Patch notes

Every release, newest first. The latest one is open.

1.27.0 06 Nov 2026

Guardian Beast eggs are easier to come by, the free realms become the Obscure Realms, longevity pills work again, and tier-0 beasts fight back.

Guardian Beast eggs

A Guardian Beast Sighting used to be the only way to get an egg, so a cultivator new to the Celestial Immortal realm could wait a week for a chance at one. There are two more ways now.

An egg for reaching Celestial Immortal. Break through and a common egg is waiting in your Nest. Once per cultivator. If you are already there, it is waiting the next time you open the Nest.
Any beast of the Celestial Immortal realm can leave one. Very rarely: about one kill in five thousand. It counts in every fight against those beasts, including exploring and auto-combat, and most finds are common eggs. The victory screen names the egg, and you get a notification.

Sightings are unchanged, and still the best place to find rare, legendary and mythic eggs.

The Obscure Realms

The free-to-play realms are now called the Obscure Realms, and the pass that opens them is the Obscure Realm Pass. Getting in takes a purchase, so "free to play" was never quite true. Nothing else about them changes: the Celestial Caravan still does not travel there, and nothing inside can be bought.

Thirty more slots in every capped bag. Equipment, consumables and manuals each hold 80 instead of 50 in an Obscure Realm, since slots cannot be bought there. Cultivators already living there have them now.

Tier-0 beasts fight back

Beasts in the open field at tier 0 had fallen far behind a new cultivator, and a fight barely touched your health. They are three times as tough now: a fresh cultivator comes out of an ordinary fight a little hurt, and out of a pack or the strongest beasts noticeably worse. Gates, region tyrants and tier 1 are unchanged.

Fixes and smaller things

Longevity pills can be swallowed again. The Vital Essence, Marrow Longevity, Millennial Ginseng, Immortal Peach, Nine-Turn Longevity and Eternal Spring pills all answered "unknown effect". A Celestial Immortal, who no longer has a lifespan to lengthen, is told so and keeps the pill.
"Qi pool full" no longer arrives every ten minutes. Exploring or auto-fighting in your second slot with a full pool sent the notification, and the push to your phone, after every beast.
The walkthroughs no longer overlap. The Mortal Road walkthrough now finishes when you close its conversation. Before, the bag walkthrough could start underneath it, pointing at a button you could not reach.
A realm closed for maintenance tells you so. You are returned to realm select with a note, and the realm shows a padlock until it reopens.

1.26.0 01 Nov 2026

Master your battle arts and reshape them into Variations of your own, every art gets its picture, and Guardian Beasts get a Nest and a Stable.

Six arts, and mastery from using them

You now choose which battle arts come into a fight. The Techniques screen has a row of slots along the top, and only the arts in them can be cast. Passive arts are always active and take no slot.

You start with two slots. More open at Core Formation, Nascent Soul, Immortal Saint and Void Emperor, up to six. A locked slot says which realm opens it.
Your bar is filled for you once, with your strongest arts, so nobody logs in to an empty one. A newly learned art goes into a free slot.
Swap freely outside a fight: tap an art and press Swap in, or tap an empty slot and then the art.
Every cast in a fight you play counts toward that art's mastery, up to level 10. Foes far below the art teach it less, and bloodline and physique arts take twice the uses. The victory screen shows what each art gained.
Dao Power counts the arts you carry, not every art you know, so your rating may move once with this update.
An art you lose comes off your bar. Replacing a bloodline or physique, or breaking an armour set, takes off the arts it gave you and frees the slot.

Sect wars, tournaments and the Damage Trial fight with your six as well.

Variations: make an art your own

Each mastery level past the first gives that art 3 mastery points, for it alone. Spend them with Refine on the art's page.

An art holds up to three pairs, opened at mastery levels 2, 4 and 6. Each pair is a Bonus and the Burden that pays for it.
Damage arts can hit harder or more foes, pierce, crit more often, finish the wounded, drink life, inflict a status from their element, empower you, or be attuned into a new element made from their own (Fire into Hellfire or Magma) once you wield it.
Heal and buff arts can heal more, heal again over three turns, raise a shield, last longer or grow stronger.
Burdens cost more energy or health, slow the art, wind it up or burn it out. They cost no points, but the art carries them into every fight.
Balance is your bonuses against your burdens: while the first is no more than the second, you can forge it. Forging spends the points and some Qi. Removing a Variation gives the points back, never the Qi.
Name it. A forged Variation takes a name of your own (filtered, and never a copy of another art's name), and shows it to anyone who inspects you.

Variations work in PvP and survive reincarnation.

A new Techniques screen

Every one of the 1,543 battle arts has its own picture, on its block and across the top of its page.
The list is a grid of blocks with each art's element and mastery level. Tap one for its page: its name as the title, its picture, and its elements beside its damage, cost and the rest. How you came by an art is on its page now, not on the list.
The Techniques button lives on the cultivation screen, Weapon Mastery opens from under the weapon training pod, and the Dao Trial sits with your daily resets.

New elements now have arts to throw

Every bloodline, physique and manual that opens one of the new elements (Hellfire, Torrent, Plague, Chaos and the rest) now teaches an art that strikes in it. An art learned before the element arrives keeps its old element and gains the new one as an option. Two lineages opened the wrong thing, and one now opens a different element:

Myriad Venom Sovereign opens Plague (it was Blood).
Heir of Crimson Fate now opens Blood.
Moon Palace Sovereign opens Shadow, the moon's own (it was Plague).

Guardian Beasts: a Nest and a Stable

The guardian page opens on two doors.

The Nest shows your eggs and nothing else. A ready egg hatches with one tap and takes you straight to the new beast.
The Stable lists your beasts. Each opens on its own page: its picture, its level written inside its experience bar, one list of every bonus it lends (its own first, then each rolled bonus with its rank and lock), and its moves on one row in their element's colours.
Serums are drawn like your bag. Tap one to reroll every unlocked bonus from its category; the label above each says which.
Tap a move to bring it into the fight or leave it out. Hold it to read what it does.
You are told when an egg is ready to hatch, with a notification and a push to your phone. It falls under the Explore switch in your notification settings.

The character sheet

The cultivation bar explains its rate. Tap it (the i beside the rate) for every source of your Qi multiplier, the world bonus, your cultivation slot and travel, multiplying to the figure on the bar. Past ×2.5 your sources are compressed, and the panel now shows that as its own row instead of an unexplained "Other". The rate also caught up in three places it used to lag: a Soul Tree purchase, a new character, and a finished rebirth.
Elements read at a glance. Each element tile shows its picture with attack on top and resistance below. New elements made of two or more others are drawn half a row wide at the top, and the grid always ends on full rows.
Tap an element to see where its numbers come from, now including which bloodline, physique, manual or soul demon lets you absorb or reflect it.
Bloodline and physique milestones list their rewards as badges, including on realms you have not reached: a new element in its colour, the art it teaches by name, and the manual it lets you learn.
On a phone, the Mortal Road is the first section of the Resets view instead of a tab of its own, and the Attributes view no longer repeats its own heading.

Fixes and smaller things

Leaving a treasure to your sect works. It used to fail every time, and if you also donated everything, the rebirth itself reported "could not finalize reincarnation". A bequest that cannot be made now says why.
Soul demons carried through a rebirth are visible below Immortal Emperor: the pentagram shows them, still lending their power, until you can command them again. Soul Demons also get a walkthrough when the first seal opens.
The victory screen tells you when a beast can now be Auto-Combated (your tenth win over it, with Tireless Fist).
Caravan sales. Wares can go on sale for a limited time, with the old price struck through, a countdown and what is left. The Limited Shop lists everything currently on offer.
Patch notes and the website are two buttons beside Settings on the login and realm screens. Every ? page now links to its section of the website guide, which is split into tabs and shows the game.
The super-compact inventory has a close button on an open item.
Element tiles no longer show a tooltip on top of their breakdown.

1.25.1 27 Oct 2026

The rest of the game speaks your language, pills break one at a time, and a rebirth once begun is finished.

Your language, on every screen

Changing the language in Settings used to leave a good part of the game in English: labels, buttons, tooltips, messages and whole tabs that had never been sent for translation. That covered the character sheet, Settings, the sect, the bag, the crafting benches, combat, the Caravan, achievements, the rebirth wizard and more.

All of it now follows the language you chose, in Spanish, French, German, Italian and Korean:

Hundreds of labels and messages that were stuck in English.
Item, element, technique, monster and region names wherever they appear, including several screens that always showed elements in English.
The help pages behind the ? button, every one of them.
Dates and numbers. They used to follow your browser rather than the game, so a Spanish player on an English computer read achievement dates as 10/26/2026. They now read 26/10/2026, with the separators your language uses.

A few things are still in English because the server sends them as plain text: Guardian Beast names and moves, cosmetic names, armour sets, emotes and the exploration and battle logs. Those are next.

Breaking part of a stack

Pills and other stackables are one stack holding many, and breaking them treated the stack as a single item:

All But One did nothing at all on a stack.
Break One destroyed the whole stack.

Both now count pills, not stacks. All But One leaves you exactly one, Break One takes exactly one, and with the profession that makes the item you get materials back for each one broken.

A rebirth, once begun, is finished

Starting a rebirth banks this life's Dao Soul Points, and the Soul Tree perks they buy take effect at once. Nothing stopped you there: backing out to character select, or simply closing the game, left the old life playable with the next life's perks.

Now:

The old life stops the moment the rebirth begins. It no longer cultivates or explores while you are away.
Coming back to that character opens the rebirth again, wherever you return to. The points you banked are not paid twice, and the rolls you were offered are the ones still waiting.
Closing the rebirth takes you to character select, not back into the old life.

If a rebirth ever told you "could not finalize reincarnation", two things have changed. A rebirth that did go through is no longer reported as failed. And the server now records why one fails, so the next report can be answered.

Smaller things

Escape opens Settings on the desktop and Steam builds, from anywhere in the game, and closes it again. It only does so when nothing else is open, so one press still closes a dialog first.
Duel and Martial Arena opponents are drawn as themselves on phones and in the wide desktop layout, rather than as a placeholder beast.
The page Steam opens after a Celestial Crystal purchase now looks like the game instead of plain black text on white, and offers a way back to it. On desktop the game window comes forward when the crystals arrive.

1.25.0 25 Oct 2026

Thirty-three new elements, and every number on the climb weighed again.

Elements made of other elements

There were eleven elements. There are now forty-four. The thirty-three new ones are each built from elements you already know, in four tiers:

Enhanced — one parent, purer: Hellfire, Torrent, Tempest, Sand, Adamant, Tribulation, Dread, Soul, Shadow, Solar, Force
Combination — two parents, fused: Blood, Magma, Storm, Glacier, Smoke, Wood, Crystal, Plague, Soulfire, Dream, Oath, Divinity
Advanced — two parents, and it ignores a quarter of all resistance: Void, Karma, Samsara, Calamity, Starfall, Gravity
Primordial — three or more parents, and nothing that drinks a parent can drink it: Chaos, Creation, Destruction, Entropy

A composite hits with less than its parents — 60% of their average at Enhanced, rising to 95% at Primordial — but meets far less resistance. Against a foe armoured in the parents that is a large gain. Against a foe with no armour at all it is a small loss. Which one you're fighting decides it.

