a LOT of background information. This includes Chinese mythology, folklore, details on background characters like the Gu and Celestial Monkeys, techniques and trigrams and so on.
• An Ice Person: Songshan Lengshan, leader of the Songshan Sect has an as-yet unnamed Way that appears to be this — but given that with enough exposure, he seems to be able to freeze things like motion, qi and even time itself, it seems to be more of a Semantic Superpower take on "freezing" than any conventional cryokinesis.
• Art Attacker: The Immortal of Architecture ends up pulling this off, using a mural of a man's impalement to stab intruders to death through Sympathetic Magic- an effect which is reinforced by the Immortal of Writing captioning the picture 'You died impaled on six spears.'
  • Later, the Immortal of Theatre ends up trying the same tactic, trapping Xifeng and Qing in the midst of a play in order to force them to commit suicide. It doesn't quite work.
  • The Immortal of Writing can manipulate ink to form or disrupt written material at will.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: A common goal of cultivators, who seek to ascend from Lower Order worlds, such as ours, into Higher Order ones- a process which somewhat complicated by the fact that the distance between a Third Order world and a Second Order world is similar to the one between an atom and a planet.
• Bad Powers, Bad People: The Zhen Sect definitely qualifies. Their toxic tendencies as a poison sect only further magnifies their murderous practices and horrific behaviors.
• Bad Powers, Good People: While Taylor retains her (admittedly grubby) righteous heart, she also makes a habit of getting her hands on problematic, dangerous, or simply frightening powers. Alongside her original insect control, she also acquires a lethal array of poisons and toxins, a technique to destructively fuse anything she desires, and a superspeed ability which produces lethal amounts of radiation as a side effect.
  • Her store of Gu deserves special mention, since even one of them is dangerous enough to qualify as a weapon of mass destruction by Xianxia standards. Taylor has ten, not including the ones in her blood.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Xifeng absolutely qualifies. While normally quiet, awkward, and shy, the girl has a hard limit to how much crap she is willing to take. The last person to cross that line ends up having his body torn apart some one-hundred and fifty thousand times, before Xifeng rides a lightning bolt and explodes him from the inside, out.
• Bizarrchitecture: When Taylor/Xifeng end up hunting down the Immortal of Architecture, they find her in a city which she's already dimensionally twisted into a pretzel, to the point where it's described as 'Imagine a hollow mountain with a city built inside of it, only the mountain is another city'.
• Bizarre Human Biology: As an Immortal's cultivation progresses, their minds, bodies, and souls deviate further and further from human standard, until there is very little in common between the two.
  • Hao Peizhi, Immortal of Perspective, sprouts eyes wherever he is injured, making him very difficult to harm.
  • After undergoing an accelerated Body Reformation, Xifeng ends up with a body of black metallic threads and clothlike skin, covered over with plates of chitin armor, and filled with a toxic, golden ichor which is both her blood and an army of poisonous insects.
    • Later, Xifeng ends up having all of her organs, including her brain, replaced when she ends up constructing a proto-entity out of her soul.
  • The Immortal of Identity is a living ghost who infiltrates a city so thoroughly that it essentially becomes part of his digestive system.
  • Chen Wentong, Immortal of Coincidence, has hands in odd places, including his neck. He uses them to hold his head in place, whenever his main hands are busy.
  • Songshan Mian, The Immortal of Architecture, grows back limbs of stone and wood and pavement when injured.
• The Blank: The ultimate fate of those consumed by the Immortal of Identity.
• Crapsack World: While marginally better than the Death World in which Taylor first lived (and died), the Sacred Lotus Kingdom is still a terrible place to live- especially for mortals, who live within an semi-enforced medieval stasis in order to avoid conflict with especially powerful or sensitive cultivators.
  • Murder by cultivator is alarmingly common, to the point where the risk is simply considered a normal part of doing business with them. Not to mention particularly powerful Immortals who might wipe out entire towns in order to advance their cultivation. Or just as accidental collateral damage in a fight.
  • Dangerous spirit beasts are at least semi-common, with more lethal examples, such as Gu, capable of depopulating entire regions while spreading like a plague.
  • Moreover, the entire region is on the brink of war with their powerful and unscrupulous neighbor.
    • Not to mention what the rest of the world looks like, with an entire continent being reduced to a constant battleground between obscenely powerful cultivators.
• Death of Personality: The goal of the Immortal of Identity, who feeds by eroding a person's thoughts, memories, and identity until only a hollow shell is left.
• DidWeJustHaveTeaWithCthulhu: There are definite shades of this, whenever Taylor or Xifeng end up having conversations with their respective mentors. For all their friendliness and helpfulness, the Red-Bottomed Horse Monkey and Six-Eared Macaque are strange beings from a higher dimension who are immeasurably bigger and stronger than their students, and it shows.
• The Dreaded: Subverted, when the unfortunate Ha Zan attempts to ward off Taylor/Xifeng by mentioning his master, the deadly Tsong Lee. Unfortunately, Taylor/Xifeng have no idea who he is, and aren't of a mind to care regardless.
