This is a guide based on me playing through the game a few times. I will not go into detail for the basics, hovering over many items will actually give you a lot of clues with respect to what to do. I also have not fully explored every single spirit's upgrade grid, so I cannot fully judge how good some of them truly are.

So you are warned, the game requires heavy grinding due to heavy reliance on RNG for drops. I may occasionally editorialize parts when I feel they are poorly designed, kindly overlook me voicing my frustrations.

Savescumming refers to the practice of saving before doing something risky, and quitting to the main menu without saving (manually or the end-of-month save) to try again. You will be doing this a lot most likely.

There won't be any screenshots, since to be frank, I'd have to add far too many to cover every aspect in this guide.

I will regularly reference the wiki, you can find it here: Wiki link [tale-of-immortal.fandom.com]

Furthermore, there is a Chinese trainer by XiaoXing, which alleviates a fair amount of questionable design choices. I cannot offer a link here since it's regularly updated, but you should be able to find it with the name, there are also a few English translations of it available.
Alternatively, you may wish to look into Cheat Engine to reduce the mindless grind of certain parts of the game.

If you encounter a an error on launch, try to delete "version.dll" if you are not using mods. If you are, you will have to rename the mangled folder names for melonloader/get an updated melonloader. There are a ton of posts in the forum about this.

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This guide does not feature the content of the sect update in a comprehensive manner, I've just been busy.

The update with the final ascension tiers dropped. The translation is half-done and there're reports of progress-stopping bugs in the English version. I'll just wait until that gets solved.

When you create your character's appearance, you may see a red tag applied. This means you picked a clothing choice that boosts your charm. Charm is largely meaningless, so don't worry about this.

Out of all your starting stats, only four are truly relevant. You should reroll until you have starting fates with meaningful boosts to them if you want to make things easier for yourself:

High Insight will make it easier to learn manuals and more importantly, give you more reroll points for improving traits later. This cannot be increased permanently (except for a breakthrough fate that you shouldn't bother getting), so your starting stat is very important. Aim for at least going over 100, ideally significantly more if you feel like rerolling/using the trainer.

Luck is also very helpful. It cannot be increased permanently (also got a breakthrough fate not worth taking) as well and you will encounter a large amount of random events in the game. Less important than Insight, but helpful.

Starting Attack/Defense makes the very start easier, but the value quickly becomes meaningless. If you can get a boost, it helps, but it's not critical. It's more important on Chaos mode, where you must manage to overcome the very start of the game.

Additionally, Agility is your movement speed in combat. There are only two starting fates that increase this (one for an achievement). The boost is pretty small (20 points) and quickly meaningless, but it does help a bit very early on. You can pass up on boosting this, but it is helpful.

All other stats are either not important to boost or any starting fate becomes meaningless almost immediately.

Just/Demonic isn't very important, the best quest results tend to come from doing Just things, so you will likely tend to slide to that anyway. Although there's a questline much later where you may be compelled to follow the demonic path even as just character, you will shift by 50 to 100 points for it. If you go for the above-mentioned boosts, a few also have a shift to Just to begin with.

Incidentally, almost all starting fates are borderline useless, and the achievements actually add more that you don't need. Getting more achievements makes it harder to get good starting fates. Enjoy the mindnumbing rerolling.

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There're two artifacts now, here's a quick rundown.

The Bagua Jade basically lets you resurrect for free multiple times. It's a failsafe for beginner players, for the first time around. You need to reach a high enough cultivation realm to unlock the other items. According to the patch notes, you can also use it to resurrect allies in the final battles.

The Eye of Providence is an item that lets you learn an enemy skill from bosses if you deal enough damage during its phase. In addition, it grants some vision-related bonuses (one more tile range, see more inventory). Contrary to the Jade, it only lets you escape for free once unless you repair it (not possible on Chaos), though you can just quit instead. Most of the skills aren't that good, but a few have uses.

A loose collection of information you may wish to know ahead of time.

NPCs will steal from you like absolute bastards. Sect members will steal from you. Friends will steal from you. Everybody is a thief. It can get patently absurd when five people in a row try to steal the same item.
They steal martial manuals, ascension materials and even spirit stones from you.
The former include manuals you are studying right now even.
If you are being threatened, check the enemy's cultivation realm (early vs. late doesn't matter much). If it's the same as yours, you should win. If higher, due to the increasing ascension bonuses, you will likely not. Reload. If you run during the fight, you still lose the item.
You can prevent all of this by storing all your manuals and ascension materials in your cave at the end of the month. If you are studying something and it's not done at the end of the month, teleport back, store it in the cave, and only then trigger the new month. This is tedious, I know, and I rather wish this system didn't exist.

Buy teleportation talismans. Always have some handy. Similarly, always upgrade your mounts and equipped ring when you break through.

Just go through the first area relatively quickly, items like the books that increase Specializations start at 5 points in the first region, but give 10 in the second. You don't need any specialization in the first, so you can basically grind the points at twice the speed by going to the second region quickly. Later on, the new sects let you buy required pills too, so alchemy may just not be necessary anymore. You can even skip joining a sect on the lower difficulties, though you may wish to do so anyway for a Sect Breakthrough Fate.

You can and should savescum breakthrough fates (unless on Chaos), item drops if you're hunting the special metal for artifacts, red books from world bosses, as well as specific breakthrough items.
Always save before making pills/artifacts since they can randomly fail.

Mood/Health/Energy can give you a debuff if they drop too low, so rest/use hobby items to top them up (for mood, monster drops/buy in town) occasionally. They're pretty superfluous as systems.

The first four difficulties only change the amount of grinding required, Chaos difficulty prevents you from rerolling breakthrough fates. You can use the rare mushroom drop from the mushroom man to get a second set of fates though.

For whatever reason, a lot of hitboxes in this game are rectangles. You should avoid doing that. In this game it means that some attacks can only be reliably dodged by walking left/right or up/down. You can also attack enemies better from above when they use circular attacks.

The tavern boosts are quite powerful, and you can get one for each drink and each region. You should probably get fully drunk before any major boss later on, on higher difficulty levels.

Sometimes the world simulation is terrible and you get cultivators with a realm of the next region in your tournament/sect promotion. Usually, you just have to accept the loss and move on. They will eventually move to the next region. As you go through the game, the difference between realms becomes bigger, so overcoming it approaches impossible.

Damage is ((TotalAttack - EnemyDefense) / (100 + 10/3*relevantResistance)) * SkillDamage.

I'm leaving out modifiers for the appropriate spots for brevity. Martial resistance applies to all attacks under the martial umbrella (armed+unarmed), spiritual is for all the magical stuff. This means that you must have a high enough attack to meaningfully deal damage, that resistance values are much stronger than they appear and that the skill damage value is actually a multiplier. The attack boost pill counts double in its strength in the formula.

Due to the above, you should always upgrade all skills after a breakthrough to the new tier. The base attack bonuses overpower almost everything since they are multiplicative. It's really only the movement technique where this matters less. A red skill is roughly comparable to a grey/green skill of the next tier, it's that extreme.

Crits compare crit value - crit defense to determine the chance of a crit (it's not that high), and then applies crit damage bonus % - crit defense %. Due to how things scale, defense lags behind and crits become increasingly dangerous as you go through the game. Lategame enemies can crit for 5 times damage, just as warning.

Your spirit roots don't just enable you to learn skills, they also give you a chance to greatly reduce damage from an incoming attack, based on how high your roots are. As added incentive, the strongest attack- and defense-boosting traits are based on your total roots (ATK/DEF per x skill). They make a major difference. Your main source of spirit fruits are sects. You basically have to join one as of the sect update. They seem to give around 2-10 fruits for each type they have in their library each restocking. If you look at the values, you may realize that you need a lot. Thankfully you can also trade spirit fruits 2:1 with the behemoth. This at least lets you quickly upgrade your main element. If you become sect leader and take over other sects, you can expand your elements and get a lot more.

For the random events, they usually have specific outcomes depending on your choice. Do X, get a spirit fruit, or money, etc. You will probably remember most after a while and after trying a few options. The scholar inquiring about love can give you skill fruits by the way.
You will probably see the fortune teller NPC a lot, don't bother. The outcomes aren't worth it.
You can also randomly trigger quests like events. This can include quests you are absolutely not ready for yet. It's usually a good idea to put them off if the dialogue lets you, so you can at least reach the Late realm.

Making money is most easily done by auctioning ascension materials, as well as red or orange skill books from bosses. More in the town section. Sadly, you will only be informed of zone boss spawns in the area you are in, kinda wish you could always see them.

Running depends on your travel speed (mounts boost this) and the enemy count. One enemy makes it easiest, so if you accidentally run into something too powerful, try to run immediately before it summons adds. If you escape with no monsters around, you won't even lose the drops.

You can eat pills before a battle starts by clicking the small + symbols next to the bars.

You should resolve quests by being kind, helpful and willing to talk before fighting. This usually gets you the best results.

Mousewheel zooms the world map camera out. Sadly this setting doesn't stick between restarts.

If you want to test something, you can export and import your saves to create duplicate save files.

The skills are absolutely not balanced all that well. The following are my personal opinions, I have not tested everything in depth and could well be overlooking something. Take this with a grain of salt. Some elements have issues with specific attacks being much stronger than the alternatives. Mix-and-match is an option, but building up special stacks to make the abilities stronger can be outright necessary to reach an acceptable damage output.
You should practically always use Wind Movement, irrespective of your main element.

Sword is a very good beginner skill (and probably the best overall), since it offers excellent damage and AoE. If you roll a good trait for the single-shot LMB, you can even get piercing on it. Even has a Chaos-suitable build by combining Wind movement for complete invincibility.

Blade is lifesteal. Lots of lifesteal. Relatively straightforward to build, suitable for Chaos too. Can utilize breakthrough fates that only make sense for lifesteal builds. Its damage output is pretty lacking, especially early on. You may want to start with Sword first, just for the damage and only later switch. You also want every damage advantage you can get here, so grind those passives. Lastly, you need to build for energy regen since you will be spamming all your skills just to maintain an okay damage output.

Spear is generally considered the worst element in the game. Low damage and inaccurate attacks.

Fist has a rather fun Boss OHKO build with a specific breakthrough fate, but only up to Nightmare. Otherwise somewhat tanky due to shields, though Fire can be much stronger in that regard.

Palm has mediocre damage output and isn't all that good. Some of its attack skills are also flat out terrible compared to others from this element. You must build for status effect stacks to make the RMB skills useful. Since there're three, that means more rolling for books. Many charge skills too, which can cut into DPS if you aren't always getting perfect charges.

Finger has decent AoE, and the chain of explosions RMB overlaps a lot. It suffers heavily from not being able to make use of the Combat Expertise breakthrough fate, which greatly cuts into its damage output. Overall not that strong. It can drain enemies of energy through stacks, but that does absolutely nothing outside of a few specific traits and one artifact.

Fire can be made really tanky, if you grind out manuals with the correct traits or the lifesteal fate, but it is quite the grind. Perfectly suitable for Chaos even. Flamethrower is pretty fun too.

Water is very much lacking in damage, but it gets to freeze enemies, even some bosses and mythical monsters. This lets you skip an attack if you time it right, but you could just use Wind Movement to get past an attack while still attacking. Some bosses are completely immune to crowd control. You should build for energy ponds, which is basically necessary to reach an okay damage output. That will consume energy though, so you need some energy regen or it will drain you quickly if you use the beam LMB. Water Beam is pretty fun for crowd clearing.

Lightning has a really fun chain lightning LMB that just chews through enemies on lower difficulties, really nice for Fallen Valley. Many of its skills have very high hit counts, but its overall damage output is not high.

Wind has the best movement technique in the game, but is otherwise not that good. Damage seems lacking.

Earth's summons can be pretty tanky and good at drawing aggro, even from bosses. Suffers on the damage side though.

Wood has in my impression worse summons than Earth and not that good damage output either. It gets access to poison debuffs stacks though.

Wind is by far the best movement technique. It makes you invulnerable for three seconds (traits can increase this) while you can still attack. It is incredible.
Water movement leaves a clone that aggros enemies, this can be useful against specific bosses.
The vanishing movements (earth, blade, fire, wood) can be used to break AI attack routines for a short bit, but wind is still better.

Generally, AoE skills that leave a red ring area marker (like ultimates) aren't as strong as AoE skills that have no markers like the chain of explosions from one of the Finger RMBs. Since you can overlap them on boss targets, they tend to offer outsized damage. Beams are generally not that strong. Anything with a damage/sec just doesn't seem to be quite as good as other skills, since for a number of skills, the cooldown does not start until the duration is over.
Shotgun-type skills can be good, but you almost always need most of the blast to hit one target for that. And standing right in front of a boss is usually not advisable.

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Rarity is as follows: grey, green, blue, purple, orange, red. For skills, each higher tier of rarity has one more trait than the previous one. Attack skills also get boosts to their base damage. The difference can be up to double the damage from blue to red. This boost is usually very large and a major reason to try to upgrade to red skills. Passive skills similarly receive major base boosts. From blue to red, the difference is about 25% for the base value.

Never forget to upgrade your passives if you are able to. They provide absolutely massive boosts to your stats and keeping them upgraded becomes really important around area 3. You need skill points for them, from NPC interactions and Ascension Tournaments in Towns, see info below.

You can equip up to 8 different passives. You cannot use two passives that boost the same stat, but sometimes traits can boost stats the skill doesn't.

The traits are the other big part of why red skills are king. Having more traits means more boosts, furthermore you can boost traits to the red, highest, level. Some of the traits are even critical for making builds work, good luck getting them to drop on skills you want.
Incidentally, around area 4 you will have to grind materials to upgrade skills since doing so through combat becomes prohibitive.

Rerolling traits (Comprehend) makes sense until more than half are of the highest tier of the skill. You probably won't have enough reroll points to go much beyond that. You cannot change the nature of a trait, only the strength of the boost. Reroll points depend on your spirit roots and insight, which is why the latter is so important. Unlearning skills to free slots gives you some Comprehension stuff.

Item drops from world bosses can be rerolled, but the active skill that gets dropped depends on your highest spirit root (the passive does not). If you go with a single-element build, you absolutely want to make sure that it's also your highest spirit root for a guaranteed source of red books. There are no other guaranteed sources. This is incidentally one of the major issues with upgrading your skills, pray for good RNG. There are a few events that permanently increase some of the spirit roots (elemental ones, sometimes all the martial ones), so you may wish to keep a bit of a gap to counteract this.

The other source of red skills is the auction and the ultimate+passive set that the sect has. That's it. Before region 3/4, you can do just fine with purple/orange on Normal though.
Potentially outdated info: Sects have +crit +physres and +elemres books, world bosses drop atk, def and vit, the remaining two are only found in auctions. Since Sect stats are supposed to increase the value of manuals, maybe you can push it to red manuals now?

You should basically always go for the optimal breakthrough, with the highest rarity items, since it really doesn't take that much more time usually and the stat boosts add up. Especially on difficulties higher than Normal. You should generally value attack/defense boosts over increases to Vitality etc.. Lower tier breakthroughs give you fewer fates to choose from in addition to lower stats.

The purity of the elemental Qi pearls does not matter for the stat boost you get from ascending a realm. You can use 10% or 99% pearls, you get the same stats. They only affect the likelihood of getting a lightning tribulation, which aren't really an issue. Purity only matters for reaching Enlightenment, the purity of the dao souls actually influences your stats. The difference is quite minor though and not really worth caring about much.

The minor breakthroughs require a specific pill, just buy it in a town/city.

Only cities (the bigger, blue map icon) offer stuff for the second realm tier of a region.
Incidentally, there are only appropriate recovery/buff pills for every second breakthrough tier, this means that in the latter tier of a region, you won't really have good pills.

Always remember to upgrade your attack skills and your passives after a breakthrough.

The later you go, the larger the bonuses for breakthroughs are. Unfortunately this also means that it becomes less and less possible to defeat higher tier NPCs. You can if they're still Early and you have tavern boosts +an artifact with a good spirit, but it may well prove impossible.
Honestly, I find that mildly upsetting since surmounting a realm is a core concept of cultivation novel power fantasies, kinda wish the boosting pills were stronger, but harmed you too or something.

Every breakthrough has a chance to fail. When that happens you get a lightning tribulation. You can savescum this, or you can endure it with Wind movement + pills. It doesn't even scale up in the later tiers so it actually becomes less threatening over time.

Fates are a difficult topic since some are build-dependent, but the gist is that most are bad. Expect rerolling. Many come in tiers with later ones offering better boosts. When you pick a tier I skill, you are much more likely to see the later tiers. You can look towards the bottom of the guide for an overview. Generally speaking, only combat-relevant fates are useful.

If you ever can't find something, you should continue exploring the region you are in. All important areas are marked on your world map once you've found them. You can also buy special talismans from stores that allow you to find nearby special zones.

The sect update added specific breakthrough fates for sect. They appear in the menu if you break through in the cultivation room of your sect. A few of these seem entirely too powerful.

NPCs have special breakthrough fates related to the Wayborn path. It does not seem like you can get them currently.

On Chaos, you can't reroll your breakthrough fates, but you can get a different set if you use the Strange Mushroom. It does not work like that for sect breakthrough fates. It only replaces one of the 6 choices you would have normally if you didn't use the mushroom. That said, some sect fates are so insanely good, they're worth taking if your alternatives are bad.

This is the first introductory segment after the tutorial. You should know how the basics work. You need pills from stores for minor breakthroughs, and items for the breakthrough to Foundation (II).

As a general rule, always pick the highest ascension route. The bonus stats make the new cultivation realm easier.

You cannot use an ascension item more than once, even if you have duplicates.

To go to Foundation you need 3 special items (for the Heaven Path). The stronger ones come from the "Land of Spirits". These are special places that cost 500 Spirit Stones to enter. After you pay, you enter a dungeon and the boss at the end is guaranteed to drop a specific item of the three. In short, you need to find and visit all three Lands of Spirits. Do not confuse these with the Lands of the Arcane. Those places cost 1000 stones and will murder you right now.

The second part are the Qi Pearls. In the region, you can find 6 separate elemental zones. You should spend time early on just mapping everything out for this purpose. Occasionally a zone boss will spawn and you will be notified. If you hurry over (you get about 3-6 months), you can kill them and get a guaranteed Qi Pearl of high purity of the associated element. The bosses will also drop a purple ascension material and possibly artifact rare metals. Do not throw the last one away.

For this region and all others where it matters, you can buy talismans that highlight nearby elemental zones if you have trouble finding them. Although usually you should just explore everything to find all the towns, sects, special spots, etc.