Nobody is left with no answer. If you have no resistance to a composite, your resistance to its parents covers part of it: 35% of the parent for Enhanced, half your weakest parent for a Combination. You need both halves of Blood to resist Blood. Your own resistance to the composite always wins when it is larger.

And a blow is mostly its parents. Only 25–45% of a composite strike is the composite itself; the rest lands as its parents and meets your ordinary defences.

Where they come from

From your blood. All thirty-three are granted by a bloodline or physique milestone at realm 7, 9 or 11, on a trait that already carries the parents: rank S for Enhanced, S+ for a Combination, SSS for Advanced and Primordial. Nothing rolls them, forges them or drops them.

Or from a book. Five scriptures teach an Enhanced element to whoever reads them far enough, for a cultivator who was not born to one:

Primordial Chaos Flame Codex — Hellfire
Infinite Ocean Emperor Codex — Torrent
Infinite Heavenly Wind Canon — Tempest
Infinite Wisdom Sutra — Dread
Primordial Cosmos Emperor Codex — Soul

On your sheet, a composite takes its parents' cells: Hellfire stands where Fire stood. Tap it to see which parents it was made from and how much each gave. Every one of the forty-four has its own colour and picture.

And against you. 215 of the 724 beasts now fight in a composite element they hold the parents of. None below tier 4, about one in ten at tier 4, rising to most of tier 14. Region tyrants are likelier to carry one.

Echoes of the Infinite Dao

A new rank-S bloodline of Spirit, Mind and Yin, with a mind scripture only it can read: the Infinite Echo Scripture.

It has no signature attack. It makes your own attacks matter more:

Echo Resonance — nothing aimed at you lands until your next turn is done.
Infinite Echo — your next three attacks sound twice, the echo dealing 40% again. An area art thrown into a pack counts as one attack and echoes on every foe it struck.

The echo is a share of damage that already met the defence it was going to meet, so it is not mitigated twice. A foe that cannot be harmed cannot be harmed by the echo either.

Health grows the way attack does

Health used to grow by a flat amount each breakthrough while attack multiplied, so the higher you climbed, the less of your bar survived an equal blow. By the Celestial realms a single hit between equals could take half of it. Health now multiplies on the same step as attack. Your health per point of attack is the one you were born with, at every realm.

The 63 manuals that listed health growth now actually grant it.
Energy and stamina keep their old flat growth.
Existing characters are caught up once. Nobody loses health, and a realm that was set rather than climbed is not paid.

Between two cultivators, defence counts double. And speed now earns at most one extra strike per turn in PvP; it was two, and three blows before the other side could act was deciding duels on speed alone. Beasts keep both.

Qi: every source priced against cultivating

A simulation of a maxed cultivator found fighting and pills had outrun cultivation by orders of magnitude: World Creator in two weeks against years of sitting. Every source is now pinned to the same yardstick.

A beast pays Qi in a range set by its tier, the same for whoever fells it. Two hours of felling one beast of your own tier a minute pays about what two hours of well-built cultivation gathers. Tyrants pay 3×, packs +20%.
Exploring meets a beast on one search in ten, in any zone that has beasts. Fortune now shifts weight between materials and opportunities only.
Qi pills: a full day of your clean safe limit at Normal quality is worth about six hours of cultivating. Amounts only went down.
Dao trials pay the lesser of their old share and half an hour of cultivating, times how well you ran it. Nothing changes early on; the ceiling bites from about Void Emperor.
Grand Exploration Arrays at a region's throne no longer pay out a minor realm every few arrays.

Pills that taper, and builds that defend

Stat pills taper within a realm. The first ten of a kind (attack, defence, health, …) each major realm work at full strength. After that each one is worth less, so a realm's pills of one kind come to about twenty full doses however many you swallow. The count resets at your next major realm. The Medicinal Pond counts too. The toast tells you how much a pill took.

Defence pills at every tier from 7 to 14, each the mirror of its tier's attack pill: Adamant Shell, Heavenly Iron, Starforged Hide, Worldwall, Skyrampart, Starbulwark, Godshield and Worldanchor.

Guard arts hit like they should. An art that scales off defence, mental fortitude, resistance or damage reduction is now measured by the larger of your attack and 0.8× that stat. A defence build's own art is no longer turned aside as if a weakling threw it. Arts can now scale from resistance and damage reduction, and 73 physique arts that scaled off energy, stamina or speed now scale off resistance.

Every physique reduces damage, by rank: 3% at D up to 15% at SSS, plus half that again at each milestone from realm 7.

Energy, stamina and speed arts ride attack, adjusted between 0.7× and 1.4× by how your stat compares to what is ordinary at your realm. They had fallen about fifty times behind attack arts by the Celestial realms, and speed arts scaled off nothing at all.

The open field is a fight again

Beasts met in the open had stopped being a challenge: a moderately kept cultivator felled them in a fraction of a round from tier 5. Fight Beasts, auto-combat and beasts met exploring are now tuned so a cultivator who has kept up wins comfortably mid-realm.

A pack of five from tier 6: about two wins in five for a moderately kept cultivator.
Gates use the same beasts as the zone behind them, won about two times in three mid-realm.
Tyrants are the hardest fight in their region, won about half the time at the end of their realm. Every tyrant is again the strongest fight in its region, and the tier 13 and 14 thrones can be won.
Empowered rematches are for the well kept: about 60% at the end of the realm.
The gate rating on the map follows the new tuning.

The opening tiers are unchanged, and story chapters, the tower, bounties, missions, secret realms, world bosses and incursions keep their own tuning.

Possessed beasts

A hard mode for every beast in Fight Beasts, unlocked by a new Soul Tree node, Hunter of the Possessed (combat tree, under Momentum of Ages).

Once you have beaten a beast's ordinary form you can face it possessed: alone, 5–10× harder, carrying three of nine traits (drinks its own element, reflects one, unshakable, purified, frenzied, deadly, swift, warded, or a passive art). The multiplier and traits are fixed per beast and shown before the fight, so a loss can be prepared for.

A win pays spirit stones by the multiplier, more Qi for the longer fight, and rolls its drops twice. They are tuned for a well kept cultivator, who wins about two fights in three; a moderately kept one should not expect to.

And a new Celestial Caravan item: the Thousand-Li Stride Talisman (60 crystals) walks two hours of your journey between towns at once.

Arena and duels

Walking out of a staked duel concedes it. Forfeit or escape pays the stake to the duellist who stayed; it used to void the bout and send both stakes home.
The winner's log no longer says they fell. Each duellist's log now ends with the loser named.
Losing on your opponent's turn now shows you the defeat screen instead of dropping you back at the menu.
The turn-order strip shows whose move it really is.
Challenges arrive at once, not 10–20 seconds later.
The round counter counts rounds, so a companion's used ability comes back in PvP.
Guardian Arena: a lost bout no longer knocks out and ages the beast's owner, and the beast's attacks no longer train your weapon mastery. Matching and the ladder stay within your world.
Guardian Beasts grow by kills, weighed by tier, instead of by a tenth of the fight's Qi; one Celestial fight used to take a hatchling to Superior 11.

Chat, names and moral questions

The chat filter speaks six languages. Spanish, French, German, Italian and Korean, plus the English it already had. A swear followed by "!" or spelled out letter by letter is caught. "Je suis en retard" and "das ist zu dick" are not, and nor are spices.

DM notifications are filtered. A push preview on a lock screen used to arrive raw.

Names are filtered in all six languages: characters, families, sects and estates. A reincarnated life's name is checked like a first life's, which it never was.

Moral questions come round on a clock: the first 5–20 minutes into a session, then one every 15–35 minutes of play. They used to come three times as fast on the combat screen, and one could be waiting the moment you logged in.

Fixed

Celestial regions had no pictures. Every Celestial zone and throne shows its art now.
No ceremony when a Celestial region opened. It plays for both realms now.
Array plates could not be thrown away unless you were an Array Master. Every plate has a Break button (switch it off first).
The Crafting Time Dilation Talisman reported an experiment as "\_\_experiment\_\_ ×40". It now names each job and counts cycles, and it now also speeds up pill crushing and array studies, which it used to skip.
Sword Flight could deal a red block that walled off the canyon. Every run can now be flown.
Binding a soul demon of an element you already hold did nothing. It now tells you why and what to do.
World-firsts named the account's oldest character rather than the one that earned it.
Stat pills' crit, crit damage, fortune and regeneration never applied. They do now.
The fight AI no longer strikes into an element its foe reflects. This covers auto-fights, sect wars, tournaments and beasts.
Celestial events say what they gave: a Guardian Beast Sighting names its egg, an incursion kill shows the stones paid, and the soul demon panel shows its real numbers.
Guardian Beast Sightings fell in under one strike. They are a fight now.
Five guide pages were missing their pictures.
Fifty-nine items, Soul Tree nodes and achievements that were borrowing another's picture now have their own.

On the website

A FAQ page.
Happening Now: open region events, the week's world boss, sect wars, world bonuses and the month's tower, per world.
A sect directory with search and filters.
Per-world statistics.
A wiki of every region and tyrant.
A press kit.
An RSS feed of these notes.

This update carries four migrations

0177 (moral question clock), 0178 (health catch-up), 0179 (stat pill taper), 0180 (world-first earners).

Nobody loses health. Characters who climbed are paid the health they are owed exactly once. Existing world-firsts are credited to the account's most advanced character in that world.

MinClient is unchanged. The server-side changes (balance, Qi, pills, filters, duels) reach you whether or not you update. An older client cannot show you composite elements on your sheet, the possessed toggle, the plate Break button or the Celestial region art.

1.24.0 14 Oct 2026

Your cultivator has a number of years, and they run out. Everything in this release is about buying more of them.

You are going to die

Your age has been on the character sheet since the first day of this game — one year for every real hour — and it has never meant anything at all. It means something now.

A mortal has 100 years. At the rate the sheet has always counted, that is a little over four real days.

Every breakthrough buys more. A minor one inside a realm pays that realm's figure; crossing into a new major realm pays a larger one. Flat years, not percentages, so the arithmetic you do in your head is the arithmetic the server does:

Body Tempering 137
Qi Condensation 221
Core Formation 436
Golden Core 996 — the thousand-year mark
Nascent Soul 2,676
Immortal Ascension 10,276
Immortal Emperor 240,776
Shattered Void 1.18 million
Void Emperor 5.88 million

And at Celestial Immortal it stops. Not a very large number — no number. The bar disappears off your sheet and nothing in the game can take a year off you again. Ten billion years is not immortality; it is a bigger number.

Nobody is taken by surprise

You are warned at 90%, 95% and 99% of your years. Cross two thresholds while offline and you get the one that is true now, not a backlog.

When the years run out you are not dead — you are dying, for a full day, and you can still act. Long enough to swallow a longevity pill, call in a favour, or get somewhere that sells one. The sheet carries a countdown and tells you plainly that something can still be done.

