This kind of thing is to be expected, since Cradle is essentially a Death World, but a few instances really stand out.
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Book 1 - Unsouled
- The concept of Remnants, being that when you die, all of the spiritual energy in your body coalesces into a "living" entity that almost always starts out with just basic animal intelligence. The stronger the person, the stronger the Remnant, so if you manage to kill someone but be exhausted afterwards there's a good chance their Remnant will finish you off. Oh, and if they last long enough they can gain a measure of their old intelligence and individuality back.
- Being labelled as Unsouled in the Sacred Valley, you aren't even considered a person, you are forbidden from learning any Path, forbidden from ever marrying, and literally anyone can kill you and the worst punishment they would suffer is a hit to their Honor. Not because of what they did to you but because they lowered themselves to attack something so weak. What's worse is that it's all wrong; Unsouled have nothing wrong with them except a lack of an apparent affinity towards a Path. The Sacred Valley is filled with what the outside world considers to be backwards rubes who don't even practice proper Paths and all the pain and torment that an Unsouled suffers is out of the Sacred Valley's ignorance of this truth.
Book 2 - Soulsmith
- Goldsigns: some of them are super cool Mark of the Supernatural, like Lindon's burning black and red eyes, or something benign like Mercy's permanent gloves, but some can hideously maim someone so that, even if they advance, there's a good chance they'll never look normal again, like Jai Long who is stuck with a Nightmare Face that he is forced to cover with scripted bandages.
- Dreadbeasts, spawn of the Dreadgods that exist only to kill non-Dreadbeasts. They are one of the few natural holders of Hunger Madra and when they kill you nothing remains. To put this in context; normally when you die, you leave a Remnant, when a Dreadbeast kills you, that's it, nothing left. Northstrider has incorporated this into his own Path, called The Path of the Hungry Deep. As of Wintersteel he is now training Lindon who has managed to incorporate this into his Path of the Twin-Stars with the Consume technique.
Book 3 - Blackflame
- What the Path of Black Flame eventually does to its user. Overuse can cause the user immense pain on the spiritual level, eventually driving them insane.
Book 4 - Skysworn
- The Dreadgods, beings so vast and powerful they appear to be part of the landscape and no living creature of any advancement level on Cradle can kill them, including Monarchs. Oh, and one is heading right for the Sacred Valley.
- Blood Shadows, parasites spawned from the Bleeding Phoenix that bore into your spirit and attach themselves to your core. They cannot be removed and feed on blood, wherever it can be found. Best case scenario is that you are able to tame them into a weapon that fights on your side but you're still forced to feed them Blood Madra to keep them under control. Worst case scenario they hollow out your soul and take over your body completely. For example: Mu Enkai was a Lowgold that found a Blood Shadow and used it to take over an entire town, even over the Highgolds that were there, before Lindon put him down. Yerin was infected with a Blood Shadow when she was a child, when the Sword Sage found her it had murdered and fed on her entire village, including her family.
- Monarchs, beings of unimaginable power that can literally hear their own name spoken thousands of miles away and kill someone from that same distance. They rule over Cradle as its supreme leaders, but even they are nothing before The Vroshir and The Abidan: beings of immense power, that move through the Iterations acting as agents of Order. This, of course, does not prevent them from wiping entire worlds out of existence if Chaos grows too strong there. They will at least try to save the populace of that world, but to them A Million Is a Statistic, while The Vroshir are Abidan-level entities that thrive on Chaos and serve The Mad King.
Book 5 - Ghostwater
- What happened to Ziel: An enemy Sage cut his core apart and stitched it back together wrong, on purpose. This would be like breaking someone's arms, legs, and ribs, then forcing them to heal wrong. He is basically crippled as a Sacred Artist, and every waking moment is pain, with almost no hope of ever getting better. The strength he has when we meet him just goes to show how far he was tossed down. Lindon states that if it'd happened to someone weaker, they would have been dead.
- The death of Akura Harmony. Trapped in a Pocket Dimension that is slowly falling apart. Sure he deserved it for the death of Renfei and his treatment of Lindon, but then Northstrider arrives and dashes the last of his hopes with a single word: No.
Book 7 - Uncrowned
- In Cradle, even the trees can kill you if they're old enough or have been exposed to enough aura. The Monarch Emriss Silentborn started out as one such tree - lucky for Cradle she is one of the more benevolent Monarchs.
Book 8 - Wintersteel
- The Madra Engine, a Divine Treasure that is made with a hundred pure madra Remnants. What makes this Nightmare Fuel, is that the only way to reliably harvest pure madra Remnants is from human children. The Madra engine needs 100 to function.
Book 9 - Bloodline
- The Suppression Field inside of Sacred Valley. No matter who or what you are it drains you down to a Jade at most and can leave you open to be murdered by the the Sacred Valley natives.
Book 10 - Reaper
- The Dreadgods and all of their destruction can be laid directly at the feet of the Monarchs. If they didn't try to hold on to their power over Cradle and ascended as they were supposed to, the artificial Hunger Madra would fade away. They all know this, and take oaths to prevent it from getting out.
- For a brief moment it looked as if The Mad King was going to wipe Cradle from existence, and all that anyone from the lowest Foundation to the highest Monarch could do was weep and wait for the end.
Book 11 - Dreadgod
- The Silent King. Everything about him is shrouded in layers of mystery.
- Early on, some of his servants are completely unable to see a dead man, even when they're standing on him. When the Silent King wants you to be peaceful, you will not see anything that could disrupt that peace.
- He needs your permission to gain control of you. But he can trap you in a dream without you even realising it, and keep you there for years while only a second passes in the outside world
- It becomes aware of Lindon and threatens everyone he cares about by name. Lindon gives them all defensive constructs to defeat the mind-control technique... so the Silent King just controls everyone around them and sends endless waves of slaves at them.
Book 12 - Waybound
- Malice is so twisted and petty that she's willing to kill her entire family and start over rather than give up control or ascend.
- The fact that with each Dreadgod they kill Lindon's body is turning more and more into a Dreadgod itself, and that if they don't act fast enough to kill all of the Dreadgods and either force the remaining Monarchs to ascend or die he will fully become a Dreadgod and potentially go out of control and kill them all.