If you have no luck with spawns, you can manually make Qi Pearls. If you fight monsters in the appropriate elemental zone (don't confuse wind and lightning by the way), you will get Qi Pearl fragments of an element. In towns you can synthesize 100 of these into Qi Pearls, usually of lower purity.

Purity of Qi Pearls doesn't matter, it only affects your chance of getting a lightning tribulation, which is not an issue if you got some healing pills in your slots.

Remember to pick a good fate and upgrade your skills to Foundation (II) tier.
Unused ascension materials make for good gifts, or can be auctioned.

You should try to get through this step relatively quickly, since the specialization books in region 2 are worth 10 points. There's little point in trying to grind for Alchemy and so on in region 1.

Foundation is quite similar to the first realm. You should have noticed that you got a lot more stats and are fairly more powerful. Get skills for the new tier, the difference will be noticable. You can only do that in the primary city now. While you're there, upgrade your ring and your mount.

Incidentally, there are no healing pills for the Foundation level and the Qi pills aren't very strong anymore. This will happen in every region for the second cultivation tier and is quite bothersome.

You need 4 treasures for the final step. One drops from the left world boss in the Lei Ze area, to the lower right. You are automatically attacked in it, so be ready with pills and a teleportation talisman.
Three more can come from the Lands of the Arcane, the ones that cost 1000 stones mentioned in the previous section. It's the same as before, dungeon, boss, guaranteed specific drop.

The lesser treasures are random drops from the lesser bosses (no red skull map marker) in the Lei Ze area.

You also need a breakthrough pill with herbs from the Lei Ze region. You can have the workshop of the city craft them for you, buy it from your sect or craft them yourself via Alchemy. The latter however is a waste of time, grinding Alchemy up is better done later. Just prepare for a potential tribulation if you fail the roll.

Once you've broken through, you need to go through the lower right to the next area. Once a month ends in the new region, you will be basically kicked out of your sect and free to continue in the branch of the new region or choose a new one. If you became sect leader of the single non-branch sect in region 1, you will have to transfer it.

You should now shift to the bottom right region, past Lei Ze. As always, get new skills, equipment and so on.

There're some new things in this region. You can take part in the Ascension Tournament once you reach the fourth tier, and you can get started on forging artifacts if you want to go through that grind.
The books for Specialization skills are now worth 10 points and you may as well get started on that grind once you are Late Qi Condensation or Golden Core.

Avoid going to the upper right of the ocean, you will trigger a bossfight you have no hope of surviving. A questline will resolve this later.

You can decide what sect you want to join here. If you pick a non-branch sect, you can actually become sect leader in them and start sect wars and more. In return they will be more limited with fewer elements for skill books and fewer spirit fruits until you change that as leader. You can even create branch sects yourself in later regions.

To progress, you need to find the four Spiritlock Circles, they tend to be in the lower right. When you enter, a turtle will demand G4 Spirit Fruits from this region from you, 3 for each circle. You will then have to survive an endurance fight while protecting the turtle. Enemies will mostly target the turtle, having mob clearing ability is pretty important. It's not particularly difficult on Normal however. After finishing, you get a treasure. The lesser treasures can be gained if you do this again, or as drops from the elemental zones, but there's really no reason to.

You also got another world boss to kill, this time to the lower right in Lei Ze.

Lastly, you need Qi Pearls again, it works the same as before. Kill bosses spawning in the elemental zones or get pearl fragments and synthesize. The lesser breakthrough requires herbs from north of the filled in area, where you get attacked automatically.

If you're doing the Golden Crow questline from the previous area, you can now finish the fight. You have a single chance to learn a skill if you have the Eye of Providence, but the fight should be tough enough that you will not be able to skip it.

During the Filling the Land quest, you will be given a choice to save the girl. The decrease is permanent, but most builds have no use for Focus. She's added to your cave and gives you items depending on the hearts. You can increase them by giving gifts, but even at 5 hearts, I have not gotten anything but junk from her. However, it seems that a new quest was added that she's involved with, which gets you a new bossfight. Keep her around I guess.

If you joined a sect, register for the Ascension Tournament. You want those skill points badly.

Treasures are the same, only now they are to the north of the filled in area (Hundred Mountains, the place where you will be attacked automatically) in Demonseal Circles. And the turtles demand 5 fruits each, but thankfully there're only 3 circles. The world boss is in the new area, but there's a new snag.
While doing the Filling In quest, keep in mind that if you have the Eye of Providence, the Leviathan has an attack you can only learn at this time. I don't think you can refight it anywhere. But the fight is long enough that you probably can't miss it.

The pill can be bought from your sect or you make it yourself.

Making the pill requires learning alchemy, the workshop will tell you the recipe is too complicated. Thus you must grind your alchemy in this region. The real challenge will be the herbs. You're going to wonder where you can get them from since you won't have them yet. There's a dungeon spot called Cloud Cave in Hundred Mountains (the northern area where you get automatically attacked). In it, you can sacrifice 50 herbs (any will do) to summon very resilient mandragora and tree minibosses for a limited time. You won't deal much damage unless you seriously upgraded yourself, but you can also just trigger it over and over. Almost every kill drops the herbs you need, trees drop more. Good mobclear makes this easier.

With that, it's done. Register yourself for the ascension tournament one last time before it's time to go.

Welcome to the first region where things will be a bit tougher. Expect to spend a fair amount of time here, in addition to having to upgrade your skills more than before.

Incidentally, this is worst ascension method out of them all. Just so you are warned. The pill must be made by yourself again, so you will need to upgrade your alchemy (and herbology if you want decent drop rates).

The superfuntime is getting the heavenly treasures. One is a world boss as usual, but the rest are RNG of the worst kind. First you need to identify Lands of Beyond. You inject your divine sense and are taken to a combat arena.

Your goal is to destroy the Array Core in the middle, while being attacked by monsters and constantly taking damage from the area. If you are reasonably upgraded, this should pose no problem. Lifesteal makes it a joke.

This will give you a map item. If you pay Spirit Stones, it will show you a spot on the map where you must use Feng Shui nearby to find it. Do not go into the snow area, you are not ready for it.
You will find a cave with a fox boss that can be pretty tanky. Once it's finally dead (wind movement is good), it will give you... a completely random treasure. Including the worse ones. Or duplicates. Or even none at all if it feels like it. You need a new map for each treasure, but you can savescum the bossfight itself.
If you want the optimal treasures, prepare for a lot of tries to get the last missing one if you're unlucky. (I needed about 30...)

I really strongly hope this breakthrough will be reworked, especially since the next tier is the best in the game.

The Land of Origin/Land of Beginning work the same as the elemental zones from before, but there's only two this time. Just get the Heaven Qi. You can also go via a pill, but why? Earth Qi is good for selling.

Welcome to the one ascension segment that I think is actually fun. It's quite involved and very difficult. You are now powerful enough to survive in the northern ice area.

First step, upgrade your skills. You will likely spend a lot of time preparing in this breakthrough, so work towards getting red skills. If you have a monoelemental build and it's your highest spirit root, you can kill the hundred mountains area world boss to get red attack skills, and a sect for some red passives. You should probably also visit the auction a few times, and possibly grind up your spirit roots. The latter will let you use a lot more passives and you're going to spend a lot of time preparing here anyway. Upgrade your skills and Comprehend them too. Take part in the Ascension Tournaments for skill points.

Now for the breakthrough. When you go into the northern ice area, you will be given a special scroll, read it to start gathering 5 souls. In the area, you can find 5 special zones. If you enter them, you will be attacked by a guardian. They are pretty strong if you are unprepared, but appropriate tier skills will best them pretty easily. The water guardian can summon clones that attack too, you can just stay away from them. Each guardian will give you a quest to fulfill after you beat them.

Gouchen wants a pill you need to make with the recipe from the workshop, quality doesn't matter. Herbs are from Everfrost.
Xuangui wants three ascension materials from a Land of No Return. It works the same with the maps from the previous tier, BUT this time the quality of the items doesn't matter.
Jialong requires an Immortal Lingzhi, which is a drop from the ice area world boss. The ice protection only lasts two years, so only end the quest once you are ready.
Chongming requires you to use the crystal in your Other inventory to find a spot like the maps, then get stone for the guardian. This involves a lengthy fight against the untamed. You need to survive for 2 minutes while killing them quickly enough to keep the enemy count below 50. Pretty much a DPS check. If you can't do this, you aren't ready for the bosses anyway.
Luwu's Kunlun Wood just has a quest marker. You will then fight Coatl and Harpy bosses at the same time, they can be pretty tough if your passives aren't up to par. I recommend focussing Coatl (the bell chime) down first.

Once a quest is done, you can challenge a unique boss. All of them are really powerful. You are hopefully prepared with good skills, passives and plenty of healing pills, preferably the highest quality. You will need them. If Wind Movement doesn't cut it, give Water a try. The clone draws aggro from some of the bosses, which is really convenient. Doubly so if you have reduced CD. Other options are specific traits like granting shield on energy use, energy and health recovery when low, or going through the grind for artifacts.

I won't spoil the bosses, they're pretty neat.

Once you beat a boss, you earn a soul fragment. You need to Use it in your inventory to add it to your rotation and to gain its boosts temporarily. It's in the Materials tab.

Next you must forge an immortal soul via climbing the Stairway To Heaven, always located near the city. This is a very long endurance slog. Make sure you are fully stocked with pills. Your skills are hopefully prepared due to the previous bosses. You can use pills before the battle starts by clicking the small + symbols next to your bars.

You are given a 2x5 area that represents the stairway, with one area marked as boss. In each area, you must fight a set of normal enemies or minibosses. Once all are defeated, you gain a soul fragment. You can pick one of three, generally just pick the highest attack/defense combo.

You can cut your soul gathering short if you go straight for the boss, but why do that when you can gain greater power?

I would suggest wind movement and triggering it immediately the moment the first battle starts. I've had enemies spawn directly around me and take me down to half health with little time to react. That only happened in the first area however.

Once you got as many soul fragments as you want out of 9 max, fight the boss. It's not particularly strong, but some of the attacks are not really avoidable. If you still got plenty of pills, you will be just fine.

Now you must create your soul. You sacrifice four fragments, and keep one as foundation (the one you don't select). The kept soul will give you special boosts which you can see in the description.

Honestly, as far as I can tell Jianlong (blue dragon) is just the best choice for non-lifesteal builds. The attack boost is massive for boss fights and it gets a very powerful special attack too (8000 base), triggered every three RMBs. If you have an RMB CD reduction setup, this becomes very powerful. Passive boosts also increase attack even more.
Xuangui (turtle) can help in certain builds (lifesteal), and deals damage as you take damage (1000 base, weak compared to others).
Gouchen (red dragon) gets a full sealing + damage skill that triggers on ultimates (1000 / sec base). Since those have long cooldowns, this isn't that strong. Sealing works against everything though.
Luwu (white tiger), movement speed boost and summons a spirit that deals (seemingly low? 300/sec base) damage whenever you use a movement skill. Unless you have a movement CD reduction setup, this seems weak.
Chongming (green bird), restores health whenever you enter a room below 50%, deals a fairly large chunk of damage (5000 base) every time you get hit. Good combo for lifesteal.

And you're done. Next up is a horrible grind. If you run into the giant do not continue the questline until you are in Enlightenment (VIII) if you want to complete it fully. Furthermore, you should perhaps stay here for a while and take part in tournaments to gain skill points. The next ascension will take a lot of time before you're ready for the next region's tournament.

This is going to be long and pretty difficult. You really should update your skills and passives for the new tier. Also, more alchemy grinding for the pill.

Explore the area to find the strange new dungeons, there will be six total. Each will have two colors together, representing a combination of two elements for the dungeon. In those dungeon, you can find tao stones of the colors that the dungeon's entrance has. Each type of stone has two associated elements, which are in the dungeon's name.

Your first order of business is to go into the dungeons, fight enemies (up to the third room, read the next two sections first) and get 1500-2000 of each color of tao stone. Yeah, this is a pretty long grind, but you will need them, trust me.


A dungeon consists of five rooms in a row, ending with a boss fight with one of two bosses. They are dungeon-specific and you should make note which dungeon's bosses you can defeat easily for later.

• 1. Basic mobs and minibosses, each dungeon has its own set of mobs.
  
• 2. More of the same
  
• 3. A boss that will be weak usually and easy to defeat.
  
• 4. A group of minibosses combined with a cultivator. Depending on the skills the cultivator rolls, they can be pretty strong. The camera will lock when you kill the cultivator, you can be hit while that happens.
  
• 5. Each dungeon has 2 associated bosses, one of them is randomly picked for the fight. They are all very powerful if you aren't heavily upgraded.

Once you have cleared a room, the action will stop and a two-colored symbol of the dungeon will spawn in the middle. If you touch it, you will continue fighting. If you want to get out instead, hit ESC, and run from the dungeon. Since combat is over, you will keep all the tao stones you got so far. In terms of speed, it's usually best to clear the third room and then run. The cultivator can be a gamble with their skills and potentially a miniboss that can stun you.

After you clear a room, you can choose to continue by touching the symbol in the middle. You will be shown a new screen where two new modifiers are determined for the rest of the dungeon, ending in 8 modifiers if you finish the dungeon. These can range from giving enemies health regeneration, damage boosts, to guaranteed crits, increased attack cooldowns and more.
A modifier has an associated element, number and color. The element matters for Tao souls, the numbers too and indicate the strength of the modifier, the color is for rerolling.

A modifier will only appear if your spirit root of the element is above a threshold. 5 points modifiers are always on, 10 requires >100, 15 means > 200 and 20 point modifiers require a spirit root of their element of over 300. You may find out you have to grind fruits for a while here. Alternatively, having low spirit roots can prevent some of the more dangerous modifiers from appearing.

If you encounter a modifier that is too dangerous (like 5 guaranteed crits), you can click the arrow below to reroll the modifier. This costs Tao stones of the color of the modifier. Every 3 rolls, the cost goes up by 5 stones per reroll for all existing modifiers. This cost is reset if you move on to the next room.

Now you should prepare to get yourself at least 1000, ideally over 1500 tao stones of every color. since you will be rerolling a lot to get your ideal tao souls. Ignore the part in the middle of the modifiers until you are ready.

After you got enough stones, and hopefully have powered up your character, you should attempt a few runs to the end, to see if you can beat a boss from a dungeon. You will need to in order to gain the Tao Souls for ascension. You can just sell the tao souls in the auction, they're a really good way of making a lot of money.

The Tao souls you gain will grant you a new domain ability once you ascend. The properties of said domain are determined by the primary and secondary tao soul elements. The primary (Stat) determines the effect, the secondary (Substat) provide boosts to the statistics. If you have the same primary more than once, it will add up to a different law. (Two sword souls + 1 wood primary soul give a mixed level 2 sword and level 1 wood domain, 3 primary means level 3 of that one element.)

You may be tempted to just get a domain for your primary element, but that's not a good idea. Many domain effects are unfortunately not very good.
Wiki entry[tale-of-immortal.fandom.com]
Sword 3 with Spear and Wood (extended duration) is good for many builds since ultimates hit multiple times and build those stacks up quickly. Blade 3 or Fist 3 are great for blade builds. You can also mix lower-grade laws as long as it adds up to 3 (1+1+1, 1+2).

Decide now what you want and figure out which combinations are possible.

Fusing dao souls requires matching elements. The primary element of a tao soul has to be either listed in the primary or secondary elements of the other tao souls. This has to be mutual for all three souls. If you make 3 times the same primary, they will all fuse into a level 3 domain of the element you picked. If you wish to use a mixed law (like 1+1+1), then the primaries must be among the secondaries of the other souls.

If you want maximum stats from having the highest purity, you must only have one primary and two secondary elements at the end of the dungeon diving. In other words, if you want a mixed high purity soul, your tao souls can only consist of a primary and two secondaries that are the primaries of the other souls.
The stat boost from purity isn't large though. A less pure tao soul can have more than 3 elements at the end, which requires a lot less rerolling. However, the two highest numbers will become the substats and they must match each other. You can't just make souls with 6 substats.

As you go through the dungeon, pay attention to the modifiers. Each has an element and a number. On the rerolling screen, you can see all the elements with the sums of the modifier numbers. The primary is the one furthest left, which has the highest number. The secondaries are all the other ones with lower numbers. If you have more than 3 elements, you will gain an impure tao soul, you will also lower the probability of actually creating one after you clear the final room. The two highest secondaries will become the fusion substats.

Now then, your goal is to reroll all the modifiers of elements you don't want, until you only have elements you want to have. Make sure the biggest number is the primary that you want to have. If you want max purity, the primary must have a value of 50 or more. The sums of the secondaries do not matter for purity.

This is what you need all the stones for. If you are unlucky it can take an absurd amount of rolls (I reached a cost of over 150...), especially if you want a pure tao soul. Keep in mind that you can reroll between each fight and the price will be reset after the next one.

Latest patch dropped, but the English version is reportedly buggy with potential progress-stopping bugs and the translation isn't done either. I'll wait for now. The steam forums can help for the time being.



After the last section, you got a shiny new ability, your domain. It takes some time in combat before it can be activated, but then it triggers the effect you picked via your tao souls (you can read it on the breakthrough screen... after you picked it. Not before. Sadly.) As long as enemies are in the range of the ability, they will be affected (with few exceptions). If the domain builds stacks, they stay until the domain ends.
Use requires Tao Points which replenish every month, more if you equip a specific spirit. No other way for now.

If you want to go west, you need to go through the Giant questline, make sure to keep him healthy. As there are time limits, you should only start it once you are in Enlightenment.

If you want a challenge, fight the Fallen Valley boss from the last area with 50 Nether Breaths. Good luck. Save beforehand.

Storage caves are all linked, and I think the space is infinite? Nobody can steal from them too.

Inns restore all your stats.

The quest board lets you earn spirit stones and Mayor Decrees. The latter is the currency for the manual pavillion. You can get new quests every month, but you don't need to finish them in a month. Keep in mind that the quests are tiered. If you breakthrough, you will get more difficult quests. In Area 4, Hell quests will be rough if you don't have a full set of tiered and orange/red skills and passives. Resource quest will be easy since you will quickly have a large amount of items. Avoid the storage ring or assassination quests since that requires stealing/fighting and incurs NPC hatred.
The quest for finding treasures with Feng Shui can end with the NPC attacking you. They should not pose a challenge. The treasures are almost always worthless though.

Taverns can give you temporary boosts (useful), increase affinity with random sets of people in town and let you trigger a small number of sidequests (purple exclamation mark).