And nobody loses a character to a holiday. Age is wall-clock and stays wall-clock, but a cultivator cannot be taken while nobody is there to answer for them: the last stand only begins for a character played in the last week, the rebirth is only forced on one whose account has been seen inside the day, and a dying cultivator who comes back after longer has their day start over from the moment they arrive.

When it does end, you reincarnate. Below Nascent Soul you carry nothing — no Dao Soul Points at all. A soul not strong enough to choose a rebirth is not strong enough to carry anything out of one.

Unless your blood refuses

Nine traits — six bloodlines and three physiques — now carry a chance to refuse death outright. The body burns away what it had become and rises from it with half its years returned.

10% at rank B, rising to 50% at SSS: Silver Phoenix, Crystal Phoenix, Vermilion Flamebird, Vermilion Phoenix, Origin Flame Phoenix, Eternal Samsara, the Eternal Phoenix Body, the Eternal Samsara Physique and the Immortal Bone Physique.

Half, not all. A rebirth from ashes is still a life lived — which is what lets the clause fire again and again without ever producing someone who has simply stopped ageing.

The better of your bloodline and physique rolls, rather than both. Holding two of these already makes you the luckiest person alive; stacking them would be an immortality nothing else in the game sells.

Six ways to lose years

Falling in battle. Half a percent of your lifespan, with a one-year floor, every time you are knocked out.
A failed tribulation. Three percent per lightning strike you wagered — 27% of everything you have left at nine strikes. The wager is the whole of that mechanic, and choosing nine is now a question of whether you can survive being wrong.
Moral choices. Three new roadside scenes trade in years rather than stones: a physician who will not last the night, an elder offering what is left in him, and a broker with jade phials he will not explain where came from.

And six ways to gain them

Six longevity pills, one for roughly every other realm: the Vital Essence Pill (+5 years) up through the Marrow Longevity, Millennial Ginseng, Immortal Peach and Nine-Turn Longevity pills to the Eternal Spring Pill at +300,000. Each worth about 5% of the base lifespan at its tier. They cost the same daily pill capacity as anything else you swallow.
Four things found while exploring: a Pool of Life-Enriched Waters (+3%), a Fruit of Lingering Years (+6%), An Elder's Parting Gift (+12%), and the mythic Spring of Ages at +25% of your lifespan.

And one way that costs you who you are

Demonic sects now post a fourth kind of errand: Harvest Years.

There is nothing to turn in and no creature to beat. The sect marks somebody, and you come back older than you left — 2% of your own span, once a day, at the heaviest morality cost of any repeatable content in the game. Worse than a pillage, because a pillage takes goods from somebody who will have more goods.

Run it every day and you will end up demonic whatever else you do. That is the correct consequence of doing it every day.

Bodies that last, and souls that have learned to

Twelve physiques now affect how long you live, in two different shapes:

A flat gift, worth 25 to 70 years — a body that simply wears out more slowly. Worth most to a mortal and almost nothing by Golden Core. Stoneheart, Jade Bone, Stone Vein, Jadestone Marrow, Iron Mountain Frame, Jade Vessel.

A percentage on every breakthrough, 8% to 20% — a constitution that ages better the further it is cultivated. Worth nothing the day you roll it and compounding across every realm after. World Tree, Eternal World Tree, Mountain King, Stone Titan, Immortal Bone, Eternal Samsara.

And the same two shapes in the Soul Tree: Long Years (+40 years to every life, five ranks) for a soul that keeps dying young, and Unhurried Dao (+4% to every breakthrough's years, eight ranks) for one that has already climbed several times and knows what it is short of.

No two cultivators are born the same

Two characters rolled the same afternoon are no longer the same person. Every birth varies by up to 12% either way, rolled from the creation seed.

And where you came from shows. All 233 origins now carry their own figure, from −26 to +45 years. A childhood among medicine is worth something; a childhood in a mine is worth something else. Ascetics, herbalists and the Vital-Born line live longest; miners, charcoal burners and street orphans least.

It colours an opening rather than deciding one — a cultivator who climbs leaves it behind inside two realms.

Tailoring exists now

Tailoring shipped as a full profession — its own patterns, its own bench — and had exactly one origin touching it, while the other four crafts had six each. You could not start as a tailor.

Six added, mirroring every other craft: Tailor Prodigy at four rarities, Journeyman Tailor, and the Master Tailor's Apprentice, who starts specialised at master level with a pattern already known.

Fixed

The PvP arena was a weapon shop. Both arenas borrowed the armoury's door, because there was no art for them — defensible while there was nothing else to use, and indefensible the moment somebody opened one. The Martial Arena and the Guardian Combat Arena have their own buildings now. The Martial Arena also had no name: its label was rendering the raw id, because the one door with the wrong picture was also the one with the missing word, and nobody noticed because the wrong picture had a right name under it.
The sect hall and the "something is happening" door were glyphs on a street of paintings, which read as placeholders because they were. Both are buildings now.
A new character never received their physique's lifespan bonus although a reincarnated one always had — so the same Jade Bone Physique was worth 35 years to a reborn soul and nothing at all to a new one. (It was new in this release; it never reached you.)

This update carries one migration

0176 for lifespan. Everything else is content and client.

Nobody is killed by the deploy. Every existing character is given the base lifespan for the realm they hold, and anyone already past 90% of it has their age reset to zero. A mortal's hundred years is four real days, and there are characters rolled months ago sitting at Human realm — backfilling them honestly would reincarnate most of them within a day of this going live. It is a one-time amnesty and it is the only alternative to a retroactive death sentence.

MinClient is unchanged. The server-side half reaches you whether or not you update — years accrue, pills work, the clock runs — but an older client cannot show you the lifespan bar, the warnings or the countdown, so it will look like nothing is happening right up until it happens.

1.23.0 12 Oct 2026

Where you came from stops being a difficulty setting — and a life that ends now leaves something in the ground for a stranger to find.

An origin becomes a life

Every one of the 218 origins was the same shape: a stat block, a purse, and some iron armour, all three scaled by tier. Every single one started you in an iron plate chest and iron legplates — 56 "distinct" kits that were nested subsets of one armour set, 29 distinct items across all 218. Sixty-four of them had no lasting effect of any kind. The difference between a noble heir and a mortal farmer was how much of the same iron they were handed.

Every origin now carries a standing on the righteous/demonic scale, because this life left no mark on your name is a statement about a character, and a blank field is a statement about the content. 90 open righteous, 112 neutral, 31 demonic.

And every origin now carries a cost. At every tier, scaled with it, paid in a stat the origin does not boost, against a slightly larger gift. A mythic origin is a bigger trade, not a bigger gift — so picking one is a decision instead of a ladder.

Fifteen new lives, each reaching a system no origin could reach

The Wanderer's Path — four origins begin already holding an estate, in the starting town. Never with a sect: the loader refuses an origin claiming both, because a formation yard switches off the instant a disciple reads it.

A master — sixteen origins name who taught you, and hand over what a master is actually worth. Not the book — the reading of it. Comprehension is where almost everything a manual pays lives.

The disciple origins, finished — all twelve already enrolled you and granted the sect's manuals, and none of them had you understand a word of them. They now open part-way into their own sect's primary art — 8, 20 or 35 comprehension by rank, under the sect leader's name.

A name — three origins begin with lifetime renown, which buys real things on day one: cheaper shelves, better searching, faster comprehension. Credited through the renown ledger rather than straight onto the column.

A bench — blueprints, patterns and arrays were all grantable and alchemy recipes were not, so an origin could be a smith's child and could not be an alchemist's. Four origins now open knowing a recipe.

All thirty new names and descriptions are in all six languages.

A rebirth leaves something behind

Reincarnation was entirely private: you ended a life, banked Dao Soul Points, and nothing about it reached anybody else. One rebirth in four now soaks something of the old life into the zone where it ended, and the cultivators already searching there come across it.

Three kinds, and they are not interchangeable. A pool of water thick with the old life's Qi reinforces a body. A Soul Condensation Stone feeds blood and element. A Mental Clarity Spring sharpens a mind. Each gives from its own short list — a mind spring never deepens a bloodline, a body pool never teaches an art — so which one you find means something.

Charges are a guest list, not a counter. When the relic is laid down it names the cultivators already searching that zone, longest-standing first, as many as the dead cultivator's realm earned: one at the bottom, six at the top. Fewer explorers than charges is not a problem to be solved — the relic serves whoever was there, and a quiet forest keeps its secret.

What a relic is worth

The magnitudes are shares of the finder, not of the source. Scaling purely by the realm of whoever left it is the obvious design and it is wrong on its own: a World Creator may reincarnate standing in the starter village, which drops an end-game windfall into a tier-0 zone where only novices search.

So the source's realm sets the share — 2.5% of your own stat for a mortal's remains, 20% for a World Creator's — and the share is taken of yours. A great cultivator's remains are worth more everywhere and rewrite nobody.

The same reasoning runs through the trait boon: it deepens your own bloodline or physique, as three essences of it would. The relic is steeped in somebody else's nature and the body answers by becoming more thoroughly itself. The alternative hands a stranger's SSS bloodline to a novice who found a puddle.

A boon that cannot apply declines rather than firing emptily — nobody without a bloodline has one deepened, nobody practising nothing is taught — and another from that relic's list is rolled instead, so a relic never announces itself and then does nothing.

A character is severed slowly, and can be called back

Deleting was one statement: the row went, the slot was free. That made a re-roll free — delete, create, read the bloodline and the physique, repeat until they came up the way you wanted — and rolling a character is meant to be the decision the rest of the game hangs off.

A delete now schedules one, four hours out. During the hold the character is entirely ordinary: it keeps its name, it keeps its slot, and it can still be played. So the friction is real whether or not you are watching the countdown — with a base allowance of one slot, rolling again means waiting, and waiting is never faster than playing the character you have.

Cancelling asks for nothing. Scheduling already cost you a retyped name; making the undo equally laborious would protect nobody.

The supporter tiers deliver what the shop card says

Four of the eight things a subscription advertises were not implemented. Not broken — absent. Activation set the tier, the expiry and the premium spend that drives VIP, and that was the whole of it. A Mythic supporter was owed six hundred crystals a month, a fifth more Qi and two extra pills a day, and received a badge. All four are live now:

Celestial Crystals — 100 / 250 / 600, paid on each entitlement event: an activation, or a renewal the store tells us about. The store's billing period is the only authority on when a month has passed, so they ride on that rather than on a clock of our own.
Offline Qi — +5% / +10% / +20%. Read live, so a lapsed subscription reads as no tier at all from the moment it lapses.
Daily pill safe limit — +1 / +2, applied after the poison floor. A subscription buys extra capacity; it does not undo what a Medicinal Pond did to your body.
Priority craft orders. A supporter's commission sorts to the top of the sect board — and now says so with a badge, because a sort nobody can see is a perk the buyer cannot tell they are getting.

All four are withheld in a free realm, as every other paid benefit is.