• Enlightenment Superpowers: A staple of the genre, particularly in the form of Tribulations, which provide great power but require cultivators to unlock some knowledge about themselves or the world in order to get through it.
• Good Is Not Nice: While a righteous soul at heart, Taylor is also a brutal, vicious fighter with a ruthless streak big enough to cheerfully wipe out an entire sect for the crime of harming her adoptive daughter. Which doesn't even get into what she does to the sect leader, or the immortal they end up fighting later...
  • Xifeng, having learned a lot from her adoptive mother, is just as brutal when provoked, and ends up torturing an enemy to near death for his crimes before delivering an Explosive Finish.
• Happily Adopted: Xifeng adores Taylor for being the lone person who cared if she lived, when her birth father and brother wouldn't stop abusing her in progressively worse ways.
• Hive Queen: As always, Taylors ability to control insects turns her into one of these, especially when she gets a spell to summon them with.
  • This gains new meaning when her evolving powers end up turning her into a mobile hive, with blood which can turn into an endless swarm of poisonous insects.
• Humble Goal: Xifeng actually doesn't care about Ascending To A Higher Place Of Existence like basically all the other cultivators, she merely wishes to see a big city and open a shop to sell dresses and eat candy whenever she feels like it. It causes a great deal of confusion when she reveals it because it's that simple.
• Identity Breakdown: Qing is in the process of one of these by the time Taylor/Xifeng manage to rescue her, due to the nature of her imprisonment- an illusion which seemingly forces her to reincarnate until she ends up with a more compliant personality.
• In Harmony with Nature: As an Immortal of Harmony, Xifeng has a natural ability to align herself with the world around her, or vice versa.
• Laser-Guided Karma: The Zhen Sect's poor treatment of Xifeng leads directly to their terrible deaths at Taylor's hands.
• Lightning Bruiser: literally every cultivator for the simple reason that any cultivator without super speed doesn't live very long.
• Loss of Identity: The primary weapon and goal of the Immortal of Identity, who 'digests' the identities of others in order to fuel his own cultivation, leaving them bereft of thought, memory, and their faces.
• Meaningful Rename: The Zhen Sect forces upon every person they abuse to death by poisoning the denomination Xisheng, "sacrifice". Taylor decides it won't do and gives her adoptive daughter the more flattering Xifeng, "flourishing phoenix".
• Mental World: Every cultivator seems to have one of these as a side effect of the process, with the shape, nature, and size depending on the cultivator in question.
  • Taylor's inner world seems to be shard space.
  • Xifeng's inner world is a poisonous swamp, filled with webs.
• Paper Master: The Immortal of Writing, Songshan Bagong, is able to manipulate and even transform some or all of her body into paper, forming vast wings and weapons at will.
• Person of Mass Destruction: While all cultivators above a certain power level technically qualify, a few examples stand out above others.
  • Taylor/Xifeng's ability to spawn enormous plagues of insects, produce clouds of deadly toxins, and output alarming amounts of radiation on basically a whim turns them into a depopulation incident basically waiting to happen.
  • The immortal who sprouted a tree through a mountain almost certainly qualifies as well.
  • While less obvious than other examples of this trope, the fact that the Songshen Immortals of Writing, Theater, and Architecture managed to murder an entire city means that they are good candidates as well. In particular, Mian, Immortal of Architecture, repeatedly manifests powers on a city-sized scale, including the construction of a stone hand the size of a large building.
  • Even Xifeng ends up qualifying, when she ends up taking the role of Bohu in Songshan Kexin's botched play. Taylor's subsequent appearance as Tohu is almost superfluous in the face of Xifeng/Bohu's ability to consume the entire city- or create a hydrogen bomb upon command.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: After going through Spiritual Refinement, Xifeng figures out how to manifest her soul outside of her body-which, considering the construction of the soul in Xianxia land, gives her about six extra bodies worth of limbs to work with.
  • Songshan Kexin seems to have elements of this, with a thin, sheet-like body supported by a multitude of hands and legs.
• Perspective Magic: The primary weapon of Hao Peizhi, the Immortal of Perspective.
• Pest Controller: As always, Taylor remains the plague queen with her ability to control any and every insect within range. The fact that most of her insects now qualify as low-level cultivators merely magnifies her potency.
• Pocket Dimension: As befitting a Xianxia story, there are common enough to be part of the local cosmology.
  • While an odd example, on account of being partially metaphorical, the inner worlds of most cultivators likely qualify, on account of how they are integrated into the Hells upon the cultivators untimely death.
  • Taylor/Xifeng's new body definitely counts, able to contain not only an enormous volume of insects but the mass of over a hundred and fifty thousand people.
  • While a borderline example, Taylor/Xifeng's ability to spin things into silk probably qualifies as well, since the resulting tapestries are significantly larger on the inside, to the point where they can contain entire ecosystems.
• Poisonous Person: A not uncommon methodology among cultivators, with Word of God stating it makes them troublesome enemies to fight, allowing them to reliably punch above their weight class.