Markets let you buy basic pills, minor breakthrough pills, rings and mounts, teleportation charms and some other items. They also have a set of books to learn for the specialization skills.
Every town has its own set of books for Feng Shui and Herbology, but not for Mining. So make sure you do a round and buy them all when you're about to leave a region if you're building up those skills.
Cities (bigger, blue map icon) offer stuff for the second realm tier of a region.
Furthermore, in cities after region 1 the market offers a superior ring at the bottom of the items, added by a patch. This one is only usable by the second realm of a region.

Pavillions let you buy martial manuals, excluding Ultimate skills. Usually only up to purple rarity. They require stones, mayor decrees and reputation (from quests). Cities have manuals for the second realm tier of a region. These can be decent if you broke through and need to update your skills. They will never have anything red and almost never anything orange. These are refreshed every 12 months, so don't dilly-dally if you need one.

Workshops cover forging and alchemy, which will be covered below. Synthesis lets you make qi pearls from fragments and upgrade the materials to upgrade skills if you need more. Exchange rate isn't kind though.
You can buy the forging and alchemy recipes here.

Cities-only:

Immortal wardrobe lets you buy new outfits. It's largely pointless unless you really like one. You need to buy an item to start a time-limited monster fight for the drops to buy anything.

Auction Houses sell their inventory every 2 years, first month. They cannot be savescummed since their inventory actually comes from NPCs. You can sell tier-appropriate red/orange items here for a lot of cash. This is a primary source of red manuals, make sure to take a look. The manuals are usually only for the second realm of a region though.
During the auction, if you like something you can try outbidding the NPCs. Be warned that you can incur hatred here for outbidding someone, though this hardly matters. Furthermore the prices get pretty high, 10-20 times the sale price isn't uncommon, make sure you have a lot of money. Or try to threaten NPCs, causing NPC hatred.
NPCs seem to have a specific buy limit, so if you reload you can just bid that directly.
Threatening/buying off NPCs if you're more powerful and don't mind the NPC hatred can work too. If you're bidding on a non-elemental passive book though, there may be too many people to threaten.
By the way, you can make the game skip all the items you don't want anyway, with quick buy and using the checkbox in the upper left.

After the first region, Ascension Conferences are a pretty long tournament for the sake of Skill Fruits. They happen every 3 years. You can participate if you are in a sect, have a high enough reputation (do quests) and are in the later tier of a region. You should always participate since the Skill Points grind is dumb and you can get a lot of points at once.
You will be up against the strongest NPCs of the region, and rarely the world simulation may put you up against next tier NPCs. Make sure to drink up first. NPC victories are random, but weighed based on their stats, so rerolling can occasionally let you bypass a cheater.

By the way, there seems to be a minor bug where if you reregister immediately after a tournament ends, you don't actually register. Let a month pass.

Taoist Hero Board pillars were added. These give you a way of finding out who has a specific title/if someone has it. They give a special buff that grants temporary damage immunity to the element that the character holds the title of. If you want a title, you need the maximum roots for the element for the region to claim it if it's empty, or to challenge the person who has it currently if not.

In each region, there're two sets of Taoist Titles. One group is for the #1 cultivator of an element, the other set is more for miscellaneous deeds.

The titles are not transferred between regions. If you surpass the cultivation realm of a region, you lose all your titles.

In order to hold a title for an element, you must have the maximum (or more) spirit roots for the element for the region from spirit fruits. Furthermore, you must have learnt LMB/RMB skills of the element. If you unlearn all of them for an element, you will lose the title. If there are no other competitors, you will gain the title at the end of a month if you fulfill the conditions, otherwise you must fight the current holder. In their profile, there will be a double sword icon that allows you to fight for the title.

Each region's city has a floating slab that shows all the cultivators that hold #1 element titles. You can click investigate and pay (a lot of) money to get an item that shows you where they currently are so you can challenge them.

In combat, the title grants you something like 10 seconds where all attacks with the element you hold the title of will be neutralized, their damage will be halved. It's not that much of a bonus really.

The title does not apply for spars for some reason. Possibly other situations too like tournaments? Sect wars?

---

Each region past the first one has 5 to 6 non-combat titles as well:

Charmer: If you have a lot of partners, you get a bonus to affection gain with cultivators of the opposite gender.

Champion: Win the Open Challeng Sect Tournament (the final part where you fight as many cultivators in a row as possible). You are more valued by the sect, which I guess means cheaper prices or more sect contribution points?

Elixir: If you learn all the alchemy recipes of a region, you can claim this. From the description, I think you get more affection from giving elixirs as gifts?

Forge: Learn all forging schemes, get title. Your artifact gains more affection from cultivators, I guess if you use it in spars? As gifts? Artifacts as gifts would be really expensive though...

Benefactor: Buy a lot of stuff in towns and you get reduced prices.

Fashion Connoiseur: Available later, you must own a lot of outfits for this. Gives a bonus to same-gendered relations.

Why would you want to join a sect?

• Purchasing Spirit fruits
  
• Purchasing higher quality skill manuals
  
• Purchasing alchemic cauldrons
  
• Higher quality pills than you can buy in cities
  
• Occasionally you can buy ascension materials (pretty handy in region 3...)
  
• Sect Tournaments and Sect Wars reward you with treasure chests if you do well, which can have a very wide variety of content like red skill books
  
• Access to the Ascension Tournament (in the main city), which rewards skill fruits (for dao points)
  
• Modest monthly salary
  
• Cultivation Chamber that means you don't need to hunt for Qi spots.
  
• Unique missions I suppose
  
• NPCs may chose not to fight you if you are in a strong sect and have backing.

In practice, you are basically forced to join beyond the first region. You need those spirit fruits.

---

In the prologue event, you get a letter of introduction for your first sect, depending on your choice, otherwise you have to fulfill one of two conditions.
If you can find higher ranking sect members, you can befriend them by giving gifts, aim for at least elder. If they aren't Heaven Chosen (gold frame), rings and mounts will do just fine.
Otherwise, if your spirits are high enough for the sect, you may also join.

If you want to join, you need to apply and then win a sect tournament. It's a fight against a few cultivators in a row (you are fully restored between fights). You don't even need to place first, you can be up to fourth. Unless you get really unlucky with NPCs, you should have no problem of passing if you have done basic preparations such as realm-appropriate skill books.

The spirit root requirements also indicate which spirit fruits you can purchase from the sect stores, as well as the manuals available from the pavillion.

A sect can either be a branch sect, or a main sect, most are branch sects. In those, the sidebar will inform you that there's an upper limit you can be promoted to. If you join a branch, you will automatically be able to transfer to the branch in the next region.
On the other hand, if you join a main sect, you are able to take over and become Sect Master. This will be described in a later section.
Branch sects will have more elements available at the same time until later regions. They have the same elements as the main branch. Non-branch sects gain more slots as they get transfered to later regions.

Sects have two sect rules displayed on the side, as well as two benefits. The benefits aren't particularly large, and most of the time the sect rules don't matter either. A handful can be annoying though, so read them at least once.

After you joined, your current sect will be a brighter sect icon on the map than the rest.

You will now get access to a new currency, Sect Tokens, the plates to the right of the city medallions. They are used to pay for basically anything sect-related and are gained through finishing sect missions. The sect token grind is pretty exhausting if you want to upgrade your spirit roots, you will have to do a lot of missions.

Sects have an alignment with Just or Evil. If your alignment doesn't match, this usually means you get some form of penalty. I believe it's primarily a tax on your sect tokens, but there may be more.
If you become sect master, you can change the alignment.

You should probably check which elements the sect has, unless you want to become sect master and take over other sects. There may only be a single sect of the opposite alignment if you're unlucky.

If you leave a sect, you will be banned from it for years and forfeit all sect tokens. If you see a really powerful breakthrough fate offered by another sect, it may still be worth doing so.


The Cultivation chamber lets you trade sect tokens for Qi, this can occasionally be less annoying than hunting for Qi spots, especially in higher difficulties where they're rare. They also have sect-specific breakthrough fates, if you specifically do your breakthrough in the sect room, which can be (unreasonably) powerful.

The Treasure Pavillion lets you buy items. This includes the critical spirit fruits, for which sects are the only reliable source. This is also the only place to buy alchemy cauldrons (more later) and flames for refining artifacts. Lastly, given enough time, they will stock breakthrough items for the region which can save time. All prices will be in sect tokens. The sect leader does not need to pay.
Ore and Herb items will be restocked when the respective sect points reach a total dependent on the region, hover over ? to see it.

The Manual Pavillion lets you buy manuals, mostly up to purple, for both cultivation tiers of the region. If you get promoted to Grand Elder, you can access a set of red passives and ultimates for the elements of the sect. These can still be pretty useless though. Sects are largely not the best source of manuals. Every 6 months, they toss out the non-treasured manuals like the city pavillions. The Grand Elder "treasures" will not change. If the ultimate is not what you need (you got Combat Expertise, but it's an ultimate that requires field objects), or the traits of the passives are bad, you're out of luck. As sect leader, you don't need to pay and can even change the elements available, which will switch out the treasures too. But for that, you first need to acquire more elements.

Hospital lets you heal for free, Inns cost so little that this doesn't matter.

Council Hall lists the sects higher members, and gives access to various sect management features, if you have been promoted enough. More explanation in the next segment.

Mission Hall lets you do sect tasks for sect tokens. I'd suggest avoiding the Kill Sect Enemy and the Retrieve Manuals tasks, since those just cause problems with NPC hatred. Either you kill a named NPC or you steal from them. The Rogue Cultivator is different, it's not a named enemy. It's only generated for the task and has no relationships. You can kill them without worry, but they can be tough. You get new tasks every month, but you don't need to finish them in a month.
Some of the missions can end with tasks that give skill points (construction missions) or rare metals (Kill nearby monsters).
The missions available depend on your status within the sect. Elder and higher get quests of a difficulty more suitable to the 2nd region of a region.

The Behemoth lets you exchange spirit fruits 2:1, feed it to upgrade its realm and talk to it to improve its mood. If you reach about 12.000 for both mood and satiety for a long enough period, the Behemoth can upgrade in realm (within region limits), which matters for sect wars. It will occasionally give you buffs

Initiate
Your status after joining. You have access to sect missions suitable for the lower cultivation realm of the region. You gain access to all sect buildings. For every promotion, you must have enough sect tokens from missions to start a tournament, this time among the Initiates and then place first. This tournament is scaled to the first cultivation realm, too. You may get unlucky with Heaven Chosen, but usually you should be fine.

Disciple
You are an official member now. Your spirit stone salary is greater and more mission types are unlocked. You can now be ordered to participate in Sect Wars and Resource spot conflicts, but it's not a good idea.
Promotion is more complicated. First, you need a higher elemental root for one of the sect elements. You then have to pick an Elder to become a True Disciple under. The first step is beating all Disciples that also applied for promotion (there will be very few), then you must defeat the True Disciple whose spot you wanted to take. The True Disciples will practically always be in the 2nd cultivation realm of a region. Until you break through, you probably won't be able to reach this level.
If you manage to pick an empty slot, or a disciple dies between picking them and the tournament starting, you will be facing an auto-generated disciple. And you probably shouldn't pick a Heaven's Chosen unless you are really confident.
You will automatically become a disciple of the Elder, you can cancel the relationship immediately afterwards via the social network.
Beating the True Disciple will incur NPC hatred from them, they will be forced to leave the sect. You can just buy them off with rings though.

True Disciple
Higher wages, missions suitable for the 2nd cultivation realm.
You can now participate in the triannual sect tournament, more on that later. You can also play a bigger role in sect wars and resource spot fights.
For Promotion, you pick an Elder to replace. You fight the other NPCs who applied, then the True Disciples of the Elder, and then the Elder themselves. If you win, you get their spot. The True Disciples become yours to order around.
The Elder will hate you and leave the sect.

Elder
This is the first point where you have power in the sect. First, you can freely assign the ordinary disciples within whatever sect branch you control (like Patrol), you can also pick True Disciples if they accept you as master. You can order True Disciples on special missions. In addition, you can suggest, but not force, battles for resource spots. See below for all this.
You unlock more mission types, bigger salary, etc.
In Sect Tournaments, you cannot participate as fighter anymore.
To promote, you must pick and defeat one of the two Grand Elders, or pick and empty spot to replace if someone died.

Grand Elder
You now control 2/3 branches of disciples and can freely order them. You can now start resource fights and pick resource spots to control.
A number of lower-rank mission types will no longer be offered to you.
The next promotion works differently. You must reach a sufficient level of personal reputation (from completing quests) and a specific amount of sect tokens in total, also from completing quests.
After some time passes, you will receive mail that the Sect Tradition has taken notice of you.
You will be invited to fight the Sect Tradition.
This is a randomly generated cultivator, who has received some kind of buff. This can be really tough, so you may need to quite powered up in the late stage to have a chance. If you win, you replace the sect leader. They will hate you and leave the sect.

Sect Leader
You have basically all the power in the sect. You fully control personnel and can directly recruit, but if you arrange new True Disciples, they still need to accept their Elder and vice versa. You can freely control sect wars and resource conflicts. You can change the sect rules, the elements of the sect (from what it has available after conquests) as well as its alignment.
The Sect Tradition will boost you at most every 3 years if you fight in the Sect territory or your sect is attacked.
Lastly, everything in the sect is free. You can even sell the red manuals for personal cash, and change sect elements to refresh them.

As Sect Leader, you can order the transfer of a sect to a new region. This is extremely expensive to do, but the only way to progress with your sect.

Sect rules:
If you are leader, you can click the paper above the sect name to change them.

They really need to fix random out-of-region cultivation realm sect leaders... If every sect is a branch sect, could you even take over anything ever with all the IX realm cultivators?
AI for assignments seems potentially a bit questionable.
A few of the sect fates seem utterly busted, sometimes only for lifesteal builds though.

Cost is for restocking + expanding if available. Happens once you surpass it instead of per year? That'd allow you to do things a lot faster if you have a powerful sect.
First region: 2500
Second: 6500
Third:
Fourth: 30000
Up to 10 spirit fruits per actually.

There might be a bug with sect elements, since I had a sect with only two when every other had 6.
The ones that are branch sects always seem to get 6, while new sects need to somehow get access to more elements?

Taking over resource spots: You send x number of disciples depending on the size (8/11/17?) and get herb/ore points or spirit stones every month.
You do this from Council -> Sect Territory
Click on the grey mountains to see what it is.
The sword icon (top) is a fight over an occupied spot.
The flag is claiming it yourself.
The quality of the disciples (realm? stats?) determines the level of Alert, which I presume means likelihood of preventing an attack?

Going by the numbers, you probably want a lot of people. Manually promoting disciples to fill the highest ranks means they're stocked for other tasks.

You can separately assign missions. The more disciples you assign, the better the results.
As elder you have one category, Great Elders get 2/3, Sect Leader controls everything.
Recruitment means more people.
Patrol improves stability
External grants more prestige points
Construction means more Ore+Herb points
Training means more money (... why?)

Once you have assigned nameless disciples to the categories, you can further assign specific missions.
As the game says, the higher the difficulty, the more disciples will die (even on trivial tasks...). So manpower is pretty important.
Keep in mind that just assigning categories already improves statistics.

The sect Leader can and will override your assignments. Potentially with nonsense. So... maybe don't bother unless you are leader yourself.
... Uh, in my test sect, nobody is recruiting (and overriding my choices) and we are losing disciples every month. This seems like a death spiral.
You can assign disciples to resource spots and to missions at the same time it seems.

You can gather information on special missions as a % each month?
Once you unlock them, you can assign a true disciple to do them. Note their likelihood of success, likely stat-based. Strengthen Seal may be busted because no disciple had more than 0% success for me.

As you gain reputation in the sect, once you fulfill both sect leader requirements, a "voice in your head" will tell you about the legacy.
Allows a special boss fight against Tradition itself. You will fight a human cultivator with a special condition (such as losing vitality every second). They're somewhat tough, but not too bad.

You seemingly need a source to replace a martial arts tradition? From defeating other sects and plundering?

You can move your sect into a new region if you want to.


Great Elder missions:
Save Recruitment Disciples: (Nightmare) One off fight with miniboss
Save Lost Disciples: (Nightmare) Lost disciple has hostage: Pay small sum (finishes quest) / ignore
Find Missing Disciples (Nightmare): One fight + miniboss
Arrest Offending Disciple: (Nightmare) Disciple of first realm of region, random (up to purple?) books
Defeat Disciples with Qi Deviation (Nightmare): Cultivator that can summon undead. Somewhat tougher than the offending disciple, gives (up to purple?) random books
You can't do missions of a sect you conquered.

Sect Competition: You get to hold a speech as sect leader, haha.
True Disciples fight in a competition. You better be prepared to deal with HC. World simulation can also break and have cultivators from higher realms appear.
Elders and higher pick out treasures for them.
You pay spirit stones (rather few though) and get to pick up to 3 times. Each item has a description.

Due to how busted Heaven's Chosen are, those should be your primary targets for recruitment and kept at the True Disciple level.
You can select disciples who are ordered to fight each round. Winner scores a point. You fight once against each sect.
If you want them to use items, you must click the lower right on the selection screen and them pick the disciple whose fight you want to watch instead of settling it via AI. I recommend AI if you have higher stats. While watching you can order them to use items.
Health is NOT replenished between rounds. But your best disciples should win without losing health, sooo... All this seems a bit poorly balanced.

Next up is open competition. Disciples will challenge each other. Whoever remains keeps fighting. Unfortunately the AI is what it is, so I hope you kept a lot of items to spam from the previous round. HC will mop the field, haha. A single busted cultivator is enough.
Artifacts are really good for this if your disciplies rolled some since the AI will always try to focus them down first. Even if it can't or should just ignore them.
Any decent lifesteal NPC will probably just win I guess.
If you want to win, you need to be stocked with pills, hopefully have some vitality restoration traits.

The champion of the competition gets rewards, the winning sect gets rewards.
The treasures are in the "Other" tab. They give Spirit fruits, orange and red random books.

Yellow exclamation mark on Mission Hall: Special mission unlocked.
On Council: -> Territory, left button, expands max sect capacity. Important. Requires prestige above cap and money. More people cost more money though, keep that in mind.