Phones

Reported from a phone, and measured rather than guessed:

The bottom nav buttons that "didn't react." Not a missed tap. The strip's drag-to-scroll handler is meant to be mouse-only and was running on touch as well — a tap emits synthetic mouse events afterwards, so a finger drifting a few pixels scrolled the strip under the press, slid the button away, and the browser dropped the click. It got worse the fuller the bar got. Measured after: a 9px drift during a tap now moves the strip 0px.
The Haven's buildings were an 84px target on a phone for the only way into its four rooms. 116px now, unchanged on larger screens.
The Wanderer's Path tagline was six words and an ellipsis on a phone. Removed — the screen below it says the same thing at length.
The title and VIP line sat under the scrim the character's own name casts, losing its top edge. Lifted clear.
Your standing moves to the end of the gender and age line instead of taking a whole row to itself.
A Dao trial no longer selects its own instructions. Tapping fast near a word is a double-tap, and iOS answered by highlighting it mid-run with a copy callout. Reported on Sword Flight, fixed for all five trials.

Fixed

Pills above your realm could be taken in a fight. The bag's Use button has always refused a pill meant for a further-along body; the battle sheet never did, which made combat the one place in the game where the rule could be walked around. They are now kept out of the list and refused by the server.
Wandering encounters could arrive mid-battle, interrupting the fight and sometimes failing it. Held back on both sides now: the client checks the route it is on, which cannot go stale, and the server stops offering them to anyone with a live battle at all. The offer simply waits until you are out of it.

Fixed — content and balance

The Heir of Crimson Fate manual was filed in the wrong slot. It was authored as a body manual, and everything else about it disagreed — a spiritual stat block, and three arts that spend energy rather than stamina. It sits in the spirit slot now, which also uncrosses a clash: a cultivator holding both Crimson Fate and the Vajra Eternal War Physique had two signature manuals competing for one slot and had to choose. The two gated on a bloodline are spirit, the two gated on a physique are body, and no character can hold a pair that competes.
The four new trait crests and tier-11 manual covers showed as blank cards on the website. The site keeps a separate, trimmed art manifest and cutting 1.22.0 did not regenerate it.
The yardstick the whole world's difficulty is measured against was moving on its own. It picked whichever origin happened to sort to the middle of the id list, so adding fifteen origins slid it from an uncommon life to a legendary one — doubling the baseline every zone gate is scaled against, with no balance figure edited and nothing failing. It is a draw-weighted average now, stable to a fraction when content is added, and it reproduces the old figure to within 4% — so the gates stay calibrated exactly where they are. This is a stability fix, not a rebalance.

This update carries two migrations

1.23.0 is the first release in a while that needs the database moved: 0174 for the deletion hold and 0175 for the relics.

MinClient is unchanged. The server-side changes apply to your account whether or not you have updated — supporter benefits pay, relics are left and found, and a delete schedules rather than erases. What an older client cannot do is show you the four-hour countdown or the way to cancel it, or the priority badge on a craft order. Update when you can.

1.22.0 08 Oct 2026

Combat learns to refuse a blow instead of just surviving it — and for the first time, everything out there can do it back to you.

Refusing a blow

Every defensive idea in this game has been the same idea: take less. Armour took a share, resistance took a share, the rest went through.

Absorb already broke that rule — an element you drink does nothing to you — and it now heals you for a quarter of what the blow would have done. Not a quarter of what was swung: a quarter of what would actually have got through after your defence, your resistance and your guard had their say.

Reflect is the new one, and the louder one. The blow is refused the same way, and three tenths of it lands on whoever threw it. The return does not go through the attacker's own defence — it was mitigated once already, by you, and a share of what was left goes home.

It pays more than absorb for a plain reason: healing is worth nothing when you are already whole, and a return is worth the same whatever shape you are in.

Both come from a bloodline, a physique or a manual milestone. Neither is common, and neither should be.

Wounds that belong to somebody

Bleed has been in this game since the beginning and nothing was ever built on it, because bleed was 8 damage a turn — written when a cultivator had a few hundred health, and still 8 at Void Emperor with three hundred thousand.

A wound's bite is now a share of the attack of whoever opened it, read once, at the moment it lands. So a bleed is exactly as bad as the blow that carried it, at every realm, and it does not fade if the one who opened it is weakened afterwards.

That one change needed six new kinds of status, because a wound now has an author and both parties get a say:

Lifesteal — the bearer heals for a share of the damage they deal
Healing cuts — healing the bearer receives is reduced
Deeper wounds — wounds the bearer opens hit harder (captured when each one lands)
Open wounds — wounds already ticking on the bearer hit harder (read every turn)
Silence — no techniques. You may still swing
Pinned — you act every turn and the only thing you may do is attack

And statuses can stack now instead of refreshing. A venom that did the same thing on the tenth dose as the first was a debuff with a snake on the label.

Arts that are never cast

Three new kinds of passive, carried rather than used, costing no turn:

One that fires once when a health bar crosses a line — yours or theirs
One that builds every turn you are still standing, and never fades
One that rides every blow you land

The rarest of them refuses death outright: the first strike that would finish you doesn't, you hold at a single thread of life, and nothing touches you for a turn. Once per battle.

Four bloodlines and physiques, and the manuals only they may read

Each comes with a tier-11 manual that nobody else in the world can comprehend — and the trait grants only the right to study it. The book itself still has to be found.

Envoy of Sublime Death (S+) — spirit, and a reflect. Its sutra drops rarely from any mortal zone. Death's Last Bloom hits half again as hard when you are nearly gone; Death's Neglect is the refusal to die.

Heir of Crimson Fate (SSS) — blood and weapons, physical and metal in equal halves. Crimson Field Absorption gives you lifesteal and cuts their healing in half at once. Heaven Severing Blood opens every enemy at once and silences half of them. At full comprehension, Crimson Blood Frenzy wakes when either of you drops below half and doubles every wound you inflict.

Myriad Venom Sovereign Physique (S+) — earth, water and physical. Two status immunities, one of them poison, and a body that doses whatever touches it.

Vajra Eternal War Physique (SSS) — yang and metal. A physical reflect. Perfect War Body lasts longer the worse shape you are in; Eternal War Momentum strips your debuffs and hands them back as buffs half again as strong; Radiant War Force leaves a field where nobody may do anything but fight.

Five hundred traits, made less alike

185 trait stat blocks reshaped. Ranks had converged on a handful of silhouettes — too many traits that were the same numbers with a different animal on the front. They are varied now, at an unchanged total budget per rank, so this is variety rather than a buff.

164 arts renamed. Above S rank, a trait's signature art was too often the rank below's art with one word swapped — Revelation, Ancestral Edict, Legacy Incarnation on a loop. No two traits in the game now grant an art by the same name.

42 D-rank drawbacks given their own shape. Every one of them was the same penalty to defence with the same sentence attached. A brittle frame, a thin meridian, a shallow well — they read as different weaknesses because they are.

Both generators had drifted far enough that running them deleted content; they were repaired before any of this, and they now carry fields they don't own through untouched instead of dropping them.

The bestiary fights back

A mechanic only the player has is a toy. 202 creatures now carry arts built on everything above, handed out by what the creature is rather than at random — serpents envenom, undead stop a wound closing, constructs turn a blow back, aberrations silence.

Ten new beast arts, four of them passives. 58 creatures drink an element and 31 turn one back on you — both deliberately rare, both from the upper bestiary only, and 89 creatures gained a weakness so that a thing which drinks fire has an answer a player can guess.

Region tyrants wind up. A tyrant's opening blow is announced the turn before it lands. That turn is the fight.

Monster speed keeps climbing. The old curve flattened at about 80 by tier 14 while cultivators were reaching two and three hundred, so every late fight was a cultivator taking two turns to a tyrant's one. Tiers 0 to 7 are untouched; tier 14 goes from 82 to 151.

Eleven region seats were renormalised against their own region's peak, which moved most of them up a little.

The wiki now says what any of it does

You could read all 1,541 battle techniques on the wiki and still not know what a single one of them did, because the doing lives in the status ids they list and those were never published. "Applies venom" is not an answer to "what does venom do".

A Status Effects tab, with all 319 statuses in the game sorted under the sixteen kinds they belong to, read live from the game like everything else there. The kind is the part that matters — the same 25% is a quarter of your health as a ward, a quarter off the healing somebody gives you, or a quarter more damage from every wound already open — so each card says what its number means.

Below it, the mechanics that are not statuses and could never appear in a list of them: absorb, reflect, weakness, immunity, stacking, who owns a wound, split elements, execution and desperation, death saves, telegraphs, break.

The guide covers the whole game now

It stopped at nine sections a long time ago and the game kept going without it. Twenty sections, with eleven new ones: manuals and mastery, making a living, what a fight does to you, exploring, campaigns and climbs, the Wanderer's Path, renown and titles, guardian beasts and soul demons, families and heirs, reincarnation and the Soul Tree, and everybody else in the world.

Smaller things

The combat log can describe what is happening to you. Twelve things it previously had no words for: a blow reflected, a death looked away from, a body proof against a status, a wound drunk, a venom deepening by a stack, a silence, a pin, and afflictions turned back into strength. In all six languages.
A manual you can no longer read is taken off you. Change the bloodline a restricted manual belongs to and the comprehension goes with it, rather than leaving you with an art nothing in the game will let you use.
Everything that moves your health goes through one door. A single path for damage and a single path for healing, which is the only reason a death save, an immunity and a reflect apply everywhere instead of in the one place each was written for.

Fixed

Bleeds and poisons stopped mattering somewhere around Core Formation. A flat 8 damage a turn is a real wound at tier 1 and a rounding error at tier 14. Every damage-over-time now scales from the attack that opened it.
A creature's passives never reached the fight it was in. The battle AI correctly refuses to cast a passive, so any passive listed on a creature was quietly skipped and did nothing at all. They are sorted out of the AI's hands at load now and asked for by the engine instead.
Some creatures could not be beaten. A lockout art on a creature that heals itself is a stalemate — you may only swing, it mends faster than one swing a turn, and the fight runs to the cap with the creature ahead. A realm-9 lotus went 0 for 24 against a well-geared cultivator before a simulation audit caught it. Neither a lockout nor a reflect goes on something that can mend itself.

This update is not required

1.22.0 is additive and no database migration comes with it. Older clients keep working — but the combat changes are the server's, so wounds, reflects and beast arts apply to your fights whether or not you have updated. What an old client will not do is describe them: the new log lines render as blanks until you update.

1.21.0 06 Oct 2026

The world starts keeping track of who you are, sects stop being islands, and the cultivator who joined nothing finally has somewhere to come home to.

Renown

A second number beside your name, and it is the only one in the game that is about other people.

Dao Power says what you can do. Spirit stones say what you can afford. Renown says whether anybody has heard of you.

You earn it for work done where people can see it — taking a major realm, winning in the arena, a share in a felled World Boss, filling a sect's public contract. Ten thousand pills brewed alone in a cave are worth a great deal and worth none of this.

What you have ever earned is what counts. It never falls, because being famous is not something a bad week takes back.

Four tiers of awareness, each raising the same three things further — what town shops charge you, what a search turns up, and how fast you come to understand an art.