  • The Zhen Sect, where the story starts, is all about this, to the point where even weak members can paralyze a family by breathing in their general direction.
  • Upon killing and consuming the majority of the Zhen Sect, starting with their Sect Leader, Taylor/Xifeng were left with the same suite of abilities, albeit several times more powerful.
    • They later discover an ability which produces lethal amounts of radiation as a side effect, further reinforcing this trope.
  • Jincan, and the other Gu children, absolutely qualify, with the ability to manifest a poisonous miasma which can produce physical specters of lethal quality.
• Prison Dimension:
  • Alongside the mortal world and the heavens exists a multitude of Hells, self-contained dimensions which exist to punish and/or redeem the sinful and guilty before returning them to the cycle of reincarnation.
  • Taylor/Xifeng also figure out a technique which allows them to spin enemies into silk, trapping them within a tapestry, allowing their body to be freely manipulated while maintaining their consciousness.
  • During their battles with the Immortals of Writing, Theater, and Architecture, a Gambit Pileup results in all eight of them (Taylor, Xifeng, Qing, the three Songshen Immortals, the Qilin and her wife) getting trapped within Qing's inner-world, where things proceed to go very badly for the Songshen Immortals.
  • Also one of the more useful powers of Songshan Kexin, Immortal of Theater, allowing her to trap her enemies within pre-scripted roles upon a near inescapable stage- though the fact that the barrier between actors and audience works both ways prevents Kexin (or others) from interfering until the script plays out.
• Psychic Surgery: One of Xifeng/Taylor's more useful tricks, which takes advantage of their knowledge of dimensional physics to alternate injured flesh for healthy without actually moving anything.
  • This is what they use to heal Qing's meridians, beginning the plot of the story.
• Razor Floss: A staple of Taylor's arsenal, though it's currently unknown if she maneuvers them with so much subtlety that they cannot be seen, or simply summons them into place as desired.
  • Chapter 4.13 confirms it to be the former, with Taylor letting the threads drift into position by following the natural flow of the world's qi and arranging them so they don't create disturbances until they are needed.
  • A later battle shows Taylor using it as "a murder weapon," wielding her webs and strings to tear apart buildings, Immortals and space-time traps with equally indifferent ease.
• Revenge: Xifeng gets hers when Taylor wipes out the Zhen sect, killing everyone responsible for abusing her.
• Semantic Superpower: A staple of any cultivator above a certain level is their Way, an idea or concept which defines their understanding of the world. While theoretically capable of manifesting any ability, a cultivator's power is always magnified while working within the boundaries of their way, which means that a cultivator's strength lies in finding as many ways as possible to apply their way to the world.
• Shock and Awe: Xifeng's ability to call Heavenly Judgement on the wicked tends to manifest as lightning.
  • The faceless Qilin also exhibits a lightning specialty, which doesn't end well when Taylor turns it back on them.
• Space Master: The Immortal of Architecture, Songshan Mian, expanded her Way into space-manipulation then expanded it even further thanks to everything she learned from the fight with Taylor-and-Xifeng.
  • Xifeng herself manifests a variety of space-bending techniques in the course of their battle.
• Supernaturally-Validated Trans Person: If a Cultivator doesn't identify as the gender they were born as, if/when they become Immortal they can restructure their body to fit their identity, like the Qilin.
• Swiss-Army Superpower: Xifeng's "Kitchen" is a sphere of tuneable physics in which she can cook anything. Pretty soon she figures out that "anything" truly means *anything* if she can conceptualize it right — and the definition of "cook" could be stretched pretty far too.
• Symbiotic Possession: The core of Taylor and Xifeng's relationship, with Xifeng running the body normally while Taylor hangs out in the background as a helpful ghost/shard. It's also an immense source of power for them, since their cultivation has been intimately tied together, basically turning them into a single super cultivator who simply happens to have two minds/souls.
  • Further reinforced by the presence of Queen Administrator, who quickly settles into her old role of managing the growing collective.
• Time Master: Tsong Lee not only makes time distortions with his own power, he figures out to use them as a primitive communication method with a higher power which allows him to travel backwards in time, effectively Save Scumming.
• Transhuman: The essential goal of all cultivators, who seek to replace their merely human state with something grander and more powerful. This makes cultivator anatomy increasingly complicated as they replace bones, skin, and organs with things like light, shadow, and mathematical formulae.
• Villainous Valor: the fight between the Xifeng-Taylor Collective and The Songshan Trio very quickly goes from the protagonists being underdogs to the villains desperately and valiantly fighting to survive, leveling up their skills again and again, at all times frantic inches away from death-by-overpowered-protagonist.
• Yin-Yang Bomb: Taylor's "Annihilating Heaven and Earth Technique" works by colliding yin and yang qi to (among other benefits) give the user a brief but massive burst of super-speed. This is more effective than safer versions of similar techniques, but creates what amounts to magical radiation (which Taylor promptly weaponized), and is dangerous for everyone nearby.
  • Xifeng eventually creates an arguably superior version without the radioactivity that she can use solo via nuclear fusion instead of nuclear fission.

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