Sect War:

Find a sect whose leader you can beat. Pick a fight.
Use enough resources to fill the green bar. Keep in mind that sects can be allied which can be a bother. The green bar are resources used for fighting. They reduce the casualties you receive during the war, which is generally a good thing.
Next month it begins. You get three untranslated choices. Upper left is starting it yourself, upper right is appointing someone. Lower left is cancel.
Sect leader holds a speech, battlefield begins.
There're 6 outer and 6 inner segments. If you aren't an elder (unsure), you get assigned a spot, disciples are outer realm, true disciples fight the beast.
Destroy the outer battlefield to make the fight for the inner easier.
All 6 beast parts form the total health bar, damaging any part brings you closer. Assist your people well.
Afterwards the sect leaders fight. If you are leader and picked a good target, this should be easy.
Treasures get distributed (hold ESC to skip).
You then get two choices:
Left: Takes over. Pick the people to occupy it.
Right: Should be plundering.
Taking over takes a lot out of the sect, keep that in mind. You cut your personnel in half and it will take a while until that's all regained. Resource spots also now need to be split between both sects?
Gives you access to new elements in the new sect though, and a different breakthrough fate.
You can't access allied sects' elements, so you need to conquer them too...

Unclear: If you take your sect to the next region, do you maintain all traditions you had access to? Or do you need to reconquer? Is that how you get more elements anyway?
When the AI request shuffling, it fills gaps, right?

If you conquer a sect, currently you can get their breakthrough fate.

Sect stats:
Members: Recruiting people, used for tasks like resource points I assume?
Territory: Maximum prosperity
Reputation: Amount and quality of the sect manuals
Stability: Increases/decreases prosperity
Prosperity: Amount of money per month
Loyalty: How many members leave each month
Ore: Replenish the Qi breakthrough items, furnaces, skill training items (the stuff for cultivating skills), forging materials and "other materials".
Herb: Replenish breakthrough treasures, pills, spirit fruits and herbs.
Ore and Herb points are consumed to replenish/expand the treasury. I have not tested if you can replenish things more often than once a year with very high ore/herb stats.



Sect war as Initiate: Complete and utter mess. I was playing defense.
So you can freely pick the battlefield, but keep in mind that the inner area will be for disciples of the second realm of the region. They will shred you if you aren't.

I had just broken through and not upgraded anything, so the sect war was pretty annoying. You will get resurrected if you fall in battle and the sect still has resources. This would probably trigger the Soul Lamp debuff first though.

Due to the sheer length and number of disciples you will fight, you need some form of restoration that's not limited like pills are (or elixir recycle) unless you are way more powerful than your enemies.

You get treasure chests (inventory -> Other). If you killed a lot of Heaven Chosen (how...), you may well get silver treasure chests that give you red books and similarly valuable stuff.

Sect wars are awesome for expanding your sect elements, you will get way more spirit fruits that way. And they're all free as sect leader too.


Sect War:
Need to be sect leader to kick it off.
Take over another sect. Currently this does not let you take their breakthrough destiny though. Might be a bug?
The first two disciple ranks fight others, true disciples fight the behemoth, then the sect leaders fight each other. How would this work for branch sects with a realm 9 leader? Just impossible?
Winning lets you take resources or destroy the other sect. The latter should give you their special breakthrough fate?


The flower over you on the breakthrough screen gives you a wayborne seed when you get 100%.
You can also pass it on to other people. This turns them from nothing into Paragons (blue frame). That seems to be the non-Heaven's Chosen that do have a seed. Most cultivators don't. After a while, they can turn the Paragon's status into actual Heaven's Chosen
The Heaven's Chosen get some special fate on that screen. All of them are associated with a specific element and seem to be only good for teamfights (sect wars?). They don't seem too strong from what I've seen, so I don't think they matter as much as the hilariously busted stats of HC.

You start accumulating tao points (the frame around the seed) by beating other cultivators (and monsters?), and discussion supposedly. You lose points if you lose in fights. Once you have enough points, you can unlock additional feats in that interface. Stage 1 is +5% damage dealt. Stage 2 is -10% damage received. Stage 3 is +10% damage dealt.

In sect wars, you don't matter in the first realm of a region. The inner region can be tough to survive. I just not spawning in the most fought-over battlefield or you may get instagibbed by a number of abilities, ultimates and artifacts getting dropped on your face before you can react.

Sects can stock basically all of the breakthrough materials on a long enough timescale. That should make Origin Spirit (V) a lot less annoying hopefully.

Sect war: On the defense, you must shred as many cultivators as you can, just remember that the inner area with the beast is for the second realm of the region.
Thing is, your sect may just lose anyway. If they do, you get nothing, no matter how well you did. They lose all herb+ore if they do. No idea if a hostile sect can take over yours.
The outer area seems of limited use, since the disciples of the inner area can just defeat the beast even if most of the outer area is defended.

The outer crystals seem to respawn quickly? Is that just a temporary damage buff for the inner area for the offense?

Plundering resources gives you additional sect tokens and some low tier treasure chests. It does NOT give you the cultivation elements.

You get spirit fruits for EVERY element in your library. Not just the ones selected.

The enemy sect leader can also trigger the sect tradition to resurrect in the final sect war battle.

Request to take over resource spots:
If you aren't in realm 2 of a region, don't bother.
Grid map where you must take over specific regions while fighting people.

If you want to get promoted in a sect, you need to have a high enough root of their type. If you join a sect that isn't a branch sect, that can be limiting.

Sect war postmath: You can't become a True Disciple of an elder that's dead. You also can't skip straight to replacing them unfortunately.
If you challenge a True Disciple that's dead, you get a generated enemy with an untranslated name. You then replace them.

Resource raid mission: It starts immediately.
You can keep watch OR gather the resources.
Keeping watch: Defend your ally. You will be attacked by cultivators.
Since you should basically always be more powerful than your ally, you should always defend I guess? If your ally gets down to low health, they will flee. You can continue the mission then by interacting with the target while enemies are gone.
This is a long endurance slog, just as warning. Hell rating is not a joke.
The cultivators are just generated, but many will immediately drop artifacts.

Many pills now in the sect. Would you even need Alchemy anymore when you can just buy everything?

Sect competition as disciple:
First up, the turn-based fights:
You get given item(s) for the fight, you decide the timing. Some items are really strong, but I don't think the AI will prioritize the good stuff. If your sect is bad, all the true disciples may not even be of the second realm and will do nothing. Thus your sect loses. I've had the sect just give up basically, haha.
You often seem to get picked third, no matter how sensible.
You DO NOT get health back between rounds. Make sure you have healing pills. Or get lucky with the healing flower as gift.
The logic for choosing disciples, I do not understand.
If you can, keep items for the consecutive fights afterwards.

The top 3 sects fight in the open battle. Defeat as many as possible to score points.
If you are well-prepared and in the second realm, you will slaughter a lot of fodder.
I strongly suggest going first to get as many points as you can, with the Get on Stage button. Even if your sect leaders make very questionable decisions in the first part, you can just mop the floor with everybody in the open round and make up for that.

Winning as Sect and Champion gives you 6 silver-looking chests. They can have some red books. Elements seem to be random? They can be rerolled, but the results are completely random.

Branch sects make you fight the Grand Elder on the left. Or presumably the remaining one if there's only one.
You can change your loadout on the screen where you give a speech.

Sect relocation creates a new branch and splits your personnel. It can also give you random buffs or skill points. So uh, if you take along your old disciples, aren't they entirely outclassed now?
You go into Council -> Sect Relocation. Build the ship. Go into it again to get a flag. You go into the new territory to place the flag. Then you go back and now you can move on. You pick the disciples and amount of resources you want to take with you.
It may be better to just take nobody along and make friends to recruit first? They'd at least be of the proper cultivation realm.
If your old people move up, you would then need to kick them out too, to make space for people of the right realm.
Recruiting HC is tricky, you would usually have to give them ascension items. If you're lucky, you can buy them in your sect store though. Alternatively, red skill books from world bosses.

You can recruit people as sect leader. The untranslated button above Mark gives you the choice to. Likely depends on relationship.

Sects can have 2/4/6 elements in region 2/3/4. You need to relocate your own sect if you want more. You also need to plunder/take over other sects if you want to expand your element selection. Gives you more spirit fruit types per month too, so it's a good idea.

But a branch sect you take over seems to retain the amount of elements they offer? Huh.

---

New sects
You can find an abandoned sect early on which you can take over easily. If you want to play with the new sect systems with you at the top, this is good. Unfortunately, you will be doing a ton of recruiting. I recommend grabbing Heaven's Chosen. Preferably from the next region for maximum cheating. If you grab a red skill book from the 2nd area boss it will be for the next cultivation tier and make for a good gift.
You can also join the secret Dragon Sect if you have the correct birth fate (Don't have the English name handy, sorry). This lets you take a series of breakthrough fates to upgrade the following bug to a dragon human, which is rather powerful. Unfortunately, that requires 5 breakthrough fates, which is hard to justify unless you're on lower difficulties and want to play with around with it.


If you attack a sect and it's a branch sect belonging to a higher region, instead of the sect leader, the left branch grand elder will fight you at the end. If you don't want those to last forever, you want ~40% higher ATK than their DEF. The sect tradition seems to boost stats, although I haven't really figured out how it works. It seems to sometimes boost damage, defense max HP or other things?

Cons:

• Getting a sect to a self-running level is work. Especially all the inviting of powerful NPCs.
  
• A lot more interruptions from NPCs.
  
• You can't take part in sect tournaments as true disciple for treasure chests, and you can't really rely on the AI to win unless you cheat a little. You practically have to recruit the stray NPCs from the next region just for security.
  
• And the world simulation will lead to sect tournaments with Heaven Chosen of a higher cultivation realm than the region should have, so cheating's fair really.
  
• Sect wars are kind of terrible due to the random NPCs with way higher cultivation realms.
  
• Transfering your sect into a new region means you basically need to do all the recruiting again.
  
• You may need to modify the disciple distribution regularly if your sect ends up lopsided in some way, such as not having enough territory and thus income, or very low stability. Usually the AI does a decent job though.
  
• Overall just changing sects every region is simply a lot faster than taking your sect with you. The only major advantage lies in the spirit fruits and money.

Pros:

• Everything in the sect is free for the Sect Leader.
  
• No need to worry about Qi, just use the cultivation room forever.
  
• Completely free sect manuals.
  
• You can auction the sect manuals (they get refreshed) and effectively have infinite money. Unfortunately, you will also discover that money isn't really that useful once you have enough of it. Perhaps an unintentional moral.
  
• They're also rather good gifts to allow you to recruit many people. Same with breakthrough items.
  
• Breakthrough items are now free as well. On a long enough scale, your sect is bound to get them all too. That certainly makes region 3 less annoying.
  
• If you conquer enough sects, your sect will pick up traditions for all 12 elements. You can pick and choose which elements you want martial manuals for, including red passives and ultimates.
  
• Even more, for every element you have, the sect will have spirit fruits for free in the sect store.
  
• This can mean up to 120 spirit fruits (12 elements * 10) every single refresh. Not year, refresh.
  
• Every conquered sect has its own storage, you can plunder those fruits every refresh too.

You must first become sect leader. You can only do this in the main sect. Most sects are actually branch sects of a sect from a higher region, it will tell you that you cannot exceed a certain status on the right side window where you can join. The sect leader promotion happens a few months after you reach the necessary personal prestige and sect contribution. You will be informed the "Sect Tradition" has taken an interest in you. This allows you to challenge it. You fight against an empowered human cultivator with random skills. This fight can be really tough, especially on higher difficulties. You need to be prepared.

The first region non-branch sect is in something of an awkward position. Sect resource spots don't exist and it doesn't seem to be generated with enough territory to really sustain itself financially. It will also struggle with generating enough ore/herb points to refresh the store. I'd work towards getting all the elements through conquest and then leaving for region 2 or starting your sect leader takeover in region 2.

As long as you put grand elders and elders in charge and let them auto-distribute disciples, the sect will largely run itself without trouble. The AI is pretty good at balancing out the sect's needs as long as it has enough territory for money. Territory expansion is pretty important to that end.

Sect raids are also a pretty good idea to gain a large heap of resources, but they cost you a lot of sect prestige and will probably kill a fair number of disciples. You may have to manually reassign disciples to build it back up quickly. If you aren't in a hurry, you can forgo these.

Not kicking off wars and fights improves relations with the other sects. They will even come to assist you if you get attacked. Likewise, if you attack someone, you may find yourself up against an alliance.

If you transfer regions, you are going to run into a lot of troubles. First of all, you need a completely new batch of disciples. Your previous ones are almost certainly outclassed (unless you recruit some from later regions) and thus useless. They will not go up in realm quickly enough to matter.

First order of business in a new region is thus getting 7 new people for all the elder positions, you preferably want some of the second tier of the region. Non-HC people are completely fine. You then want to recruit non-HC from a later cultivation region as True Disciples so that you can deal with sect tournaments/sect wars. You can sometimes find them in cities if you get lucky. Non-HC are easy to recruit with rings/mounts/breakthrough items even of tiers below them. So turn them into True Disciples, and then later pass on the Wayward Seed so they become HC.
The AI is also cheating with realms since cultivators sometimes just don't leave regional sects, it's all fair.

Your elders will quickly start recruiting new batches of initiates. It takes a few years before all the ranks are completely filled, but you need time to rebuild sect resources anyway. If you have some powerful disciples, you can occupy resource spots too. Just keep in mind that they may randomly die in the fights, and getting body reconstruction pills is a pain. You may even randomly lose next region cultivators somehow. You can't get the body reconstruction pill for them, so they're just gone. I generally leave the AI on opportunistic so it occupies empty spots, but doesn't kick off fights. This avoids angering other sects and reduces Sect Wars against you.

Chances are, after moving you will get raided pretty quickly since the AI sees you as weak in a new region. Make certain you start recruiting for true disciples and elders the moment you arrive in a new area. Empty out the new sect store for manuals and breakthrough items. I've been attacked within 3 months of arrival before.

Once you stabilized the initial elders + true disciples, you can mostly let the sect run itself again.

Important note. As you are still sect leader, your sect quests will be of the second realm of the region and way too hard if you just ascended. The difficulty marks are not a joke. Largely this means you can't really support your sect directly until you ascend again.

If you pick the Elder Dragon Aura as starting fate, you get a special questline you can follow revolving around the Following Bug Breakthrough Fate. You pretty much need to pick it fully to get any real use out of the story. As that's multiple breakthrough fates you aren't using for something stronger, maybe don't do this on Chaos.

A hamlet sect will be generated in the first area and you will be invited to join it as Initiate without passing the invitation test. All subsequent trials work as normal though.
You must become sect leader to really have the storyline go anywhere.

It has a unique building, the "Greenscale Spring". For every region, you can upgrade your following bug with a special feature once per region. This costs sect spirit stones.

After the first upgrade, you must defeat a giant bee boss to progress (scaled for realm I it seems).
You also get the quest: Concerns of the Elder. It's a chain of events requiring you to defeat Bamboo demons and the Bamboo boss.

I haven't done more of the questlines yet.

Haven't ran into them yet. I probably need to start a new character to do so, eh.

The entire system is largely superfluous and is really only good for dao/skill points or roleplaying purposes.

When people want to discuss the dao with you, always agree and check their personality. Try to answer according to their personality. Everybody likes a yes-man, even the psychopaths.

Spars are fine and don't threaten your life, you can agree to them. Dual Cultivation is also a quick end-of-month dao points boost (and requires the least work for grinding skill points outside of tournaments...). Agreeing to become friends is never a bad thing too.

As strangers, you can only talk to them. This can backfire if your just/demonic alignment or your three character traits differ too much, but you can just give them gifts once they hate you. It's easier to try to catch them into a town and just buy everybody a round of drinks over and over until you have a base rapport with them. You can mark an NPC like a sect leader with your divine sense and just check occasionally.

User ITalkToSky points out that buying and gifting rings works well. I can confirm that.
Here.
Ascension materials of any tier are always good gifts, but manuals of red/orange quality are only important if they are of the tier of the NPC or higher.

NPCs with question marks have quests you can fulfill (giving them items), for friendship points. Maybe just dump rings on them instead.

Heaven's Chosen NPC (gold frame) are meant to be harder to build a friendship with, so you may need to do quests instead of just stuffing them full of rings.

Stealing from NPCs is only worth it on very rare occasions, such as right after an auction when they have something you want. You need a higher divine sense (or use a specific artifact spirit's ability) to steal and then get lucky with the charm roll to do it unnoticed. Lower charm is better, so unequip your mount if needed and eat the special mushroom. If noticed, you may get into a fight and they will hate you. See below for a tradeoff if you need to.

NPC hatred is like a chain of dominos. One person hates you, you kill them, their family hates you, you kill them, it never ends. I would suggest never killing anybody to reduce the sheer hassle. You can give gifts to remove hatred though, ascension materials and books will completely reverse hatred.

More annoyingly, if NPCs pick a fight with you, they will hate you if they lose. Same with NPCs during the treasure search quest that decide to attack you before getting stomped. And if you find an unconscious NPC in a dungeon outside of the specific quest for it and heal them, they will attack you too. And then hate you if you knock them out.

When somebody invites you to a place, you can perform multiple interactions with them to increase the bond. It's a unique area you can't see otherwise I guess? When somebody there wants you gone, make sure to check their cultivation tier before fighting.

You can also marry people etc., but all that is largely meaningless since you really only want skill points from NPCs.

If you need to track an NPC, you can use Sense to mark them. This will always show you where they are. This does not remove sense from your bar, instead your maximum sense acts as a cap for how many artifacts you can equip/how many NPCs you can track.

They can cultivate and progress on their own, but you can also give them materials they can use. If an NPC dies, you can make a pill of the appropriate tier via alchemy to resurrect them. You got a time limit on that however, and if they surpass your tier, you will probably not make it in time.

By the way, NPCs don't play by your rules. Their stats are rolled and can be higher than yours can be. Without even being Heaven's Chosen, they can still surpass your maximum base stats.

So you need these to equip more passive skills. There're multiple ways to get them. All but the tournament happen as end-of-month event, but you can also trigger them manually.

You can look at the NPC section for the NPC interactions that grant knowledge you can transform into points. This tends to be slow and one interaction will give you about 3 skill points. Fastest is usually Training Partner over and over.

The last option is the triannual Ascension Tournament. Please look into the town section. I'd suggest participating as often as possible if you are at the appropriate tier. The skill fruits are a huge reward.
There is an exploit you can do with these. You must be part of a sect and ready to participate in the tournament. Normally, when you have ascended to the realm of the next region and you enter it, you will be kicked out of the sect and lose the right to participate, however... this event only happens at the end of the month. And teleportation talismans take no time.
You can indeed indefinitely teleport back, remain in your old sect while convenient, and sign up for a few tournaments while starting the grind of the next area. Gets tedious, but lets you score a few more skill fruits

As a point of reference, a full red passive layout in Enlightenment (VIII) will take about 3000 skill points. Yeah, that is a lot.

Largely pointless.