Whispered Of, at 1,000 — 5% off the shelves, +3% exploring
A Known Name, at 10,000 — 10% off, +6% exploring, and +5% comprehension
Renowned, at 100,000 — 15%, +10%, +10%
Living Legend, at 1,000,000 — 20%, +15%, +15%

Each one carries a title, and a new leaderboard ranks every cultivator by what they have earned in all.

The Wanderer's Path

A cultivator who joined no sect had given things up. No storehouse, no formation hall, no teachers, no stipend — the sect panel simply did not open. "Go it alone" was a difficulty setting wearing the clothes of a choice.

It is a choice now. The sixth button on your bar reads Haven until you swear to a sect, and behind it is everything the grounds would have given you, owned outright:

A storehouse — a hundred shelves, twice what a single category of your bag holds
A formation yard — array plates of your own, drawing on your own spirit stones instead of a treasury
A teaching hall — a master, apprentices, and one thing no sect can do

And against all of it, the cost: a haven stands in one town. A disciple carries their sect's storehouse in their pocket from anywhere in the world. You have to go home.

Five thousand spirit stones to establish, the same to move it somewhere else, and only a cultivator with no sect may raise one.

Out on the road it is worth +10% to +25% on everything you turn up exploring — the figure rises with how well the world knows you for your station, so fame that was impressive at Golden Core quietly stops being impressive at Void Emperor.

Sixteen places to put one

A sect's grounds are one painting shared by everyone who belongs. A haven belongs to exactly one cultivator, so the view is yours, and you pick it when you raise the place.

A terrace above the clouds. A bamboo rest beside a green pool. A grotto the sun comes through. Those three cost nothing — the rest open as the world comes to know your name, from a court of petals and mist at five hundred renown to the Celestial Isles at a million.

Drowned amethyst vaults, a cavern of ice, a deep where the rock still runs molten. Locked ones are shown with what they want, because a view you are working towards is worth more than one handed over at the start.

Change it whenever you like, from anywhere. Looking at your haven is not the same as using it.

A master who answers to nobody

A sect teaches you its one art, and its guidance only ever sharpens something you already practise.

A wandering master can hand over a whole technique.

Take anyone further along than you as your master, in a sect or not. Their guidance is free.
Take apprentices of your own — one to start, more as you climb, five at Celestial Immortal.
A master who also walks this road and has mastered an art can sit you down and teach it to you outright. Three days, and it is yours — no manual, no market, no drop.

Both halves run from your haven's teaching hall. A bond is ended by either side, any time; nobody is held.

Sects are no longer islands

Four things a sect can now do that reach past its own walls.

Declare where it stands. Every other sect in your world is Neutral, Allied or Rival. Allied takes both sides agreeing; one side is enough to call somebody a rival.

Swear to a greater sect. A lesser sect can petition a higher-ranked one and become its vassal — its members fight in the master sect's wars, and may train in the master sect's art. A sect may hold as many vassals as its rank, and one level deep: a sect with vassals cannot itself swear to anyone.

Hold a town. The highest-ranked sect seated in a town holds it, and that is worth three things: 5% of every market sale listed there, 10% off that town's shops for its own disciples and its vassals', and 15% on top for anyone from a sect it calls Rival. Nobody claims it and nothing is stored — climb the ladder and the town is yours.

Keep a purse. Donated spirit stones used to be destroyed. They fund the sect now.

The contract board

Which is what the purse is for.

A sect posts work it wants done — so many of a thing, for so many spirit stones, escrowed the moment the notice goes up so nobody gathers for a week against a promise.

Anyone in the world can fill one. That is the point of it: this is the one place a sect's wealth reaches somebody who does not belong to it, and the one reliable living a wanderer can make. It is also where a wanderer's name comes from — the work that was worth paying for is the work that gets noticed.

Up to ten open at a time, seven days each, and a notice nobody takes refunds the sect in full.

Masters and apprentices inside a sect, too

An Inner Disciple or above can guide a junior over an art they both practise. It is the fastest comprehension in the game and it comes from somebody else — a week alone in the nineties against an afternoon with a good teacher.

The lesson is worth +25% to +150%, scaling with how well the teacher grasps it, and they must have reached 50 before they may teach it at all. It costs the student merit, which goes to the teacher — so a senior who makes themselves useful to their juniors is paid by them.

Unless they are your Master. Take one and their lessons are free forever, which is the whole reason to take one. One a day, whoever you ask.

The sect grounds are a place now

The hall map used to be one picture with invisible shapes traced over it. It is a painted valley with buildings standing on it, each one its own art, lighting up as you pass over it.

Orthodox, unorthodox and demonic sects each get their own grounds. Contracts sit beside Missions; Relations and Subordinates are inside Settings.

An art a sect is founded on leaves the world. Found your sect on the Cloudstep Sutra and the world stops producing it — off every bookshop shelf, out of every loot table, in that world. Copies that already exist stay their owners'; the only new route to it is you. A sect's one technique finally means something.

Free-to-play realms

A fourth category of world the Celestial Caravan does not travel to. Nothing in them can be bought with premium currency by anybody — which is the whole proposition: everyone you meet there got what they have the way you did.

One realm opens behind it, Aether. Getting in is the only purchase: a Free World Pass, 800 crystals, sold from its own Realms section in the Caravan.

Smaller things

Warehouses hold a sword now. Both storehouses stacked by item and quality, which meant a refined blade — whose rolled stats live on the piece, not the design — had nowhere to go. A sect could sell a donated artifact and could not simply keep one; a haven refused them outright. Both hold them, each shown with the roll it actually has.
Nothing asks you to type an id. The contract board and the teaching hall wanted qi_gathering_pill and a character UUID typed from memory. Both are pickers; the cultivator search only offers people the bond would actually be allowed with.
A sect is founded in the town you are standing in, from that town's own Sects sheet. The wizard no longer asks which town or which world.
The online roster stops being a list of everyone. It opens on the twenty highest cultivators online, with search by name across the whole world, a filter for what people are doing, and sorting by cultivation, by who moved last, or by name. The count in the title is now the number of people online rather than the length of the list.
Reincarnation takes your mentorships and empties your haven. The bonds end on both sides and both parties are told; the shelves are cleared the way your bag is. The building stays — a reborn soul comes back to an empty house.

Fixed

A cosmetic pack you bought was owned in the shop and absent from your wardrobe. The catalog was fetched once per sign-in, so the purchase did not appear until the app was restarted.
Soul demon summoning stones counted against your daily pill limit. Every stone is realm tier 8 or above, so one cost eight to ten of an allowance of forty — four stones and you were overdosing on fights you had not had. The limit caps medicine a body absorbs; stones, time skips and spirit-stone pouches are not swallowed and no longer count.
Using a summoning stone while knocked out returned a server error instead of saying you were knocked out.
The Martial Arena answered 500 to anyone who had not travelled yet.
A sect's morality bar for joining was invisible on the listing — set, enforced, and impossible to see before applying.
Saving your wardrobe could fail outright for characters whose stored appearance was empty.
NPC sect shops stopped stocking the art they exist to teach, and founding a sect with shop techniques failed, after the shop key grew a column.

This update is not required

1.21.0 is additive. Older clients keep working — though renown, havens, sect relations and the contract board will not be there until you update.

1.20.0 03 Oct 2026

Two arenas open their doors, the road starts asking you questions you have to answer, and the game begins keeping a record of what you answered.

Morality

The game now keeps a record of the kind of cultivator you have been. One number, from +1000 to −1000, sitting beside your name on your own sheet.

You never choose it. It is the sum of what you have actually done — the errands you run for your sect, the notable things you kill, and the answers you give when the road puts a question to you. Tap it and it will tell you exactly where every point came from.

Seven bands, from Paragon down to Depraved. The number beside the band matters as much as the band, because it tells you how close you are to leaving it.

Two new world firsts, and only one cultivator per world will ever hold each: Righteous Paragon for the first to reach the top of the scale, Depraved Demon for the first to reach the bottom. Both carry a title.
Two new leaderboards, Most Virtuous and Most Depraved. Each lists only its own half of the scale — a ranking of virtue that opened with ninety people who have done nothing either way would not be ranking anything.

The road asks you things

While you are playing — cultivating, exploring, reading your own sheet — somebody will occasionally stop you.

An old man in the dust with a begging bowl. A rival from another sect, bleeding, who has seen you. Four carts at the roadside with the drivers asleep and nobody watching them.

Two to four answers, and every one of them says something about you. The price is shown before you choose, because these are meant to be decisions and a decision whose cost you only learn afterwards is a trick.

Walking away is always free, and always an option. Several scenes have an answer that costs nothing and gains nothing, because "not my carts, not my problem" is a real thing for a cultivator to do with their afternoon.

They arrive roughly every half hour of play, never while you are mid-fight, and they expire on their own if you are busy.

The Martial Arena

A new door in Immortal City and Heavenly Ascension City. Two ways to use it.

Singles

Post an item as a stake. It leaves your bag the moment you do — that is what makes the board real; everything on it is held, not promised.

Then look at what everyone else has staked, and challenge somebody whose wager you want. They accept or decline. The winner takes both.

Tournaments

A bracket fires at every arena every four hours, on the clock — 00:00, 04:00, 08:00 and so on, so you can plan to be there.

Sign up, and when the hour comes the field is drawn. If you are there, you fight your own bouts. If you are not, they are fought for you — a bracket that waited on absent people would never finish.

First, second and third take rare prizes, drawn at random from treasure pitched at that arena's own tier.

Demonic sects

Sects now walk one of three paths rather than two.

Orthodox keeps the orthodoxy's rules, openly.
Unorthodox is free and unconcerned with them — answerable to nobody, and cruel to nobody either. Nothing about it moves your morality. (This has not changed. It was only ever described badly.)
Demonic is new, and it is the only one morality gates.

A demonic sect will not take a cultivator whose name is too clean, and once you have fallen far enough no other kind of sect will have you. Neither can be waived — not by an invitation, not by the leader.

Demonic sects run pillage missions instead of gathering ones: the same errand, framed as plunder, paying half again as much merit and costing you your name. That trade is the point.

A sect can also be branded. If its members' combined morality turns negative, the world draws its own conclusion and marks it Demonic whatever its settings say. It is reversible — climb back out and the sect returns to the path its leader chose.

Leaders can also now set their own morality bar for joining: take nobody below X, nobody above Y, either or neither. It shows on the sect listing, so you know before you apply.

All three paths have their own hall and their own grounds.

The sect war is fought in 48 hours — and you can watch it

Three days was a long time to hold both sects' storage shut, and it put the battle a day further out than anyone was still thinking about it. 48 hours now.

More to the point: the war used to come back as one line per duel. "X defeats Y — 40% HP remaining." That settles the result and says nothing about the fight.

You can now watch it. Every bout, round by round, with both health bars moving — pick a fighter from the roster and it plays. Open to both sides, win or lose.

Avatars, borders and auras

A proper wardrobe, which means some of it is now earned rather than simply there.

