The Destiny Cycle series is a forum quest turned Xianxia web novel about Ling Qi, a teenage girl who is sent to her province's academy for spiritual arts when her ability to hear spirits is discovered. While the usual fate for a commoner with talent is to join the army and eventually plateau in power, Ling Qi is determined to drive herself towards loftier goals...
The story is currently comprised of Forge Of Destiny (which covers Ling Qi's first year at the academy), Threads Of Destiny (her second year, which is in progress), and Tales Of Destiny (a series of side stories, usually involving supporting characters or expanding on the lore of the world). New chapters are posted first on Sufficient Velocity.com, often with a vote-in choice for the audience there, then eventually tidied up and published on Royal Road sometime later.
The quest can be read and participated in here
, with an edited version being posted on Royal Road (here).
Tropes in the Destiny Cycle include:
- Deity of Human Origin: Cultivators who reach the peaks of the highest realms attainable have the opportunity to attempt to transcend physical reality entirely, becoming a Great Spirit
- Elemental Powers: Qi exists as a universal natural force permeating every facet of the world and is most commonly and easily seen as various types of elemental energy.
- Fantastic Rank System: Cultivation in the Empire is divided into two categories, spiritual and physical, with each having 8 ranks, referred to as realms, with a varying amount of subranks per realm, referred to as stages.
- Spiritual realms from least to greatest are: Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Indigo, Violet, Prism, White
- Physical realms from least to greatest are: Gold, Silver, Bronze, Iron, Steel, Adamant, Orichalcum, Divine
- Half-Human Hybrid: Spiritbloods are people born from the union of a human and spirit parent and exhibit various traits inherited from their non-human lineage, these traits carry onto subsequent generations though they tend to fade as the blood dilutes with each generation. This is particularly prevalent among the oldest clans of the Empire, who maintain their spiritblood nature with careful breeding, Arts, and medicines.
- Hate Sink: The Hui, the clan that used to rule the Emerald Seas. They maintained power by playing their vassals off one another and by having a robust network of spies, informants, and infiltrators. They were overthrown 150 years before the story starts. With the long lifespan of cultivators, the generation that overthrew the Hui is still in charge. Many of them seem to have made hating the Hui an important part of their Way, especially the Duchess Cai Shenhua. Everything we have seen about the Hui from flashbacks and relics suggests this hate is well deserved.
- Super Powerful Genetics:
- Downplayed, while a child born from cultivators will be more likely to also be capable of cultivating than a child born from mortals it is only possible to raise the floor for innate talent to about average, being born with high talent is entirely random and unpredictable.
- Spiritbloods are born with certain advantages over purely human cultivators, natural Arts, the ability to digest raw beast cores and an uncapped, boosted physical attribute.