If you trigger it, it will identify nearby special areas (herb spots, qi spots, etc.). It can also trigger new special areas that didn't exist before with some of the subskills.

After upgrading your stat high enough, you can go into the various towns and buy skill books to learn. Every town has its own unique set of books. Later regions only upgrade your existing skills. Since they are a prerequisite, you always need to start from the lowest tier.

The treasure or dungeons Feng Shui can find are almost always useless.

Turns out grave robbing can be quite useful. It will reduce your lifespan by 10 years each (and there's an ingame counter, so there may be karma much later?). But you will usually get a Rare Material (the special metals) for forging. This is by far and away the fastest option to savescum for rare materials. Only downside is that Feng Shui, even with the highest skill, only spawns graves very rarely. If you are in Fallen Valley anyway for the spirits, you may as well savescum the random zone bosses instead.

If you run into a quest requiring Feng Shui, you can do that even without upgrading the skill at all.

You improve it by hunting Blood Puppets that spawn near towns. You will be notified when it happens and you are in the region. They give 5 times region points, this holds true for all skill books. All these special town spawns are somewhat strong, you should either be in late realm 1 or realm 2 for the region to stand a chance. The book grind gets pretty obnoxious for all of the Specializations to be honest.

With Herbology, you can use it in green herb spots to gather materials. It's a good idea to grind this out since it feeds alchemy, and alchemy is useful. A herb spot will only have a single herb, in amounts depending on the quality of the herb spot.

Every town, like Feng Shui, has its own set of herbology books. The herbology books let you get a specific plant from an herb spot. If you get weeds, you rolled a plant you don't have the chart of. You can savescum this. The charts also increase the drop rate from monsters significantly.

To improve it, you need to hunt mushroom men which spawn near towns. Like the other town spawns, they drop a book. They also drop a lot of herbs, which is handy. The special mushroom lowers charm, recovers vitality and offers a special breakthrough fate. Sadly it's a near-death fate that doesn't seem that good.

Alchemy is used to make specific pills according to pill recipes you can buy in the workshops of towns and cities, the latter having more charts to learn. Each region has its own set, but all the towns have the same. This is the only reliable way to get red grade pills, which you will probably want down the line. Alchemy is used in multiple ascension quests too. Save before crafting pills.

With the sect update, the pills needed for ascension can now just be bought if you wait long enough for them to appear. This makes alchemy a lot less important.

Early on, you can use the workshops to have pills crafted for you, but they will be of lower quality. And since alchemy has a chance to fail, you should save beforehand.

For doing it yourself you need the recipe from the workshop, the herbs and a cauldron.
Herbs require herbology. The cauldron can be bought from sects (by joining or befriending them). Check the passive traits of the cauldron, some can randomly add elements you don't want, which is really obnoxious. Make sure you are using a cauldron of the appropriate region for the recipe, they must have enough slots for herbs. Even within a region, the amount of slots can differ. You want the higher one.

Now alchemy requires you to have enough herbs for the recipe. You will also see "Required Elements" bars. Here is where things get annoying. The elements are always calculated in a manner that you need all the herbs in the amounts listed, and one more herb you need to do math to figure out. The cauldron always accomodates one more herb than strictly needed for the realm of the pill according to the recipe, if it's of the correct region.

For example, Qi Condensation Elixirs requires 50 of two herbs, these fill Yin and Yang. But then you also need 200 Lightning element. So you need to calculate the elemental amounts missing, and then check which herb covers that. A cauldron of the first region will have 2 or 3 slots, and you should check you get one with 3.

You want to avoid adding unnecessary elements too. Only one type of herb always fits exactly what you need. These herbs can also cover multiple elements at once, keep that in mind. Across the regions, you get higher tiers of herbs with higher base stats. You can use the lower tiers too, but it takes more. The max is 100 herbs at once. If you get a rare cauldron that has extra slots beyond their tier, you can be more flexible.

Check you have everything, then start. Select the pill, the cauldron and confirm. Throw in the necessary herbs in the pre-filled amounts and check what elements are left over. Then figure out what the missing herb is and add it. Finish crafting and you get a QTE. You must stop the bar at the marked ideal spot. If you miss it, you incur impurities. Overshooting seems worse than under-.

After you finish, you get a random roll where the cauldron can explode and turn your herbs to ashes (you did save, right?). If not, you get an assortment of pills and a boost to the proficiency of the pill recipe. I assume it improves the odds of getting good pills, but if you exactly correctly fill the cauldron, you will get a bunch of red grade pills anyway.

By the way, your cauldron has a durability rating, it can break if you use it a lot.

Health pills become pretty important later on, attack pills count double in the damage formula. Doing alchemy yourself or buying from your sect are the only way to reliably get red pills.

Mad Alchemists town spawns drop the skill book, as well as a lot of random and useful pills. Sometimes red ones too.

Mostly useless. No really, I mean it. It gives you access to items that drop from Fallen Valley anyway. And since the artifact spirit grind is obscene, you will almost always have more than enough anyway.
The drop charts should increase the drop rate in Fallen Valley.

You can also mine resins used to refine artifacts, which changes the traits they have.

The crystal golem city spawn gives you books, they're worth 5 points times the region you're in.
You can reroll mining spots like Botany, but why even bother.

Forging is pretty complicated. You first need a high enough forging skill and learn the recipe from a workshop, if you want the best artifacts (you do). You may also want a higher forging skill anyway, just to assure a red artifact.
Largely it's not worth it since the artifact + spirit grind is dumb, and they aren't even that strong.

Every artifact requires a core material. All but the sword are drops from world bosses that spawn after long periods of time. Since you also need those cores to upgrade them, you better get hunting when they spawn. The sword requires an item that drops from the dragon boss in Fallen Valley, more below.

Supplementary materials are simply monster drops. The total impurity of these materials needs to be below an artifact-specific value. Most are found in the Fallen Valley of the region of the artifact (where you can get the chart).

The Rare Material is where it gets annoying. Each artifact has its own. You need 10 of these to make a red artifact, which has 25% higher base stats than purple. This is a lot more than it sounds, since it's +25% for all stats.

First identify the material, then figure out which zone boss drops it. For example, the bosses in the special elemental zones of the second area drop the metal for the horn. These drops are random. The spawning of the beasts is random, slow, and you are only notified if you are in the area. You can get 3-5 drops per boss monster, but it's far more common to get nothing at all. Or ones you don't need. Can be savescummed.

There's an alternate method. Grave robbing. Feng Shui has a skill that generates graves, with a rather low probability even with the highest skill level you can get. The grave robbing will reduce your lifespan by about 10 years (an artifact spirit can negate that), and you will get a region-appropriate rare metal, 3-5 pieces. You can savescum this if you are after something. Grave robbing has a counter in your stats, so there may possibly be something done with that down the line?

One more method was added by a patch, certain events (monkey and tree, ice barrier) can give you rare metals of the region for choosing the second option. This is by far the easiest overall method as long as you keep going to ?.

If you are past Nascent Soul (VI), you can also refight the five bosses to farm rare metals lategame.

The last part is a special flame you just buy in a sect. A higher tier flame can greatly boost quality of a lower tier artifact, but only up to red.

From a bit of testing, rare materials limit how high the artifact grade can be (10 for red), your forging skill and the flame used influence how much purity you can get. The normal materials only need to be below a certain level of impurity depending on the artifact I believe.

After all this, you need to play a minigame. Read the description, click to zap the bad stuff away. If you have 10 rare materials, you should have an almost filled purity gauge with sufficient forging skill, 0 impurities, and get a red artifact. If you can't (almost) fill the bar even with no errors, you need a higher forging skill or possibly common materials with lower impurity.

Artifacts need to be equipped into your pill slots. They are limited by your maximum focus. They also have a durability. If used in combat, it goes down by 2 if you recall it ahead of time, and by 20 if you let it be broken. And unfortunately later bosses will break them almost instantly.

You can repair them at the workshop with a material from Fallen Valley and monster drops below a certain impurity.

You can also upgrade them. This requires another copy of the core item (the boss drop), a different (and rarer) material from Fallen Valley and a large amount of quartz from Souleater Tower. You have to upgrade artifacts to your cultivation tier if you want them to be useful at all. Unfortunately the Souleater Tower is pretty hard to survive, so you may have to see if you can even survive grinding out the materials before the end of a region. If needed, you can just quickly hop in and out for the first boss, but this will take a while. The realm of the artifact determines from which region you need the quartz.

Forging's associated spawn is the treasure fiend, same deal as the others. It drops materials for refining on death. Be warned that its attacks are hard to dodge and you may wish to be in the second cultivation realm of a region before picking a fight.

Artifacts and spirits get their own section.

Be warned that the grind for spirits is more excessive than anything else in the game, by a pretty large margin. You want to have good mobclear for this. You will also need to interact with almost every system of the game to fully upgrade spirits.

So you made yourself a fancy artifact by forging, and now you want to have a spirit for it, so that it's actually useful. This requires you to buy an item to go to Fallen Valley, to get spirits and items that let you go to Souleater Tower, which has stuff to improve spirits.

First you must buy "Ultima Sands" from any market in any town. They're all equivalent and each shop stocks 10. If you need more, just teleport around. It's the same item no matter the region.

Next you must find one of the two Fallen Valleys in your target region, either will do. The valleys of different regions are not identical, and far harder. Each entry costs one sand and five days. Take note that the Valley is very dangerous, you should be in the 2nd cultivation realm of the region to be safe.

PS: I recommend the chain lightning LMB if you want to grind. Even if you need to get spirit fruits first.

Unequip your artifacts and pills before entering. See random events as for why.

The valley is always a 3x3 dungeon, where you start in the middle. Your goal is to get Soul Lure objects (blue spheres, they can't be taken out of the dungeon), and offer them to the large purple crystal to get crystals shards. Those shards contain a random spirit.

The center area is (with one exception) always safe. If you go in any direction, you will start a fight against a large group of monsters and minibosses. These can randomly drop Soul Lures that you need. The trees tend to drop them usually.

While fighting, be very careful of the purple spouts and the AoE circles you can see. This are environmental hazards and they deal a percentage of your max vitality as damage. This means they are always dangerous and you can never outlevel them. The explosions only happen once, and if you look closely, you can see which pieces of terrain will explode when approached. These things also damage enemies by the way, might be useful.

Once you have found the room with the large purple crystals, you can choose to end your excursion by interacting with it. You will offer your Soul Lures to the crystal and get a number of shards depending on how many lures you offer (... and it's random how many lures you can get to drop, so...). Less than 10 means 2-4, 10-20 seems to be 5-7, about 30 will be 9 or so. More than 30 seems to be wasted. You can hammer space to fast-forward through.

A boss can spawn when you interact with the crystal, but it's not too bad if you are in the second cultivation realm. If it happens you get 2 more crystal shards than usual and a treasure chest.

You must go near the shards and hold interact with them to... roll the dice. Spirits are gacha. Great.
There're three types of spirit rarities (more in the spirits overview section).

Aside from the shards, you also get two types of liquids which are used to repair or upgrade artifacts respectively.

Aside from the purple crystal room, there're a number of other random special rooms you can run into. Most are beneficial.

If you see a floating green crystal in the middle of the room, you have to keep attacking it a few times to break it for free soul pearls.

If you find a white dead body, interact with it for free pearls.

A room can have a random cultivator you must fight. They can be somewhat strong for the region. If you find you are doing no damage, escape right away. You will waste a run, but it's better than dying. They do not seem to scale up.

A room can also spawn a clone of your character. The clone can use your artifacts and your pills. They will have your stats and skills, but not your fates (at least not most, martial skill cooldown reduction actually seems to work for it). This makes them unable to use ultimates. The AI isn't too smart, but something like a blade lifesteal build may struggle a bit. They give out a lot of pearls on death.

You may run into a treasure chest, this can be a gamble. It can either just give you pearls, or have a cultivator attack you (the odds seem 50:50 or worse). The cultivator can range from very weak to hopelessly powerful, irrespective of your cultivation tier. Even if you are in Enlightenment and visiting a Fallen Valley from region 2, it can still beat you. Peak Enlightenment can be barely enough. Prepare to run if you do 1 damage.
If you manage to beat it, you get a lot of soul pearls.

Very, very rarely an artifact rat will spawn. This is a special enemy that only takes 1 damage from all attacks, has little health and does not counterattack. You need to kill them relatively quickly to get pearls from it.

Lastly you may find a purple pond. The behaviour of the pond was changed. It seems be about a 50/50 chance that it will either take your pearls, or give you double.
It's a straight gamble, but keep in mind that around 30-something pearls, you do not get more rewards.


As you keep rolling the gacha, you will get duplicates. Initially these upgrade the soul level of the spirit, but once fully maxed, you receive "Nether Breath" items instead. 1 for normal spirits, 2 for rare ones. You can use a large stack of these (up to 50) at the center of the starting area to summon an empowered version of the crystal dragon boss.

It will be far more powerful than you may expect.

If you spend 50 breaths, it will be scaled to the cultivation realm of the next region. If you don't have one of the busted builds, you will find it difficult to win.

If you win, you get a large amount of crystal shards, more if you spent more Nether Breaths. If you spent a lot of breaths (or get lucky?), you can find a special equipment ring here. This ring gives you a percentage-boost to your damage for each artifact you have equipped, but constantly drains your sense. (1%/2%/3% bonus damage per artifact for 2/4/6 sense per second). The damage bonus is pretty negligible sadly (unless you go all in with lower-tier artifacts I guess) and you can't really restore sense.

You must have Soul Eater Stones for each time you want to enter, you can get them from Fallen Valley.

The tower is a series of 5 increasingly difficult boss fights, with a timer.
If the timer at the top ever runs out, you die. Defeating a boss drops small blue objects that grant additional time.

If you aren't at the peak of the second realm of a region, you will probably not survive until the end, but you can still get the drops you want from earlier enemies.

Those being Forge Quartzes (used for upgrading Artifacts) and various Dews (used to upgrade Spirits). These are region-specific, so you can't upgrade items beyond your realm.

If you finish a tower, you can get a soul sphere, which is an item to upgrade a spirit with. You only get it once, but it acts as equipment you can take back at any time. Some towers also give you mounts.

So you got your artifacts, and you got your spirits, and you may wonder what next.

Artifacts must be equipped in your pill slots (and are used like one). They all have unique special effects. You can read what an artifact does on the artifacts screen you can click on below the bag icon in your inventory, on the left.

All artifacts also have a number of skills, which are pretty much traits for artifacts. However, when you refine an artifact, you do not improve the traits, you change them. Some are decidedly more useful than others I'll say. The traits can have tiers, but you cannot pick which trait to replace. You can only replace the whole set at once.

To unlock the real power of an artifact, you must combine it with a spirit in the upper right. This process is reversible at any time, but doing so reduces the durability of an artifact to zero.

Spirits add their own special abilites to an artifact while it's active. Some also have passive traits that are triggered if you have the spirit merged with an artifact in your pill slots. The tier of an artifact can boost the power of the spirit's abilities (not durations or probabilities though).

When a spirit says something triggers on "attack", this means an attack by the spirit itself, not the artifact. Generally, attacks are somewhat slow projectiles (that can miss...), while buffs will home in on you. As far as I can tell, you cannot find the stats like range and cooldown for the spirit's unique attack anywhere. Damage should depend on the artifact.

Many effects from spirits only stay around while the artifact is active. Exceptions are for skills that explicitly have a timer (like Charon's boar summons).

Artifacts are sadly only useful if you keep upgrading them to your tier. This requires the liquid from Fallen Valley, quartz from the Souleater Tower and another copy of the world boss material.

In combat, you summon them by pressing the inventory button. They tend to draw aggro from enemies more so than yourself. You can unsummon them by pressing the button again. This incurs a 10 second wait time before you can use it again, their vitality will stay the same. If the artifact loses all vitality from attacks, it will break. This costs 20 durability total and incurs 60 seconds of wait time, but then it has full vitality again when summoned once more.

They sadly tend to break quickly, and on higher difficulties, bosses will shred them. At that point, you may elect to just keep them in your bar for the passive boosts they offer.

There's a lot to see on the artifact spirits screen. The left side contains a list of all spirits you have obtained from the various Fallen Valleys. The middle piece is art. The bar below is their soul realm, upgraded by rolling duplicates of the spirit in Fallen Valley.

Lower left has a history of the spirit (more unlocked with a higher soul realm).

Below you can give them gifts to increase affinity displayed as hearts in the top right. Each spirit has a preferred type of gift (like Mengyi and Iridescent Gems), those are just drops, from the Fallen Valley where you can find the spirit. The very first entry tends to be the special gift that gives half a heart. You can only give a limited number of gifts per year. Once you exceed 10 hearts you can form a pact. This simply unlocks the third combat ability of the Spirit. If you have a soul wisp from a quest, you can give it as gift to greatly increase the soul level, best used for the framed spirits.

The right side of the screen contains the abilities of the spirit, hover over them to learn more. Dark skills are not unlocked yet. You do so either by pact, by the Talent web or by increasing their Soul Level.
Specialization skills may require the use of Energy. You get it for feeding items to the spirit by clicking on the plus next to the bar or by waiting. Each month spirits seem to recover 2 points of energy. There's no quickfeed button alas...

Talents are special upgrades for Spirits, unique to them. Each talent upgrade increases the Spirit Power level. If you want to bind a spirit to an artifact, it's spirit power needs to be lower than the artifact's capacity. So if you upgrade spirits a lot, you must also upgrade your artifacts alongside.

The three slots are for items you get for completing a souleating tower of a region. They only drop once and increase all stats by a few percent. You can also take them back out for another spirit if you want.

If you click on "View" next to talents, you open the upgrade web. Every upgrade comes with a cost, and increases the Spirit's Spirit Power, keep that in mind.

The upgrades will tell you what they need. This can be money, dew from the Souleater Towers (note which region's tower is needed), practically any kind of pill (of specific grades too... You can buy grades 5+6 in towns, 3+4 in sects), interacting with NPCs (even killing them), and a lot more. You need to interact with most systems in the game to upgrade Spirits. Hope you didn't slack with your Specializations.

If you see a node that requires you to see an event, these only count after you unlocked the node. Anything that happened before does not count. This is an issue since some events are one-offs. To combat this, you can also feed the spirit an orange or red skill book, any tier, but of the appropriate type. Just defeat world bosses to have fodder.

The upgrade web also enables the second combat skill for the spirit.

If you cannot progress in the upgrade web, you may need to increase the soul level of the spirit by rolling duplicates in Fallen Valley. Have fun.

The most common spirits have 4 soul levels, the moderately rare ones 4, the ones with a frame 5. The framed ones also have a larger upgrade web.

The lower part of the upgrade web is currently not done.