Thirty avatars are free from the start, fifteen of each. The rest are unlocked — bought in packs, earned from achievements, or held back for events.
You keep the face you are wearing. Whatever your cultivators have on right now is yours permanently, whatever it costs anyone else.
Cosmetics have their own counter in the Caravan, out of Character Upgrades where they never belonged — they unlock across your whole account, and that section needed a character selected.
Borders and auras are sold the same way, with the auras running live in the shop, because an aura is an animation and there is no thumbnail of one.

The auras themselves have been rebuilt. The lightning was three fixed lines blinking on and off; it strikes now. The fire was twice the size it should have been; it is a collar of flame that moves as one body. Seven new effects besides: embers, frost, rain, sword-slashes, cherry blossom, starlight and drifting mist — and blaze, which sets your portrait alight with a plume coming off the top of it.

Forty-three auras in all, across twenty packs.

Fixed

Frames no longer lie across your own name. An ornamented border's dragon or crossed swords painted straight over the name beneath the portrait. Names now sit on top, everywhere they appear — the sheet, chat, rankings, the sect roster, friends.
A Refiner who also took up Alchemy was told they were not a Refiner. Experimenting refused with "only a Refiner or Tailor may experiment" for anyone who had learned a second profession.
Qi generation pills were worth far less than they looked. Three manual bonuses were multiplying against each other rather than adding, and nothing capped the total — some cultivators were running at twenty-five times the intended rate. Both fixed. Expect realistic numbers now, and progression that matches the curve.
Soul demon summoning stones were falling like rain. Thirty-plus a day from exploring the Celestial realm; a fortune roll was overruling the authored drop rate entirely. Celestial zones now drop the stones of the demons that actually belong to them, at the rate they were written for.
Six more Wiki collections on the website, and a tab bar that survives all eleven of them.

Website

[immortalzenith.com](https://immortalzenith.com) has a front door now: a launch countdown, server statistics, player guides, a full Wiki pulled straight from the game's own data, and these patch notes.

This update is not required

1.20.0 is additive. Older clients keep working — though the arena, the encounters and your morality will not be there until you update.

1.19.0 27 Sep 2026

Something comes through a breach above the clouds, a medicated spring wells up and asks how long you dare sit in it, and a long list of things that were quietly wrong are quietly right.

Soul Demon Incursions

A breach opens over a Celestial region and several of one soul demon come through it.

Any cultivator in the band may put down one of them. One — not as many as you can reach. What you carry off is that demon's own summoning stones, one to three of them, which is the means to call it again, alone, and seal it properly.

That is the point of the reward. Sealing a demon is a thing you do by yourself with a stone you had to find, and a breach that simply handed the demon over would replace that fight instead of feeding it. This gives you a way at demons you may never have seen a stone for.

How many come through depends on the demon. The stronger it is, the fewer of it — so the strongest breaches are the ones a region has to move fastest to claim.
The breach closes the moment the last one falls, or after four hours, whichever comes first. Demons nobody came for go back through.
One attempt each, win or lose. A breach is something a region clears together; without that it would go to whoever happened to be online and strong, and everyone else would open the event to find it already over.

Check the count before you travel — the region list says how many are still loose.

Medicinal Ponds

A spring of medicated water wells up in a region, Mortal or Celestial. You may sit in it.

Every ten minutes in the water gives you the benefit of one pill — a real pill, drawn at the pond's realm tier or one above, and it works on you exactly as swallowing one would.

You choose how long on the way in: 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, or 4 hours. Three things follow from that choice and all three point the same way:

Longer is more pills. Three, six, twelve, or twenty-four.
Longer is stronger. Every pill the water gives is worth +10%, +30%, +50% or +70% — applied to the whole soak, so four hours beats eight half-hours.
Longer is worse for you. The water leaves something behind, and the chance climbs the longer you steep.

What it leaves is either an affliction you already know how to cure — or, less often, something no pill will take out again: your body is poisoned, and absorbs fewer pills a day for the rest of this life. Only rebirth clears that.

There is no getting out early. You get in knowing how long you are staying.

One bath each per spring. The water can also undo its own work — a tick's pill may be a cure, and what it clears may be something an earlier tick put in.

Supporter subscriptions no longer lapse while you are paying for them

This one is worth saying plainly, because it was our fault.

A supporter tier is a thirty-day subscription that renews itself. The renewal happened at the store, the charge went through — and nothing told the game about it. On day thirty-one the benefits stopped while the money kept going out, with nothing on any screen to say why.

The game now checks with the store when you open it, and puts back any period you have paid for. If this happened to you, opening the game restores it. If it cost you time you had bought, get in touch and we will make it right.

The game can tell you when it is down

Closing for maintenance used to look exactly like the game breaking: things failed, nothing said why. Now there is a notice that says the realm is closed, and — when we know it — roughly when it is back. Planned work is announced in advance rather than arriving as a wall.

Fixed

Gear sets start with two pages, and tapping the page you are on no longer strips you. Turning to the page you were already standing on emptied every slot; a set you could not cycle was not a set at all.
A master with nothing left to teach no longer locks every other master. One finished lesson made all of them look unavailable.
The merit shop charges the price on the tile you clicked. An item on both the catalogue and sect storage at two prices charged the wrong one.
Walkthroughs stop appearing over the sheets they told you to open.
The launch logo is sharp. On Android the loading screen was scaling a small icon up several times over.
Some designs are taught, or they are not known. A handful of the rarer recipes now come only from a master, rather than being stumbled into.
The Mortal Road reads properly. Replies nobody could plausibly be saying, names spoken before anyone had said them, and several beats that assumed you already knew something — all rewritten. When the story sends you somewhere, it now points at the world map.

We are also recording the odds behind every refining attempt now. That is not a fix — it is so we can finally chase the reports of refining failing more than it should, which we could not diagnose without them.

This update is required

Everyone needs to be on 1.19.0. The subscription repair above only works on a device that has it, and we would rather not leave anyone being charged for a tier they have stopped receiving.

Older clients are asked to update before playing.

1.18.0 20 Sep 2026

The Mortal Road. An eleven-act story campaign running the length of the mortal realm, from the morning you leave your village to the middle of the ring — told in your own origin's voice, and changed again by the profession you take. Every act but one opens a region and puts down the tyrant holding it, so walking the road means walking all ten regions. Plus a world map that remembers where you have been, and four fixes from testing.

The Mortal Road

A story that runs alongside your cultivation rather than instead of it.

Eleven acts, from Jadebrook Village to Immortal City — thirty-one scenes, a hundred and forty-six beats, about an hour of reading.

It opens on its own and waits for you at each gate. Nothing about it is missable and nothing is on a timer. An act asks for a realm; when you reach that realm, it is there.

It begins with a wood where the ground has gone bare and the things coming out of the mist are all the same animal — and nobody can say which animal. What it turns into is not a monster hunt. It is the question of why four hundred years of accurate, correctly filed, undisputed records never once produced anybody willing to go and look.

Seventeen speaking parts, each with a portrait.

It is told in your voice

Every origin carries one of eight voices, and the narration changes with it. A cast-out cultivator and a sect-raised one are shown the same room and read different sentences in it — and are offered different things to say.

Once you take a profession, several scenes change again. A smith, an alchemist, a scribe, a formation-master and a tailor are each told something different by the same person, because they each asked a different question.

Your replies are remembered. Every choice moves three running dispositions — merciful against ruthless, orthodox against heterodox, solitary against bound — and sets marks the later acts read back.

Tell a scholar in Act II never to write your name down, and an elder in Act IV will offer you the chance to hold to it. Leave a two-hundred-year-old page where you found it, and the act that wants that page has to find another way to believe you.

What the road asks of you

Errands, and they are ordinary play rather than a separate minigame: learn a battle technique, fill your armour slots, take up a craft, join a sect, claim bounties, buy and sell on the market, walk the towns.

The ten seats. Every act but the ninth opens one region of the mortal realm and fells the tyrant holding it. Regions unlock in sequence, each waiting on the one before — so finishing the road means you have walked all ten.

The story has a reason for it. Every region has one cut stone, older than anything around it, with something sitting on top of it. Clearing one gives up a comprehension, and ten of those added together is the realm named in a standing instruction that four generations of a sect have failed to meet.

Act IX asks for nothing at all. That is deliberate, and the act says why.

The world map remembers

Towns used to look identical whether you had walked their streets or only ever seen a dot on a map. That made it a list of destinations rather than a record of a journey — and it gave away what was in a place before anyone went there.

Now a town shows the tier band its wares are pitched at, or a quiet ? where you have never been.

Amenities lists a town's doors, and stays shut until you have stood in it.

The tier tag also moved to the top of each picture, clear of the town names lettered across the bottom.

Every language

The game's content is now fully translated in Spanish, French, German, Italian and Korean — all 16,650 strings, the Mortal Road included.

Items, techniques, recipes, monsters, bloodlines, physiques, the campaign's prose: the lot. Nothing is left in English but proper names.

Fixes

Masterwork gear could not be swapped at the cap. Equipping a masterwork into a slot that already held one counted as three against a cap of two, because the piece being taken off was still being counted. You had to unequip and re-equip to reach the very same state. It now counts your loadout after the swap, which is the only number the cap was ever about.
The six-slot time-dilation talisman did nothing for 56 of the 156 recipes. It granted two hours, then divided them by the recipe's cycle — so against any craft whose single cycle is longer than two hours it finished nothing and banked nothing. That is precisely the long, expensive third of the catalogue anyone would spend one on. Elapsed time was ignored too, so a craft five minutes from done got no credit for those five minutes. Progress now carries over as a head start.
Donated blueprint scrolls merged into one scroll. Several different blueprints on a sect shelf collapsed into a single stack and lost what made them different things. They stay distinct now. This could not un-merge what had already merged.
Signing in on iPad opened a blank white card. The sign-in sheet was asked for as a popover, and Safari's browser view only draws full screen — so it presented its frame and no page at all. iPhones were never affected.

1.17.0 13 Sep 2026

Guardian Beasts. Forty creatures that come down out of the clouds, leave an egg, and grow up beside you — with their own stat block, their own abilities, rerollable bonuses, and an arena in Emerald Beast City where they fight each other. Combat gained stagger, taunts and guardians. Sword Flight is gentler at the mouth and meaner at the end. Gear Loadouts became extra pages of equipment slots instead of builds you have to remember to save.

Guardian Beasts

A companion you raise, unlocked at the Celestial realm.

They are met, not farmed. A Guardian Beast Sighting appears as a region event above the clouds — one sighting, one region, four hours. Beat it and it leaves an egg. It is never an ordinary drop, because the thing being dropped is a companion you keep for the rest of the game.

The beast you fight is finished growing — Superior or Mythic, at the last level of its own stage. One sighting in four is Mythic. Its egg is no better for it: the egg is the species, not the stage, so the harder fight pays in the story rather than the drop.

Forty species, across all eleven elements. Four archetypes — Warden, Striker, Soulcaller and Sustainer — genuinely different companions with different stat shapes and different signatures, rather than forty hand-tuned kits that would drift apart one species at a time.

Rarity leans the signature: a common beast signs for its role, a legendary for its element. That is most of why a legendary is worth hunting past its bigger numbers.