All flat stat boosts aren't worth it including insight and luck, unless you really have free slots in your fates of your build, summoning (Chicken King, etc.) doesn't seem worth it either. Spirit fruit gift is a joke. On death skills are pointless since you shouldn't die.
Not all fates are available at all breakthrough tiers. Some later quests give items that let you reroll fates once. If you pick a fate that you have higher tiers of, you will be made to change all of them. (Can't just delete a tier 1 and keep tier 2.)
Check Sect Fates too.
Big thanks to the contributors of the wiki. I'm leaving out a lot of skills since this is just my opinions.

I've seen the questions come up often enough that I've decided to just list the ones I don't think are ever worth considering here too, such as the static stat boosts. I'll add to this slowly over time as I roll them. There may be more added over time, apologies if something is missing.

You make a fate an option by breaking through in the sect's cultivation room, you need to have joined it to do so.
Sub-branches always have the same fates. If you conquer a sect, you replace their breakthrough fate.

Sect Breakthrough Fates do not act like the Strange Mushroom. They do not allow you to pick from a new set of Breakthrough Fates, instead they replace one of the choices.

Some breakthrough fates are ridiculously good. And you can even get multiple sect fates if you hop sects a lot, which seems silly. Some of them are good enough to make it worth the hassle, Murderous Rise and No Traces Left in Snow for example.

There might be some more new sect fates that I haven't seen yet.

---

HC NPC special fates: Take careful note which state they require allies and which don't. The ones that don't still seemed tuned for group fights, which makes a few rather unusually strong.



So for sect competitions, Sword, Blade and potentially Fire are decent.
Sect Wars definitely get use out of Palm, Finger people.
For solo fights, Fire seems a bit much and needs balancing.

There may be new skills added later.

You get the skill prompt during boss fights, during specific attacks. You must reduce their HP by a large amount and you get the skill. Although I've never ran out of time, it's possible that there's a hidden time limit.

Bosses can have multiple skills. You need to fight them multiple times to get them all. There seems to be a chance that any given skill triggers the eye, and sometimes a fight doesn't give you one period. You must wait long enough for the attack pattern to appear.

You will be able to pick up fights you can't otherwise get (quest choices) in the Tower of Souls as well as the 4th area Tao Dungeons.
There're two one-off fights as far as I can tell. The Leviathan and the Golden Crow. But both of those should be difficult enough that you can't just skip past the attack.

To upgrade skill realms, you must defeat a sufficient number of boss monsters of that realm, it shows you in the overview. The realm also gets upgraded if you defeat the same boss of a higher realm (recurring bosses like the artisan bosses).

The skill tiers matter a fair bit, if you defeat a higher tier boss, you can usually use their skill.

Skills that benefit from energy loss require specific finger skills, while "recharging" skills should be the spear skills that use dots.



The one-hit damage skills overall seem rather weak compared to the skills with lower numbers that hit more often. Idle thought. Something like Willow Wind deals extremely low damage per hit, but has a huge number of projectiles. If you combine that with skill that raise the minimum damage threshold, I wonder how well that'd work.

Jagu
Flora Spirit: Drops leaf orbs. They deal mediocre damage, enemies must walk into them and they're spread widely randomly. You recover a small amount of HP% when an enemy is hit. Moderately long cooldown, somewhat expensive. Not really good.

Evergreen
Willow Wind: Shoots a lot of small orbs that deal tiny amounts of damage. You pretty much need to use this inside of large bosses to get anything resembling damage.

Leaves and Petals: The stream of razor leaves. Pierces, moderate damage. Angle does not change after casting.

Bamboo Shoot: Summon the seeds. You must protect them until they hatch, which can be impossible against some bosses.. Then you either get those bamboo creatures that are worthless and die immediately or the Evergreen. The Evergreen is actually pretty powerful and if not a target for the AI, will deal considerable damage over time. But it's up to chance if you get it. If you run a summon-boosting build (like the Horn), you can get use out of this, provided you get lucky.

Mushroom Man
Hallucinatory Dish: Create a mushroom that boosts a summoned creature, either damage or speed. Also grants recovery from the creature. If you made your summons strong enough to be powerful, this could be good. Most of the time, your summons will exist as tanks though, not as damage sources.

Flash Fungus: Throws mushrooms at enemy. Surprisingly high damage if you hit with most of the mushrooms. They're aimed at your cursor, long range too. Only downside is that it takes a while to fire all the mushrooms, but it's still quite good.

Dark Crystal Spirit
Lava Blast: Hits in cone. Number might look big, but the actual damage isn't all that high.

Rain of Sands: Rocks fall in the entire arena, so you need to be rather lucky to get any usable damage here against bosses. Grants minor health recovery.

Darkfire Mask
Dark Flame - Break: Stream of projectiles. Very high damage if you can be right in front of the enemy for a second. Rather good.

Inferno Hell: Projectile blasts around you. Damage isn't high unless you're right in the middle of a big boss, and even then. Taking the cooldown into account, not that good. The spirit recovery may seem tempting, but the skill isn't cheap either.

Blood Lord
Lethal Tombstone: Slows enemies. Decent AoE damage if the enemy stays in it. Decent CD as well, overall a pretty solid skill. Energy cost is very high however.

Blood Shadow Tracks: Dash into enemies. Stun and Silence on a 14 second CD. This is pretty fantastic to interrupt bosses, since most have attack patterns longer than the CD. Energy cost is not cheap, but this is really good if a boss has an attack that's hard to deal with. Some bosses are immune to crowd control abilities, keep that in mind. The earliest available stun.

Sword Bambuki
Demon Bamboo Sting: Bamboo spears shoot up. Random, expensive. They can attract enemy attacks for a second, but still. Not particularly good.

Coatl
Arc Flash: Fires three projectiles. The cheapest Eye skill in the game. Its damage is low, but so are its cost and CD. If you just want a very cheap damage supplement, this can work against mobs.

Thunder Curse: More expensive, longer cooldown that Blood Shadow Tracks. In return it offers good damage (it hits twice) in a large AoE, a longer stun and larger range. With the CD, BST is probably still better.

Soul-Tracking Lightning: 8 Pillars of lightning home in on enemies. The damage may seem low, but it's 8 hits every tick and lasts a fairly long time. If you summon them near a boss and they keep tracking, they will deal a fairly large amount of damage. Summoned mobs will distract them away however, so time it carefully. Vanishing moves will make the beams disperse.

Six Tails
Fox Beads: 3 sets of 3 piercing orbs. Damage is unimpressive.

Demon Cold Fire: Piercing shotgun cone. Damage is passable.

Demonic Atmosphere: Projectile rain that targets the entire arena. If it hits a lot, the damage is rather good, but it's pretty much random. Probably more useful against really large bosses.

Goliath Crab
Crustacean Crush: Melee attack. It's cheap, but it's quite weak. Not useful.

Toxic Swamp: DoT AoE, pretty large too. The damage is not high, even if the enemy stays in the field the entire time. +30% agility is good for dodging attacks though.

Dig Strike: Create an AoE damage zone, while going underground to evade attacks. The AoE stuns on hit, but you can't attack for most of that time. Longer cooldown, decent evasion option.

Fortifying Wall: Recover 10% HP and 50% damage reduction for 10 seconds. Has some uses for tank builds if you have trouble with specific boss attacks I guess.
Otherwise, you should use it during fights between Sect Leaders. The HP of both fighters is multiplied by about 10 without increasing damage, which makes the 10% be a lot more HP now and last a lot longer. You can buy a lot of time with this.

Dangkang
Gust Gush: Wind beam, like one of the wind skills. Low damage, reduces CD with every tick of damage. It hits a good number of times, so it's a good option.

Sand Tornado: Fan of pretty fast tornados. Damage is mediocre.

Fuse Dash: Rush attack that stuns on contact. Damage is not enough to pick this over BST.

Earth Rending Gale: 5 Piercing beams in a spread. Weak. Cooldown reduction for RMB may have niche uses I guess.

Harpy
Bone Etching Wind: Slow moving wind pillars summoned in a round spread. Low damage.

Dust Stone: Launches (pretty fast) rocks at the cursor, they stun on hit. Damage is low, and BST has half the CD if you want stuns.

Tornado: Starts a spiral of tornados from you, with a delay. Pretty good damage if you start it very close to a boss.

Mountain Specter
Sandstorm: Launchs a shotgun spread of earth projectiles. They reduce CD of the skill with the longest timer on hit. The damage is nothing worthwhile, but some builds can benefit from the CD reduction.

Galloping: You gain an agility boost and summon tornadoes. The damage is overall very low. You can also steal spirit stones on contact, but the amount must be quite low since I didn't even notice it.

Hatuibwari
Lightning Field: You summon the field of lightning around you, lightning strikes all enemies in it. The damage is very low sadly. I could see this being very useful in the Fallen Valley though, since you practically only need to walk around to strike everything. Permanently increases RMB damage for the battle, but only up to 10%.

Rushing Thunder: 5 damage AoE attacks at target cursor position. Microstun for each too. A better stun option than BST since it's on a lower cooldown and with lower energy cost, it can even stun multiple enemies out of their attack.

Overwhelming Cloud: Targets a single enemy with lightning for tiny damage, pass.

Albino Ape
Mountain Breaker: Single hit mediocre AoE damage, at best useful for mobclear if you need that.

Lava Rain: Summon rocks randomly. Low damage, recovers a tiny amount of health and it's very costly too. Pass.

Serial Earth Crack: Multiple AoE zones in a row. Low damage per hit, probably won't land more than 2 at once either. Not worth it.

Fel Vermin
Ice Tornado: Fan of Tornados, low damage, CD reduction isn't worth it since it usually won't hit often unless against very large bosses.

Ice Prison: 9 AoE zones in a 3-spread. Pretty large, it's difficult to hit with more than 3. Damage isn't worthwhile unless most hit. You can increase your agility for the fight if you kill mobs with it.

Frost Prison: 6-fold star-shaped AoE around you. Too large to hit more than once for any but the biggest bosses. Rather low damage as such.

Three-legged Crow Pyro
I think this is a one-off fight during the Golden Crow questline from region 1.

Seared Path: Three lines of fire in the direction you aim. Deals okay damage over time. You pretty much need a large enemy standing in it for the entire time to be worth the very high spirit cost.

Leviathan
This should be a one-off fight during the filling in the land quest of region 2.

Leviathan Tentacles: Summons AoE zones at enemies. Extremely costly, with a long cooldown, but deals a very large amount of damage. STL is a bit better since it has a far shorter CD and cost though. You can cast it twice for half the total energy cost and somewhat more damage.

Sphinx
Flame Flash: A line of projectiles perpendicular to your aim direction, mediocre damage, but cheap.

Lightning Spell: Small AoE at cursor, seems to hit about 5 times. Too few hits for the CD reduction to matter. Damage is okay.

Allquake: 6-fold star pattern, lots of lightning bolts. If you summon this inside a big boss, you should do a lot of damage.

Trident Lightning: 3-spread pillars of lightning, decent damage if you hit with most.

Abomination
Wind Flurry: Fires piercing projectiles randomly all around you. Expensive and long CD, decent damage if used within a boss.

Dense Wind: Spread of tornados that stay. Only worth it against really large bosses.

Ninetails
Fox Flame: Five large, slow projectiles aimed at an enemy. Very low CD, but pretty low damage too.

Enchant: About 120° spread of hearts, low damage, stuns. Extremely expensive. It improves your relationship with a targeted cultivator by two arrows, which isn't really much. The effect is unique though.

Fox Necromancy: Summons a swarm of fire foxes moving from the left of the screen to the right. Deals a great amount of damage against large bosses if most of them hit. Pretty costly and on a long CD.

Sagittar
Rock Fly: 3-lane shotgun. Even if all projectiles hit, the damage just isn't worth it.

Lava Meteorite: Single line of AoEs. Won't overlap much and low damage.

Sundering Strike: 6-fold star line of AoEs around you, damage does not justify cost.

Lydra
Wind Blade: Two piercing projectiles, low damage. You regain some health on hits, but not much for how expensive it is. I don't think it's a linear 1% per enemy hit either.

Swirling Axe: You throw four large projectiles that stay where they go. The damage is quite good, but the energy cost is far too high compared to STL.

Word Spell: Buff/debuff the enemy and you. Can be rooting, minor damage buff, DoT or healing over time. Since they all boost the enemy too, why would you use this?

Leonid
Scorching Fireball: Fires waves of fireballs, shotgun pattern. Cooldown of RMB is reduced if there's only one enemy. The damage is mediocre, but the CD reduction should be useful for some builds against bosses. The skill's own CD is pretty low too.

Fireland Banner: AoE fire area. Low damage, long CD, not great. You can deal a lot more damage with other options.

Fire Rain: Fireball AoE, randomly targeting entire arena. Good luck getting any to hit.

Burning Belt: Rotating ring of 5 fire projectiles around you. Once more a case of being better for large bosses since they'd hit a lot more, otherwise the cost is rather high.

Carpia
Icicle Mark: Freeze AoE at cursor. Seems to hit 3 times, other stuns are better.

Frost Lance: Small circular spread of icicles with good damage. This would be a great skill if only it had half the cooldown.

Ice Blizzard: Five tornados will home in on enemies. They don't circle around though, they just home once. Moderate damage, too costly for that.

Sealed With Ice: Another map-wide attack that won't hit much. Freezes on hit though.

Qiongqi
Earth Anguish: Earth AoE at cursor, mediocre damage with a slowing effect.

Calamity Arrow: Piercing 3-lane spread. Solid damage when used up close. Cooldown is pretty low too, but the energy cost is somewhat high. Decent damage skill if energy is not an issue.

Soul Breaker: Line of moderately-sized AoEs. Even with overlap, the damage is not that good.

Kui
Chain Lightning Blast: You fling a whole lot of lightning orbs that create one-hit damage zones on the ground. Sadly the energy cost is way too high for the moderate damage it deals.

Lightning Glare: Slowly homing, short-ranged lightning beam. Damage is far too low for the cost and CD time.

Lightning Cloud: Large AoE that basically keeps an enemy trapped for the duration. Damage is low, but the CC is okay. It's just rather costly for all this.

Ring of Lightning: Two rings of lightning that rotate rapidly. They hit the target a lot and the total damage is actually pretty good if you are close. Sadly the energy cost is just too high, unless you can easily recover it. This would likely be quite powerful against larger enemies where most of the orbs are always in contact.

Hellspawn
Bloodlust Slash: The damage is a joke. This would be the fastest option to remove the CD on "recharging" skills if you use them.

Nightmare Charge: Stun with longer CD than BST. Damage is nothing worthwhile too.

Crimson Path: Two lines of attacks. High energy cost, low damage.

Blood Frenzy: Character-centered AoE damage. Again, high cost with low damage.

Jimeng
Corrosive Rain: Large AoE damage zone. The damage is decent, but since it takes so long, you can cast STL twice and deal more damage for almost half the energy cost, so...

Water Dragon Cauldron: Effectively summons a turret. The damage is good, but it will likely get destroyed quickly by bosses as it attracts aggro. And sadly it's rather expensive too.

Drought Demon
Scorching Sunbeam: Large AoE that takes a while to trigger before dealing solid damage to everything in it. If any enemy is killed, it may spawn meat that recovers 5% health each. Really expensive, but could really boost survivability against bosses that summon mobs if you can manage the energy cost.

Suanyu
This is the Fallen Valley boss that either randomly spawns at the end or is summoned with Nether Breaths.

Toxic Mist: Large AoE with okay damage. The energy recovery will not make up for the cost though.

Thousand Eyeballs: Spreads some mines around. Not that many and you have to get lucky for this to deal decent damage. Far too costly too.

Pupil Sorcery: Summons an eyeball on delay that casts an attraction field. The damage is pretty low and the energy cost is extreme. Pass.

Gudio
I think this is new because I don't remember seeing it before. No idea where you fight it. Tower? Tao dungeons probably?

Feather of Enticement: Projectiles aimed in all directions. Mediocre damage sadly.

Tiangou
I think tao dungeons?

Lunar Eclipse Orb: Three circles of five orbs each, fired at 60° angles. Pierces. Damage should be passable against large bosses where most shots hit.

Zhujian
Never seen before, no idea where to find it.

Rock Eruption: Instant AoE damage in a large area, but damage is not high. Pretty expensive too.

Nether Nibbling Ape
Same as above, probably new.

Calamity Stone: Cast a large amount of damage lines that stun enemies. Far too expensive for how little damage it deals. There are way better stun options.

Abyss Roar: Absurdly expensive full-screen damage effect that seals cultivator motion skills. Damage is comparable to STL, but this has the highest Eye skill energy cost in the game.

Since the trainer lets you cheat in a lot of manuals, I took the liberty of generating a fair amount to see what kind of traits there are.
Since the generation is nonetheless random, this list will be incomplete and is also just my personal opinion, there could well be builds that make use of traits I didn't consider.

The following was taken wholesale from the wiki and put here for convenience, full credit to the wiki contributors.

You can buy them from taverns. Each tavern has three different drinks, which have a selection of different boosts. You can have one boost from each drink active. If you drink the same thing twice, you overwrite the previous buff. You can just keep spending money until you got what you need.

Furthermore, each region's buffs count separately. You can get three buffs from your current region, three from the previous one and they stack. Going even further is not that useful since the buffs will be weak. You cannot get a drink from the next region sadly.

The strength will be in ascending region order 1/2/3/4/5. 5 may not be out yet, but was datamined.
All buffs last for three or six months, it seems random.

Nu Er Hong's Placid buff is buggy. The third area should give you 4000 vitality recovery per month, but it only gives you 1000 per month, like the same buff from the second area. It seems to be treated as the 2nd region's buff in the code, since you can overwrite it by drinking from there.

Likely too large, have a gander here. [tale-of-immortal.fandom.com]

The trainer lets you easily create Tao souls now, so I can check and verify them all, might as well get cracking.

Short reminder how they work. The sum total of tao soul levels needs to be 3. Whether that's a single element (Sword 3), or a mix (Wood 1, Fire 1, Water 1; Sword 2, Blade 1). Your elemental mix is determined by the primary elements of the tao souls you use to ascend. The secondary elements give minor stat boosts. In most cases, you want a longer duration for your law if you go for a level 3, so Wood + Spear it is for secondaries.

Haven't tried out of all of them yet at a fully upgraded level. Artifacts that deal damage use their own stats for this, this can make them less powerful than it may seem. Or more powerful if you aren't keeping up with your passives. They will tend to break quickly on higher difficulties, at that point carrying one for the passive trait of the spirit may be the best you can do.

Many NPCs carry artifacts. If you want an overview, you can just walk into a town of the region where you can find the forging recipe and check out various backpacks. In combat, you only need to expect artifacts from the region you're in.

Summons boars and offers healing. The boars' vitality is based on the artifact's. But since they will just facetank everything, it's probably not that much in practice.

Even upgraded, this just seems mediocre. The boars are not strong, the healing is not that strong. Its traits tend to boost summoned units, so you could make it work with wood/earth builds?

The spirit Charon also summons boars for tanking. Maybe two summons at once are good for drawing aggro?

Typical traits: Boosting summoned units. A debuff that makes enemies take more damage.

Casts lightning spells with a small AoE in its area. Going by the numbers, this artifact should be dealing solid damage. The spirit root reduction for enemies should be borderline pointless, since enemies rarely get reduced damage anyway.

Typical traits: Faster Bolts
You can be linked via a lightning bolt. This means additional damage, and an agility boost with another trait.
Some traits seem to reduce your Crit RES? I'm assuming this is a typo and means enemy Crit RES.

Basically acts like one of the Sword ultimates, in that it summons a lot of tiny swords. Damage is okay, can be worthwhile. Seems to have low health though for me, even as red artifact. This is your go-to damage artifact.

Typical traits: Larger amounts of the summoned swords, damage buffs, debuffs for enemies on hit

Traps and stuns enemies in its area, while dealing minor damage. There're also traits that can further debuff the target, like sealing specific abilities. You want a longer ranged skill to attack from outside the area where your opponent can't hit you.
This is pretty much an anti-cultivator weapon, since you can very thoroughly obstruct them.

This will usually get destroyed pretty quickly.
Do not take this into Fallen Valley with you.

Typical traits: Sealing certain abilities, taunting the enemy and forcing them to attack the bell, stuns, damage on destruction
Can block items.

Damage debuff for enemies in range, does not last that long. I'd say there are better options.

Typical traits: Increased range for each debuff, damage for enemies moving in the area (they will), more debuffs
Can block movement skills. While nifty, those shouldn't really be a threat to you in the first place.

Somewhat low fire damage in an area. It also absorbs spirit energy that is used by skills, but I'm not sure how useful this is. It requires traits to work. I don't know if bosses even count as expending spirit energy, which would basically only make this artifact useful against cultivators or with a small number of abilities that reduce enemy energy.
Fun fact, you can use skills with attraction like Wind Movement to move the flag away from the damage area.

Traits: Absorbing spirit energy from enemies triggers debuffs, damage upgrades.

Generates orbs that fly to you. Once they reach you, you receive a solid damage boost. Since it's created pretty late, it also does not require lengthy upgrading. If you want to go hunt down traits, you can get some really useful ones.

Traits: Faster orbs, more orbs, and new special orbs.
Black orb that makes you dodge (take no damage) from multiple attacks for a limited time span. That trait is rather good since it basically makes you invincible in most cases for the time span. Green orbs heal a lot.
White orbs make you much faster.

Good healing, minor defense boost, affects your summoned units too. This is a good survivability tool. The range is not very large.

Typical traits: More healing, agility buffs/debuffs, more range, one autododge per healing stack, guaranteed crit for a stack, a strong attack within its range

I have not even come close to finishing all of the upgrade webs, that would be way too much. Most of the upgrades are stat boosts in general, a few offer some new traits like health regeneration.

The spirits will be segregated by region, since each region's Fallen Valleys have their own set. Within a region, the valleys are identical.

You can tell a spirit's rarity pretty easily. The common ones have no Specialization skill and a max of 4 soul levels. The next has one skill and a max soul level of 4. The last has a golden frame in the menu, 3 skills and a max soul level of 5.

The specialization skills that give you stuff can fail, savescum if needed. I will only mention Specializations if they don't explain what they do or are useful.

Only one lifepact spirit, so only one third combat skill, or: Debuff 3 years, -20% max vit/energy.

Some spirits that seem like they are decent:
Region 2 Yunling (energy recovery), Searing Feather (fire DoT) and Youling/Muqing (healing)
Region 3 Zhenxin (damage boost), Charon (tanking), Jiuchen (crits), Ningshuang (damage)
Region 4 Cangya (First specialization, defense)


Yunling: Artifact attacks recover your energy. Bosses will likely shred it quickly since it has to be near them to attack them, so limited use for the fights where you may want it the most.

Silver Edge: Slows enemies, not useful

Searing Feather: Fire damage zone spawns. This can be pretty powerful with upgrades, since it keeps spawning zones in the same spot against bosses. The zones disappear once the artifact is gone, so survivability is once more a concern.

Feiming: Attacks, others are better.

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Huofa: Chance to charm by attacks. Mengyi is better.

Youling: Good fit for healing artifacts like the Cloak or the Pool. Specialization acts like resting in an inn, which is useful if you're on a longer trip.

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Mengyi: Charms on attacks, which disables enemies, and most bosses. Needs to survive to make full use of the damage boosting spirit foxes. Specialization 1 has a number of random results depending on the dream. A random outfit, a temporary buff to Insight or Luck.
Survivability is an issue, and a few bosses are immune to crowd control. Can be pretty useful, though charm still only works 1/3 times when upgraded.

Her node for talking to friends refers to people in your social web, not just anybody with high affinity.

Muqing: In combat, reduces enemy attack, emergency healing, recovering your status means healing. Normal healing range is short. Talents can boost healing pills a lot.
Her first specialization only seems to give you money, up to a few hundred thousand apparently. Seems to depend on the realm of the listeners. Third just lets you access your cave wherever you are.
Youling always heals.


Zhenxin: Boosts its own damage, and then all allies' damage if they are in range. Can work with defensive artifacts if you let them boost you. Just remember that you need to stay close.

Sharp Edge: Works strangely. Throws out objects that stick to the ground, then retrieves them for damage. Sometimes it just throws them at enemies for very little damage. It will miss if the enemy is directly below the artifact. Overall damage seems low.

Sharpclaw: Defense reduction on attack that scales with artifact tier (-141 per attack on Enlightenment). After some testing, this does not seem all that strong, since resistances still matter.

Voodoo: Increases enemy damage taken effectively, seems okay.

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Charon: Summons rather slow boars. They are surprisingly tanky against bosses. Best used with an artifact like Pool that does not have to be near the boss to work. Seems quite good if you want an aggro-drawing artifact. Could work well with the Horn too for even more boars?

Darkfang: Deals minor damage when attacking, but gives you a decent AoE that lasts for a few seconds when unsummoned. You pretty much want to summon and unsummon this over and over for damage output I guess?
Specialization guarantees success when stealing from same or lower tier people.

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Jiuchen: Specializes in crits. Normally the crit rate is too low to be relevant, but if you want to build for that, this is your spirit. Skybreak storm should be pretty strong, if your own crits count for it too. I haven't tested that.
First specialization gives you random ores from mining/Fallen Valley drops, pointless. Second gives you a chance not to lose lifespan while digging a tomb, but lifespan doesn't matter. Third is a forge you can use anywhere.

Ningshuang: Can ignore 50% of enemy Defense on attack, less than it sounds due to resistances, but still enough to be decent. Damage values overall seem pretty high. If you want a damage spirit, this is it.
First specialization just gives you random monster drops. The second lets you kill someone unnoticed if you are willing to savescum.
Her upgrade web requires doing things that cause NPC hatred like stealing or deliberately triggering revenge. This can be a bit annoying.



Xuanti: Chance of counterattacks, nope.

Bajio: Gains shield for the artifact on attack. Can detonate the shield after 10 attacks. So this spirit would protect your artifact, but artifacts attract aggro, so bosses will deal with it anyway and reduce the shield for the detonation. Furthermore, you want artifacts to survive for the power of the spirit, so this seems kinda backwards? Maybe for Pools or so?

Brawler: Slowdown and knockback on attack, and max vitality for some reason. The way the max vitality works can be useful. While it retains the damage taken (You are at 450/500 and go up to 750/800), when it reverts back, if your current HP is above the cap, the damage disappears (you lose more HP to 550/800, go down to 500/500). In other words, if you take less damage than the max vitality boost, it heals sorta. With upgrades, it only takes four attacks. Youling seems better.

Rainmaker: Steals spirit roots, deals damage after doing so. First is pointless and there are better damage spirits.

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Jiuzhu: Increases def, can convert vitality into shield. Def increases can stack and are decent. Second only matters for fist builds. That said, if you need to tank, you can use Charon or Cangya.

Muke: Seems weak.
Specialization lets you find a revenge target. So you can hunt them, or you can befriend them to end an NPC hatred chain if you want.

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Cangya: Generates shields for you on attack, pretty small shields though. However, this is actually a good thing. A shield, irrespective of health, will always fully block an attack without bleedthrough. If you have 5 shield and take 10000 damage, only the shield will be hit, no vitality damage. Furthermore, since you should rapidly lose shields, he will also erase projectiles regularly (not AoEs). Third skill should hurt bosses too.

First specialization is far more useful than you may think. The bad outcome is a buff to your martial spirit roots, which don't really matter. The good outcome is that training with him increases the Upgrade level multiple times (how many traits you have unlocked) of any attack skill you have equipped. This can save you a lot of time and resources for grinding. Second boosts travel speed, third lets you basically use a town teleporter anywhere.

Definitely get him. Excellent defense spirit for non-fist builds and the first specialization will save a lot of time. Bosses may take the artifact down quickly though.

Lingge: Her combat skills steal stats, but too little to matter. And it takes way too many attacks to trigger the rest. Does not seem strong.
First specialization gives random medicines, they will be of your tier. Since the result is mediocre in quality, and you don't get many, this isn't that useful. Second specialization is the only way to increase your recovery of Tao Points for your domain. Third lets you instantly learn a manual.
Specializations have some uses I suppose.

This is likely going to stay WIP for a pretty long time, feel free to contribute if you can.

You can't savescum which ? event is picked, only outcomes, but why bother. This list is probably not exhaustive. If you can contribute, feel free to. Walking away always ends the event without anything happening and won't be mentioned. Events don't give out red manuals, and most items are unnecessary anyway.
Apologies for current layout. For chained events, a semicolon (;) indicates a different group of choices based on your first one.


Array: Break through: Good result means a chance of a random manual, always stones and pills. There's a seemingly very small chance of a cultivator interrupting you. They may fight or just leave. If you win, you get the good result.

People fighting over fruit: Picking one means fighting the other. You get random materials or pills. Does not seem to incur NPC hatred if you let the loser go. While they're busy means getting one spirit fruit. You can get away with it or get challenged to a fight and trigger NPC hatred.

Fish swimming: Failure: Mood down 10. Success: ?

Holy Spring: Spring: Cultivation; destroy gives demonic points and an injury; Hut: Chance to get a blade manual and root; barging in kicks you out with injury.

Mountain Cave: Can be trap (fight, no treasure), treasure and a fight or treasure without a fight. Sometimes leaving actually gives you the treasure.

Black cow: Take treasures: Money; Take dates: 1 Spirit Fruit

Thunderbird: Strange feather buff (Spirit RES +10%)

Riverbed: Rest: Boosts cultivation, Fish: Materials or recovery, failure means vitality loss

Tree with large fruits: Harvest can: fail for nothing, vitality damage or restoration.

Field of black plants: Eat: Harm to health

Sage asking you questions (Region 4 only?):
What is good: Fighting/Being Powerful/Heart/Handsome

Handsome: Pick handsomeness above all in the next three questions, you get called a flirt without reward.


Many of these don't even have choices, they're at the bottom.

River with parrot: Random item (if you take it +20 demonic points) or Just points
River with fruit tree: River: Reduces cultivation Fruit: Medicine that extends lifespan by one.
Pagoda with poem: Filling it in lets you do a Training Partner session with a random person.
Noise or Light: Lights: Can give Earth root (or other things?), Noise: Reputation
Fishing: Success: Health restored (?), failure:
Peach Fruit: Success: Boosts mood, failure: ?
Watching chess game: Giving tips: Middle aged Man: Allows you to reduce someone's lifespan by 50 (pointless...) or gives you three spirit fruits. ;Old man: Increase someone's lifespan by 50 or three spirit fuits. Watching quietly: Interrupting:
Cool barrier: Take the Qi: Just cool down: + rare metal
Ruins: Search: Manuals, pills, etc., cultivate: qi
Weasel vs. Fox: Help Weasel: Help Fox:
Mysterious Force Forest (Region 1 only): Catch deer: Always fails, no reward; Play with deer: Follow: Qi Pearl (random quality) Treasure: Nothing (maybe just a failed outcome?)
Wild duck with rat tail: Catch: Plague debuff, -10% vitality per month Ignore: Vitality loss
Monkey with tree: Help monkey: money Help tree: Spirit fruit + rare metal
Rabbit selling stone: Buy: Costs manual Eat: Demonic points + 20 (it runs away) Region 1 only?
Near dead pig: Help: Multiple possible buffs (Travel speed+200 and agility+20; ***); poison too deep: the other to choices again; Law of nature: going away
Cool barrier (region 2): Take the Qi: Get Qi, get quest to rebuild the array. Takes 40 monster drops. Purple manual + tiny reputation; Just cool down: Golden Core (IV) Manual + rare metal + virtuous buff (Luck+5, Crit RES +10%)
Melon-sized fruits: Max vitality +15, fail: nothing or vitality loss
Golden Light/5-colored light (Region 2): Golden: success: money OR qi fail: nothing 5-colored:
Mysterious Bridge (region 2): Take money: You lose money and vitality; Throw in: 100: Does nothing, 500: Luck+5 buff, 1000: Luck+10 buff
When acquiring Qi from world map: Wall of text: Focus on it: Chance to get more Qi; or lose energy and health Don't: End.
Weird fruit falls to you: Catch: Success two tavern boosts/Fail: ?


Choice-free:

Ape vs black snake: qi
Fight between ?: Increases spirit roots
Bird nest; Dead body: Spirit stones
Vultures; flying fish: Mood down
Drinking with a cultivator: Pills
Heavy storm; lightning strike; Monkeys: Reduces vitality
Heavy storm, downpour: Recovery
Rock Cave; Mouse: Random items like pills or manuals.
Horned Beast: All martial roots +1
Ranyi fish: Buff +20 mood/month
Pool: Either lose materials (about 10% of a stack) or gain random items/pills/money
Spirit fox dream: Gem, gift for Fox spirit. (Only once)
Wind throws you over cliff and a monster picks you up: Wood +1
Flying snake: Loss of stamina and energy, ~10%
Tiger horse: Luck +20 Buff
Cultivation spring (Region 2+?): just qi
Giant bird hits you (Region 3): Vitality loss

Sage Tianbao on flying sword: Gives book for 3 locations with hidden treasures from Jo, find with Feng Shui. You can get these even beforehand though.
First region (N:69, E:95, tip of north): Emerald Gourd mount (TS: 300, C: 250)
Second region (N:94, E:68, northwest tip): 10 G6 skill fruits (20 points total)
Third region: (N:196, E: 72, sorta northeast): Passive manual, Origin V.

I didn't even know some of them existed, so I figure some people may appreciate these. Probably going to stay WIP for a good while while I test out some different outcomes. General rule, ? mark events can trigger quests, the purple ! in taverns and special NPC spawns always do. Some quests cannot be done again if not done immediately or rejected it seems. Some can also be pretty expensive.

Questlines can be triggered once you are at the realm required, but are usually scaled for the late realm with upgrades. Maybe save beforehand, some bosses are rather tough, and random cultivators can have very effective skills and artifacts. Even more so on higher difficulties.

You can get some special fates that assist with attacks, but sadly those tend to run out very quickly. The buffs usually also don't help much.

The soul wisp items you can get from quests can be given to artifact spirits as gift and greatly increase their soul level. You should save them for the framed, rare, spirits of course.

By the way, Mystery Man Jo always overcharges on any difficulty but Chaos.

Main: Getting through the mountains. You can either kill Jagu or go through the short questline. You are supposed to lose the first fight, but on Normal with damage boosting skills, you can win. That however cuts the entire quest line short and removes the hidden quest, also doesn't let you advance one minor breakthrough for free. Otherwise follow the directions. Not killing her may allow later sidequests to happen, though it should probably be unrelated.

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Hidden tavern quest: You must return to the tavern after doing the minor breakthrough, but before finishing the main quest. You will see the purple exclamation mark. Fight the bandit camp instead of walking away, but listen to the leader afterwards, or you won't get the rest. Now you need to bury the dead, give the grandmother the maximum amount of stones and hand over hairpin and letter without looking at them (savescum looking at the letter if you want to, it's not interesting though). You get some manuals for it, one should be for your highest spirit root... since that is likely random, the books are basically money. If you don't do the steps, the reward value is decreased/gone.


Main: Golden Crow questline. Don't challenge the first NPC immediately, they're tough and can wait. Waiting also won't change the landscape. You need to reach Qi Condensation (III) to finish the questline anyway. When you fight him, it's a unique boss. Win or loss does not matter I believe.
This spawns a world boss that changes terrain into desert (does nothing I believe). The next fight is unwinnable, don't worry. You get tasked with getting two items.
Next is fighting the Harpy lord, small dungeon + a normal harpy boss with more health.
Then the tree always spawns at the very outer upper right of the land of region 2. You get to talk to them.
Pick a fight: Unique boss that's not that easy due to the slow debuff. Get the branch for winning.
Request: You get told about a pond that contains a Lydra boss you can only defeat. Then you need to return to get the branch.
Take the two quest items back to Hou Yi. He will kill most of the crows leaving you to fight a double boss. Sunny will resurrect Pyro in battle. You need to kill it first. Fight is tricky at Qi Condensation (III), be prepared. They also have a skill you can learn from the Eye of Providence and I don't think you can fight this boss again normally. But it should be tricky enough you can't avoid learning it.

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Ice field spawn: Your choices are to give her alcohol, fire books or tell her off. Books requires any three fire books, it fails but you get an orange Foundation II skill. Telling her to go back means she fights you for 20 seconds (trivial at Foundation), you get +3 Water, Wind, Lightning each. The best result seems to be getting her rice wine, which costs 1000 stones: +5 Water, Lightning, Wind each.
I do not endorse underage drinking. *cough*

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Random encounter once you hit Foundation: A cultivator woman getting attacked by a crab. Save her and her house spawns nearby. You must memorize this location to continue the questline, it is not marked. I very strongly recommend just focussing on this quest to get it over with, if you want to do it. You should keep visiting her every month if you want to quickly cycle through her events. If you don't visit her often enough, the questline ends, but I don't know the threshold. Tedious, but if you're building your character after breakthrough, you got time. She gives a decent amount of resources.