Care for the egg and it hatches. From there your beast grows through Young → Adult → Superior → Mythic — ten levels, then twenty, then thirty, then forty more once it is Mythic.

What a beast is worth

Each one has its own stat block — attack, soul attack, defence, soul defence, health, speed — which is what it fights with.

On top of that it gives you one signature bonus, plus rolled bonuses to your own stats: one more slot per growth stage, up to four at Mythic.

Every rolled slot has a rank, D through SSS. SSS is roughly one roll in 189, so a beast with a good line on it is genuinely somebody's luck.

Spirit Pet Ability Serum rerolls them. You can lock the slots you want to keep and roll only the rest — and locking costs more, steeply: 1 serum with nothing locked, then 2, 4, 7, 11. Keeping three good lines while you fish for a fourth is meant to be expensive.

Category serums roll within one kind of bonus — offence, defence, elemental and so on — for when you know what you want the slot to be and only want its size to change.

Four combat abilities per beast. You choose one to bring until it reaches Mythic, then two. Each has two numbers: the earliest turn it may fire, and how long before it may fire again. A ward that goes up on the first turn, a strike that lands on the third, a refusal to die that answers one killing blow a fight.

You never spend a turn on it and never pick what it does in the moment. It moves at the opening of your turn, on its own schedule — a creature fighting beside you, not a second action bar.

It also acts when you cannot: a stunned cultivator still has a beast.

Raising one

It grows from what you already do. A share of every Qi reward — fighting, exploring, auto-combat — goes to whichever beast is out. There is no separate grind and no button to press.

The Caravan's two-hour wares feed it too: the Grand Exploration Array and the Blood-thirsty Rage Talisman resolve two hours of work, and your beast gets its share of all of it.

A new alchemy pill. The Beast Growth Pill doubles its experience for an hour, and the Greater one for three.

You keep a stable of them and swap freely, but only one is out at a time.

The Guardian Combat Arena

A door on the street in Emerald Beast City. Your beast fights other beasts — and here you do pick its moves: basic attack plus all four of its abilities, not the one or two it carries as a companion.

Ten bouts a day. Two ladders, because they mean different things:

Fight the house — practice against a beast the arena fields at your own stage. Recorded, but it never moves your rating.
Fight a cultivator — against another player's active beast, read live at the moment of matchmaking. Rating starts at 1000 and moves by twenty, win or lose, with a floor at 500.

The defender does not have to be there. It is simulated against their beast as it stands — the same bargain the sect war already makes — which also means nobody is ever matched against a beast their opponent has since retired.

Damage runs off the beast's own stats, and some abilities strike through soul attack rather than attack, so a Soulcaller and a Striker are different problems to solve.

Combat has more than one axis

Defend and Charge let you set the pace, but nothing on the field could change who to hit or when. A pack of five was "kill the weakest, repeat".

Stagger is an attrition track beside health. Heavy blows put points on it, it sheds a little each turn so a long fight cannot fill it by itself, and a full bar takes a foe off its feet: a lost turn, +30% damage taken while down, and anything it was channelling is broken.

That last part is the interrupt this combat never had. A wind-up used to have two answers — brace, or out-race it — and both were things you did to yourself. Now there is one you do to them, and it arrives as a consequence of hitting hard rather than as a button.

Resistance comes off a creature's defence-to-attack ratio, so something built sturdy is sturdy in both senses, capped at 75%.

Taunt lets a foe demand attention: single-target attacks go to the taunter whatever you intended. Sweeps are deliberately untouched — a taunt is a demand for attention, not a shield against an AoE.

Protect is the softer version: 40% of a blow aimed at an ally is moved onto the protector.

And some enemies now carry shields and heals, so a fight can be undone as well as won.

Sword Flight opens gently and tightens late

The canyon was spending its difficulty where almost nobody was. A tenth of casual runs died inside 2.4 seconds, the median lasted five, and the ramp reached its worst at a column hardly anyone flew. It felt hard immediately and then had nothing left for the people who survived that.

The ramp is eased in rather than linear and stretched to 62 columns, so it is still tightening at forty seconds. The mouth is wider, the passage wanders less to begin with, hazards are almost absent at first and none at all appear before column 8 — the stretch where you are still finding the controls.

The far end is meaner to pay for it: the passage closes tighter, wanders further, and nearly half of all columns carry something to dodge.

The sword also starts faster — 30 units a second rather than 24. Twenty-four read as a sword being carried rather than one being flown.

Measured rather than felt, by flying a few thousand canyons:

casual pilot   p10  2.4s → 5.0s     median  5.0s → 11.0s
sharp pilot                         median  8.1s → 12.9s

Gear Loadouts are pages of slots

A loadout is no longer a set you save and recall. It is an extra page of equipment slots, and you are always standing on one. Whatever you are wearing is that page: put a sword on while page 2 is up and the sword belongs to page 2. Cycle away and back and it is still there.

Saving was a step with nothing behind it — if you wanted two builds you already owned both sets of gear, and pressing Save only asked you to confirm what you had just finished doing.

The control is now one button with the page number in it. Tap it to cycle.

Gear sitting on another page still costs you no equipment bag slots, which is the whole reason to own one.

Origins re-roll where an origin actually lands

The Caravan's Origin Re-Roll changed your origin and almost nothing else. Your origin's passive bonuses moved, so it looked like it had worked — but an origin's battle art, its starting kit and its weapon mastery are granted once, at creation. So re-rolling into Conscript Soldier, which promises a metal battle art, gave you no Iron Rend. And re-rolling out of it let you keep Iron Rend forever. The same purchase, opposite outcomes.

It has moved to the one place a cultivator is genuinely rebuilt and an origin is applied in full: reincarnation.

Every rebirth now includes one free re-draw of the origins on offer. It replaces the whole set of five — what you walked away from is gone.
The Caravan sells more of them. They bank on the character and keep until spent, and the free one is spent first, so finalizing a rebirth never burns one you paid for.

Also fixed while there: the five origins you were offered at rebirth were seeded off the length of a character id. Every id is the same length, so two souls holding the same number of Dao Soul Points were offered the very same five origins.

Fixes

Supporter tiers can be bought on Android. The tiers were set up correctly in Play Console — as subscriptions — and the app only ever asked the store for one-off products. Play keeps the two in separate catalogues and will not search across them, so every tier came back "unknown". Crystals worked throughout, which is why it looked like a supporter problem rather than a billing one. Restoring a subscription was broken the same way: money taken with nothing given back.
TestFlight testers can buy supporter tiers too. The sandbox exception was written into the service that sells crystals; supporter tiers are sold by a different one, and nothing ever handed it the list.
The Caravan sells array diagrams, not finished designs. A plate is assembled from four diagrams now — a sequence, an essence, a flow and a formation — so selling the completed design skipped the profession rather than supplying it. A pack takes one of each kind, so the first pack of a band is a working set rather than four essences with nothing to mount them on.
The odds line tells the truth about packs. It said "1 random of N"; a pack of four drawn without replacement gives any one diagram four times that chance.
The Guardian Beast Sighting used to fight like a sack. Its four abilities were stored where a monster names its moves, so the fight AI skipped every one of them and it spent the fight throwing basic attacks.

1.16.0 13 Sep 2026

A fifth Dao trial: ride a flying sword down a closing canyon. Every attribute on your sheet can now say where it came from, line by line. Every sect member draws a daily stipend. Masters finish their own lessons and tell you what you learned. And the first gates on the Mortal Realm trail are fights a new cultivator can actually take, rather than walls quoting thirty times what they carry.

Sword Flight

A new Dao trial. Ride a flying sword down a canyon. Hold to rise, let go to fall, and stay off the rock for as long as you can hold it in the air.

The gaps close and the sword flies faster the longer the flight lasts, so a later second is worth nearly twice an early one. The reward for lasting is the number that measures it — there is no bonus bolted on the end, just a distance that gets harder to add to.

It joins the daily rotation, with a leaderboard of its own.

Every canyon is checked before anyone flies one: 400 seeds, 220 columns each, proving every column has a gap wide enough for the sword, that the arena's edges stay solid, that a block hanging in mid-air leaves room on both sides, and that consecutive columns share an opening you can actually cross between. It is meant to be hard, never unfair.

It was tuned by flying it rather than by guessing. A simulated pilot with a human's reaction lag flew a few thousand canyons, and the first version killed it in a median of four seconds — 182 of 200 deaths on a block hung at the exact centre of the passage, which is precisely the line a pilot holds. Obstacles now hang clear of the line you are already on: something to steer around, not a coin toss.

Every attribute can say where it came from

Your sheet showed a total and nothing else. But your attack is the base block, plus nine pieces of gear, plus three manuals, plus a bloodline, a physique, an origin, an armour set, a demon pentagram, a family banner, whatever arrays are burning, and whatever you drank an hour ago.

So "why did my attack drop overnight?" was a question nobody could answer.

Tap any attribute or element now and a panel lists every contributor — what each one gave, and the total they make.

Anything proportional reports both halves: the percentage it promises, and what that promise is worth to you right now. A trait with four milestones of +10% correctly reads 46%, not 40%, because those compound. A source that both adds and multiplies keeps its halves apart, rather than merging into one figure that would misreport both.

The numbers are measured off the real calculation as it runs, not re-derived alongside it — so the breakdown cannot drift from the arithmetic that actually decides your combat.

Weapon mastery is split back out of the weapon it scales, so your sword is credited with what its own item card claims, and your mastery with the rest.

Every member draws a stipend

A treasury that only ever paid for donations gave most members no reason to care what was in it. A disciple who never crafted saw a number on the wall and nothing else.

Every member now draws daily from the sect treasury, sized by your standing and by the sect's rank. Four disciple ranks and the appointed seats above them, with rank as a multiplier — so the same seat is worth more in a Grand Sect, which is most of why anyone wants the sect promoted.

It is paid from the treasury like everything else. Stipends and donations are both outflows, so a sect that overpays runs itself dry. That is a decision the leadership is allowed to make, and has to live with.

The daily allotment now scales with membership. A sect's bill grows with its people, so its income has to, or a popular sect would be punished for being popular. Bases are up across the ladder — 1,200 a day at the bottom to 120,000 at the top — and double at 200 members, capped there, because an uncapped per-member income would make recruiting anybody at all the only strategy.

The stipend bill lands near half of income at every rank, checked at both ends of each rank's own membership band.

The sect walkthroughs know about the economy

The sect-life walkthrough was written for a disciple who joined one, and it talked about contribution as though merit came from nowhere. It does not any more. Three new steps cover what you are paid, where it comes from, and why an emptying treasury is something you will notice.

And founding a sect now has a walkthrough of its own. Taking the chair hands you the settings, the merit policy and markup, the storehouse and its auto-listing rule, and nine seats that each cost the treasury and buy you somebody who can help run the place — all at once, with no explanation.

It is offered for holding the seat rather than for founding it, so it also reaches a leader who inherited the chair through succession or a duel, and had even less warning than a founder did.

Masters finish their own lessons

Studying under a profession master took two hours and then waited — with no deadline of its own — for you to walk back to that town and press a button.