So, the events. She first asks if the truth matters (yes: temporary +10 insihgt), next event she practices with a sword, next event asks if you would pursue a dangerous truth (yes, +5% ATK +10 insight buff), next event gives you a set of grade 2 pills (orange). The event after that is a boss fight against a special bamboo boss you can't fight otherwise. You can also run away, that ends the questline (you feel horrible and get the cowardice debuff, -5% ATK, -10 mood/month, +20 agility), then she asks you to get a book for her. If you decline, she vanishes and the quest is over. If you agree, you get a mountain to spawn with a boss that won't fight back. I don't know the conditions of the next event, but it's not time based. I think you need to go to, or close to, the Lei Ze area (where you get attacked automatically). This gives you one more event where she asks you to visit her in three months. You can pressure her for some backstory her, but it changes nothing. The questlog still won't say anything, so remember the date.
You get a moderately difficult fight against a "monster", a summary of her tragic backstory and a solid bunch of resources. Pills, money and a storage ring.

Always a bad ending, either dead or depressed, with similar rewards.

Main: Filling in the land, starts upon reaching Golden Core (IV). Some NPCs will tell you about a girl at a shore. Once you talk to her, you will be attacked by a special boss, be ready. You will also be attacked if you try to fly over the ocean, but that boss fight is likely going to kill you. After the fight, you agree to help her find the stone. A village will spawn to the upper left.
As you approach, you will find a wounded NPC spawning there. You can either help him or not.
If you don't, the village will not trust you. You will be told to hunt the Bi Fang.
If you do, a fight to save him follows. You get different dialogue and choices.

Bi Fang: If you didn't help the injured person, you must fight it. Otherwise you can negotiate with it and learn the backstory. It's a unique fight, melee-range fire based.
If you chose to listen to it, you instead fight a Blood Puppet-type boss with more health.

After getting the stone, back to the girl. This time you fight the boss for real. She will heal you during the fight (for relatively little though), but make sure you are stocked with pills. Skills that hit multiple times will be useful. Many of its attacks are too fast and have little telegraphing, good luck.
Most offer Divine Sense if you want to keep her in your cave. She's possibly required for a new quest in region 4 too. The earlier you do the quest, the less you sacrifice. So if you can beat it in Early Golden Core, you lose a little less.
The Leviathan has skill you only get one chance to learn (Eye), probably not skippable though.

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Tavern quest: The Journey of You Yuanzhi. This is a rather lengthy series of quests. It keeps getting updated with each cultivation realm. First you need to fund his journey with 20k spirit stone (don't go without the money), and then you will keep receiving letters. The later letters detail a situation from which you must rescue him to continue the storyline. The letters have no time limit, you can take as long as you want to to prepare. The fights can be tough, so make sure you do. If you even once choose not to rescue him, he will die. You will receive a letter about his death and a spawn a special location that gives a random orange manual. Tier of the manual likely related to how far you went with the quest.

• 105 Skill points
  
• Fluffy White Tail -> spawns location in region 2 that restores mood when visited.
  
• Deer spirit: Mysterious orb that contains a soul wisp
  
• Sect conflict: Get sword tassel. When used improves mood +15.
  
• Dark Swamp: First time you must rescue him. Golem miniboss, should be easy.
  More in Region 3

Random event: Fox demon and human. They will argue, but you can pick either choice. No idea if running away locks you out of a questline, I haven't seen the fox demon again.

Random event: People arguing artifacts: Helping either gets you an Ultima Sand.
Information on artifacts argument: If you listen and then offer a pill, he will refuse it, nothing lost. You get Fallen Valley info out of him.

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NPC spawn: Cultivator in a blue robe, Celestial Palace. Somewhat long. May need Origin Spirit (V) on higher difficulties. Or alternatively, is scaled to be easier if you're doing it in Qi Condensation?
Agree (you can't reject it anyway), but put it off if you just ascended. Once you feel ready, go to the stele and go in. You will get in a fight and then be made to pick one of four areas. In every area, you will fight ghosts with sword LMBs. You need to finish all four directions. At the end, you get a sword cultivator boss that can be pretty tough.
Talk to the robed man again: First choice gets backstory, both choices give you an orange manual (LMB only?) of your realm and highest spirit root.

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NPC spawn: A Peddler-looking white ghost will sell you a soul lamp for 5000 stones. He will keep spawning until you buy it. This will start triggering a questline the next few months.

Malignant, destroy it: Ends quest, does give book
Uncanny, examine: Ghosts take over your body and walk you to a grave. Forces fight. Don't pick.
Summon spirit: You get more choices in the next part and backstory. You can also put it off. Strongly recommended.

At grave: Capturer of the spirits, you must help the sect if you picked uncanny

Help Elder: Fight ghost cultivator. Uses water skills. Scaled to your realm
Help sect: Fight strong sword cultivator. Scaled to your realm.
Observe: Both destroy each other, you only get the book. Quest over.
Do not interrupt: Quest over, debuff Resented (-15% ATK)

The fight is hard. It's a sword or water/sword cultivator that hits hard. You may want Origin Spirit for higher difficulties (Or it's easier at Qi Condensation III? There may be some oddity with NPC cultivator realm scaling). You get a new location to spawn as long as you pick one of the first two choices.

New location:
Lamp goes out:
Cannot leave empty-handed: Refill with souls (official translation doesn't make it clear, but this is torturing them), can trade for one of three outcomes below.
Leave: Soul Lamp buff. A one-time full heal if you die in combat. Would be useful if rechargeable, but it's not.

Rune Symbol: +15 to all spiritual roots. That's it.
Bone: Unique mount Ghost Zouyu (TS: 700, Cha: 200)
Banner: Buff, once per battle, you will be invincibile for 5 seconds after taking a lethal hit. Can be used three times total.
Keep Lamp: Same as leaving, only evil.

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Riverbank with tree spawns: Cultivate: Nightmares, fight strong tree miniboss, gain qi+purple Golden Core IV manual
Be suspicious: Burn Incense: Mo Xue's Gift luck +15% for one year
Say no: Alert Buff Crit RES +20%
Ask questions: The ghost attacks you, not that difficult. You release the trapped souls. Story book + orange golden core manual. +15 Wood

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Village of elderly: If you get this event, you must complete it. You cannot put it off or do it again. The one fight isn't too hard however.
Investigate: Reputation, Just points, fewer quest choices.
Not fit for task: Quest ends.
Stay silent: You get some money and continue the quest. Offers additional quest outcomes.

Choice, only for staying silent
Died next day after treasure: Get Cube Jade item, additional quest outcomes, continue
Mist began rising 3 years ago: Continue

Try: Continue quest
Leave: Quest ends

Truth: Continue, fight miniboss, not too dangerous if you have any tier 3 skills at all.
Leave: Quest ends

Reward: Soul pill, gives lots of qi. Buff: Cultivation speed +20% for 10 years

If you picked choice 3 at the start:
Leave: Ends quest
Pay respects: Next choice

Woman with cube medallion
Give: Give all the money and medallion
Continue on: Keep presumably

At grave:
Bury pill: Get a book, and a special destiny if you also gave away the money too I assume.
Just pay respects: Keep it

Destiny: Sealing curse, mythical (and similar) enemies are silenced for 5s at the start of a fight. 9 times total.
The money and soul pill aren't important, but that the sealing curse is only for 9 times makes it pretty useless. It even triggers against cultivators. It will be gone extremely quickly. Highly disappointing.

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Upon reaching Golden Core:
Dying Wish (Iron Ruler): Has a lengthy series of boss fights, you may wish to prepare some more instead of going immediately once you get the letter.
Go to the starting village. Meet Xi, she is going to be important.
Dialogue choice does not matter. Investigate the cave to get into a fight. Next up is a fight against the first world boss. You should prepare for that, it will have more HP. And then a Coatl. And then you must go to the spot and use Feng Shui to get a memory. Next step is another boss, this time the bamboo boss. The choice after does not matter.
You get Jagu's Memories, an item that lets you reroll a breakthrough destiny of the first two breakthroughs.

Next step in region 3: Iron Shard Hunt is in next section.

Main story: Untamed vs. cultivators, happens once you enter mostly via random events.
Masked demon vs. cultivator
Help righteous: Large fight against demons, hope you got mobclear. Just +50
Help demon: Fight against cultivator, can be impossible, they can be Nascent Soul (VI), escape. Winning gives you materials, +50 demonic points
Ignore both: Nothing

Get a story for 500 stones: You learn about the leader. You also find out that his daughter was kidnapped.

Heavily wounded demon:
Let leave: 3 new choices
Attack: Demon swarm fight, Get thanked, materials + a manual (blue)

Correct direction: Just +50
Wrong direction: Demonic +50
Block them: Gives you some materials from the cultivator.

Young demon girl captured:
Fight: Cultivator, can be Nascent Soul (VI), check before.
Leave: Leaves quest undone. The cultivator can improve somehow while waiting.
You must help her. You cannot actually side with the cultivators here. You then escort her to the special region in the lower left, and get a spot of story.

Next step is in the ice area. You must be Nascent Soul (VI) to have any chance here. And going beyond that is probably helpful because the fight is kind of obnoxious on higher difficulties.

Destination Everfrost: Very annoying fight. Get into peak condition, hopefully with some vitality and energy restoring setup (lifesteal, killing elite enemies maybe?). You need to destroy the two small trees in front of the boss while enemies spawn, so your ally will deal some damage. Unfortunately, on higher difficulties your ally will deal limited damage so you need to do this over and over again. It's quite tiresome and you may want to reach Soul Formation VII first.

One last visit to the village, the girl makes you promise to visit her again, but it doesn't seem like you can.

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Tavern quest: Ask about artifacts and a drunk will ramble about golden crows. If you ignore him twice, you reject the quest and get some resources. Following the questline to the end gives a wisp.

Feather of Golden Crow: Visit the hut. Ignoring twice ends the quest for nothing, otherwise you continue. The next hut is in region 1. Then another marked spot. The bird attacks you. It's like one of the birds of the first main quest, not too threatening. Now a chase begins, though you get the three tavern max vit/en/foc buffs again. You fight it once more, it will be a bit stronger.

The choice for the spear ends the same way afterwards. A few months later the questline ends. You get the crow feather and a Soul Wisp for artifact spirits. His backpack gives you two wood items (for selling only?) and some skill fruits.

You need the feather for a different questline:
Wild Magpie: Just talk to it, hear its sorrows. You need the golden crow feather from the above quest to do this questline. You can't actually reject it, only put it off. Once you finish the above quest, you can continue. Giving it to Magpie will trigger an event several months later, you receive a Love Knot item you can give to an NPC. From what I read in the forums, you give this to an NPC to be warned when they are attacked, but it's unreliable.

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Demonic aura in town:
Investigate: You will be attacked. Sword cultivator, dangerous. Winning leads to Broken Heavenly Sword buff, Does extra damage after using an ultimate... three times total.
Stay to observe: Blue and white cultivator fight.
Ominous: You run.

Observe choices:
Go up: Join Sword Sect: Fight necromantic cultivator, not too dangerous usually. Gives Sword Stone buff (not broken), extra damage, 9 times now.
Join Cultivator: Ghost Banner, vitality < 20%, summon 4 ghost, 3 times.
Stop both: Fight both, could be tough. You get both buffs. They still disappear soon.

Continue: Repeating choices, if you keep doing this, you get Broken Ghost Banner. Vitality <20%, summon 2 ghosts, 2 times ever.
Leave: Leaves

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The Journey of You Yuanzhi, continued:

• Dangerous Lei Ze: Fight a miniboss, get three tavern boosts (+max to your bars), scaled to cultivation level. Maybe keep for major fight.
  
• Trapped at Pit Bottom: Miniboss, again. Raises mood.
  
• Frozen Traveler: Ice miniboss, tavern buffs again. Keep them for important fights.
  
• The end. You Yuanzhi wrote a book, it was very successful. He also gives you a map to treasure, but this time he's still alive. Reward is a random red nascent soul (VI) manual.

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Iron Shard Hunt:
Fight against Blood Elder, Nascent Soul recommended on higher difficulties, the miniboss' attacks can be unavoidable.
Unique and powerful boss ahead, will fight you either choice.
First choice only, after winning: Pick of stones, pills, mood treasures, manuals, all (fight again), or kill him. Second fight is tougher. Choice seems to have no consequences for now.
Afterwards: Must rescue Xi, needs Body Reconstruction Elixir II or later (from Region 3 cities or later). Does not seem time limited (I spent more than a year). Needs Everfrost herbs, so Nascent Soul (VI) recommended before starting this.
Next step needs Heaven Aura from Region 3. Remember you can grind out shards to fuse. You will be attacked by a rather powerful sword-only cultivator, Nascent Soul recommended again. The choice after does not matter.
Get Bi Fang's memories, another destiny rewriting item. (V and below)
There's one more quest in the line, once you reach region 4. See next section.

Main: Giant questline. I strongly recommend not talking to him until Enlightenment (VIII) if you want to complete the questline, because there is a time-limited part of the quest. You are also going to have to babysit him somewhat for a number of months. If you fail the questline, you can just go with a different choice to break open the mountains though. So it's not that bad.

First step is: Visit the Giant. You'll get it once you are in the ice area of region 4. You need to chat with him. The next answer doesn't matter. After this, Agar will move to the next quest spot as time passes.

Once you complete the next step, Agar's timer starts ticking, be warned.
From then on, Agar will constantly lose vitality, stamina and energy. You can find his status by talking to him. If they drop too low, he can get further debuffs, or even die at 0 vitality and you fail the questline. If they are high, he will move more tiles per month. You must talk to him and ask about nearby water/spirit fruits. A fight will ensue at the location and you basically need to be at Enlightenment if you want these fights to be reasonable. (Or use one of the artifact spirit's guaranteed damage skills I guess, if you have no choice.) Bring the item back and talk to him to give it to him.

He stops at a desert. It has a drought demon boss. You can either fight it (no rewards, it might prove difficult depending on how early you try this), or offer to buy something from the auction for it (Expect a cost < 50k stones, reward is a Manual, red passive, Enlightenment tier (VIII).

When Agar arrives at a river, he will anger the Grotto Nymph. You can't heal him while he's waiting, but he doesn't lose health either.

You can pick diplomacy or fighting. The fight is a Carpia you've met before, can be tricky to dodge though and can freeze you.
If you offer to help, you must find the Water Cauldron. Go to the indicated spot and perform Feng Shui to find a cave.
If you just take the pot, you will fight a unique boss. It summons turrets and has a shield that performs AoE attacks on hit while it's active.
If you wait, you will be offered to trade for it. The Jade are just hobby items marked with the tag Jade, chances are you will have enough.

Once you replenish the river, you get one more choice:
You can give it blood essence or decline to. If you choose to (will cost almost all your vitality), you will get the fastest mount in the game months later (TS: 1500, CHA: 200).

Strangely, even if you bring the cauldron, the river graphics still change to dried up. It gets filled up later when the untranslated boss appears though.

Now you must escort Agar to the westmost end of Region 4. You don't need to babysit him, but do check back every few months, you should keep giving him water to keep his movement speed at 4 tiles.
He will break the mountains with his death. You can then go further and talk to the Sun for some more story.
That's the final part of the game for now.

Should Agar die earlier: A set of forest tiles is spawned and the quest ends. If you go to the top west, you can talk to the united Sun that was the three-legged Crow from region 1.
It will task you with going to the peach forest where Agar died. When you nourish the tree, you receive a staff for breaking the mountains. This is faster than the alternative. No other consequences for now.

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No Tavern Quest yet.

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I did random Feng Shui and got a house to spawn in region 4.
You meet a loach inside.

Help: Orange manual, Enlightenment (VIII). That seems to be all? Maybe for much later in region 5?
Kill: Random pills.
Pull on whiskers x3: Get a garment material. Debuff resentment: -500 max focus
Leave

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Bingyi of Wei, she's unhappy you filled in the sea.
Notification, with a woman standing over rain. Happens some months after you finished Agar's quest.
Either choice she fights you. She's not that dangerous if you're prepared. She tends to seal you during the ice storm, but you can dodge that with wind movement. She seems to use it every 25% of HP? You can get each reward only once.
Martial RES passive can have a trait that increases movement speed if you're against a single enemy. It's really good here.
You don't die if you lose, but you will lose the soul lamp buff.
30%: Purple skill book, realm VIII
50%: Pills (I got three body reconstruction pills)
100%: Random orange VIII book
120%: Beat 100% to unlock. Red passive manual and a set of carrots that increase specializations by 20 and lifespan by 10. Sadly you can only get it once.

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You will be notified of a wolf spirit that will kill people in the fourth region? Might be related to Xi's quest? I haven't gotten anything from waiting for years though. I have no idea what triggers the message either. I was testing some negative outcomes. Could be from killing the river spirit.

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Xi's Call: Visit the third region's city, talk to Xi in the tavern:
She asks for either the Sun Stone, G3 Enlightenment Elixir (the one you use to break through to Enlightenment (VIII)), or you tell her off and just take the ingot.

Sun Stone: Auction. Talk to her at least a month before the auction. Probably the simplest if you want her to join you.
The Enlightenment Elixir needs to be purple or higher. Save before.
If you tell her off: You go alone.

Either way, you will visit a fox demon village and be asked to hand over a gift. Xi can give you a hint if you took her along. Give them a Vixen Jade (Fallen Valley or the one off event, pink shiny).

They will ask you to get the Fox Spirit Orb for them. Purple fox boss. No different than the ones from the maps.
Next up is getting a Primal Soul. You get a fight against the very first humanoid boss (Jagu) from region 0, but it's a lot stronger now. Not too hard if you keep your distance.
Followed by another boss fight, a unique black bird. You may wanna be prepared for this, it's rather fast and can be hard to dodge.
Get Tushan Jun's memory. Rerolls Soul Formation (VII) and below

PS: The fox transforms into a woman with black hair in the text, but the portrait has white hair.

I will try to remember to look occasionally and will include questions that may be helpful to know.


Recent updates:
Started sorting out the new sect section.

The update with the final ascension tiers dropped. The translation is half-done and there're reports of progress-stopping bugs in the English version. I'll just stay with my current patch version until that gets solved.

ThatGuyGW pointed out that the behaviour of the pond in Fallen Valley changed. It's now a 50/50, not a bank. I didn't see that in any patch notes *grumble*...

All current Eye of Providence skills added.

More sect breakthrough fates.
Qi Pearl purity does not influence stat gain, only tao soul purity for Enlightenment (VIII) does. Verified this personally.

Sect fates do not act like the strange mushroom for rerolling Chaos breakthrough fates. They just replace one you normally get.