Two hours is long enough to log off. A lesson you had already paid for with the day's dice could sit unclaimed for days because you had gone somewhere else.

A finished study now settles itself, wherever you are, and sends you a notification saying what you learned. Once a minute, whether you are standing in that town, in another one, or on the road between two.

The tier band still comes from the town you studied in. What a master knows is a fact about that master, not about where their student has wandered since — a master in a tier-6 city does not start teaching tier-1 work because you walked into a hamlet.

A master with nothing left to teach now says so, in a notification and on the panel, instead of leaving you a button whose only outcome is an error.

The button stays for anyone who waited out the two hours standing right there. Pressing it settles the lesson on the spot.

The first gates are fights, not walls

A newly forged cultivator carries about 155 Dao Power. Dewleaf Glade — the very first gate on the Mortal Realm trail — quoted 4,728.

Nothing was miscalculated. The quote was honest, and if anything optimistic. The fight it honestly described was simply two whole realms away, with nothing on the trail between here and there. A player who finished the walkthroughs and opened the map read a number thirty times their own on the first thing the game offered them.

The opening gates did not even climb: 4,728, then 3,160, then 3,160, then 5,352.

The entry region's gates have been softened against the fight rather than against the score, with the factor reaching the beasts' defences, pools and speed rather than only their health and attack — a softened beast that dies faster but is exactly as hard to wound is still a wall:

Dewleaf Glade 4,728 → 1,240
Spirit Herb Valley 3,160 → 1,240
Whispering Woods 3,160 → 1,976
Bramblefang Hollow 5,352 → 2,584

Each is now winnable at the realm it is pitched at, none quotes more than three times what that realm carries, and the trail climbs. Softening only — a gate the target realm already takes was left exactly as it was.

Walkthroughs wait their turn, and wait to be asked for

Three things, all of them about losing a lesson you never declined.

No two at once. A walkthrough that began while a panel was open dimmed that panel, swallowed its clicks, and pointed at a control you could not reach. The only way out was Skip, which took the rest of the chain with it. New walkthroughs now wait for the panel to close.

Asked for, not arrived at. The fight walkthrough followed cultivation by seconds, and the map one followed your first fight while the victory screen was still up. Combat now waits until you press Combat yourself, or reach 500 Dao Power. Exploration waits for Explore, or 1,500 with the fight lesson resolved.

A skip is not a verdict on everything downstream. Skipping used to dismiss every walkthrough that followed the skipped one — "not now" about fighting silenced exploration, the world map, sects, bounties, the world boss, crafting, and all five craft benches. Twelve lessons on unrelated subjects, with no way to ask for any of them back. Only walkthroughs that genuinely continue a skipped one go with it now.

And five walkthroughs nobody could ever have seen. All five crafting lessons were registered under one spelling and looked up under another, so every one of them resolved to nothing — written, anchored, translated into six languages, and unreachable since the day they were added. They work now.

Trials

Formation Memory gives ten lives, and six more every time you clear the board. A fixed pool did not survive the board growing: round one deals six pairs and round five deals twelve, so the number of cards you have to hold in your head doubles while your margin for error did not move. Runs were ending on the difficulty curve rather than on the player. The grant is added to what you have left, so clearing a round cleanly is worth something in the next one.

Meridian Flow's arrows are a cross. They were in a row, so pressing "right" meant finding the second button from the left — a translation step, on every press, in a game that is nothing but directions and whose whole difficulty is supposed to be remembering them.

Both trials also had a bug the first change exposed: starting a new round did its work twice. Invisible while it only dealt cards, and not invisible at all once a new round also granted lives — clearing round one handed out twelve.

The world map

The events badge answers the question it raises. A gold badge on a town said "1", which is the one thing a badge cannot be asked about: it told you something was happening, and then made you travel there to find out what — the very decision you were using the map to make. Press it now and it says what the event is and how long it has left.

Region names no longer run off the map. They were never centred on their points at all: every label was anchored by its left edge and drawn half a width to the right of where it was authored, so the long ones on the right ran out into a black band you could scroll into. They are centred now, clipped to the map, and nudge themselves back on when a long name would still hang off.

"Descend". Crossing back down from the Celestial Realm to the Mortal asked you to confirm an Ascend.

And the map holds still. On desktop it juddered between two sizes: it was measuring the box through its own scrollbar, so the number the map was sized from was changed by the map it sized. It reads the box's true edge now, and neither map draws a scrollbar it cannot afford to measure through.

Fixes

Exit Game now sits beside Sign out on the choose-world screen, and under the login screen's only control — offered wherever quitting actually does something.
"A destiny is forged" shows your origin. It read "—" on the one screen where the choice is still fresh in your mind.
Your origin's percentage bonuses were missing from a freshly created cultivator's sheet until something else happened to recompute them.
The automatic donation cap said one number on the sect screen and enforced another, once the allotment started scaling with membership.
iOS purchase failures are written down. A rejected receipt gave the operator the same vague sentence it gave the player, on a server that knew exactly which check had failed. Named TestFlight testers can now also redeem sandbox receipts against the live server, so the store path can be tested before a release rather than after one — an account not on that list gets exactly the rejection it always got, from the same code.

1.15.0 13 Sep 2026

Every cultivation manual in the game has been rewritten. No two are the same book any more, every art they teach has a name of its own, and they now teach things other than a punch — healing, barriers, and blows you wind up over a turn. Technique costs are a share of your pool instead of a flat number that stopped mattering. Sect merit has become an economy, the merit shop no longer sells the same donated sword forever, and iOS purchases work.

Every manual is its own book now

106 of the 188 manuals were the same manual. Same stats, same growth, same milestones — everything but the name and the cover. Four different Tier 1 soul manuals were one book with four covers, and there were only 124 real choices behind 188 volumes.

Every manual now has a character: a deep well of Qi that hits softly, or a book that hits hard and holds little; one that mends, one that will not be moved. 188 books, 188 different offers.

What a tier is worth has not moved a decimal place. The rebalance changed how each book spreads its total, not how much it gets, so nothing you already hold got stronger or weaker overall — it got more particular.

The arts have their own names

Every water manual in the game taught "Surging Palm". Every spirit manual taught "Astral Bolt". Every mind manual taught "Piercing Thought". Read four water manuals and you learned Surging Palm four times.

All 337 arts have been renamed. No two alike, no two in the same book an adjective apart. Undertow of the Drowned, Ash Road Climbs the Wall, The Buried King, Nine Cold Springs.

Your manuals teach the same arts they always did, at the same milestones — they simply have names worth reading now.

Manuals teach more than a punch

316 of the 337 arts were damage. Now:

Healing arts. Turn the art inward and mend instead of striking.

Barriers. A standing ward that soaks damage before it reaches your health. An elemental ward absorbs about twice as much but only its own element — knowing what is about to hit you is the price of the better wall.

Wind-ups. Spend the turn gathering, and land the blow next turn at 1.6×. Your foe is told it is coming and gets a turn to answer, so it is a real decision rather than free damage.

Which one a book teaches follows what the book is: the wellsprings mend, the bulwarks ward, and the books about one enormous blow are the ones that wind up. No manual lost its teeth — every book still teaches something that hits.

Manuals learn what they hunt

Comprehend a manual deeply enough and it starts to specialise. From the second milestone onward, a book that hits hard learns what to aim at — fire against dragons, metal against constructs, yin against the undead — and a book about not being hit learns what it is being hit by, taking less from the creatures its element answers.

The affinity appears at the second milestone and deepens after it, so two cultivators holding the same manual at different depths are no longer carrying the same book.

Roughly half the manuals grant one. A bonus everyone has is a bonus nobody notices.

Technique costs are a share of your pool

A flat cost stops meaning anything. Costs ran 16 energy at the first realm to 57 at the last — while your pools grow by more than double every realm. So techniques were a real constraint for about an hour and decoration for the rest of the game.

A technique now costs a percentage of the pool it draws on, and that percentage falls as you outgrow it:

A starting art costs 10%, dropping a point per realm to a floor of 5%
Arts learned later start heavier, up to about 18%, against the larger pool you learn them with
The expensive art of a tier is still the expensive one

Outgrowing an art is meant to feel like mastery: what you struggled to afford at the third realm is what you throw around at the ninth. It never becomes free.

Sect merit is an economy

Merit used to come from nowhere. You donated, merit appeared on your row, and nothing anywhere was poorer for it — so a sect's treasury only ever grew and the rank ladder was a matter of waiting.

Now it circulates:

In: a daily allotment set by the sect's rank, from 500 a day at Minor Sect to 90,000 at Grand
In: every merit-shop purchase, returning the buyer's merit to the treasury
Out: every donation the sect pays a member for

The leader, vice-leader or Merit Elder sets how much merit a day the sect will pay out for donations. It defaults to matching the allotment — the one setting that cannot pay out more than the sect takes in — and it tracks the sect's rank rather than going stale at a number typed a year ago.

Fixes

iOS purchases work. Crystal packs and supporter tiers did nothing at all on iPhone: the app's own StoreKit and Game Center plugins were never registered with the bridge, and a call to an unregistered plugin doesn't fail — it just never answers. Tapping a pack greyed the screen forever. Game Center had been broken the same way the whole time.
The merit shop stops selling the same item twice. A donated piece had no stock count, so buying it took your merit and left it on the shelf to be bought again. Donations are now single instances that leave when sold.
Donations respect the sect's auto-listing rule. Crafted gear used to go up for sale the instant it was donated whatever the rule said. Anything the rule does not cover is now held for the Merit Elder to decide on.
NPC sects keep a merit hall. They sold nothing at all — not even the art the sect exists to teach — and donations to them vanished with nobody to list them. Both fixed.
The daily crafting limit was on the wrong thing. It capped discovering new designs; it now caps how many known designs you can write onto scrolls for other players. Research, experiments and study are unlimited again.
Market listings suggest a real price. The sell panel opened at 10 for everything, from a tier-0 herb to a legendary manual.
Tier tags are now on every item square in the game, coloured by tier.
The exploration panel no longer runs off the bottom of the screen on phones.
Emote packs said they granted five emotes. They grant ten, and always did.
The realm bar on the cultivation page flips to show your major and minor realm as numbers.

1.14.0 13 Sep 2026

Soul Demons arrive: from the Celestial Realm onward you can hunt demons, beat them into submission, and bind five of them into your soul. Beasts across the whole game have been rebalanced so nothing one-shots you at your own tier any more, crystal packs and supporter subscriptions now work on iOS and Android, and talismans finally tell you what they do.

Soul Demons

At Immortal Emperor the first of five seals opens in your soul. Four more follow, at the realms above it.

Each seal holds one demon, and everything it grants applies for as long as it stays bound: stats, elemental power, resistances, extra damage against particular creatures, and the speed you gather Qi, comprehend the Dao and master a weapon.

Every demon also costs you something. A weakness is never scaled away, and you carry it as long as you carry the demon.

Getting one. Summoning stones drop from exploring the Celestial Realm and from its tyrants. Each names a single demon — its element and its rank, 1 through 16.

Breaking a stone does not hand the demon over. It calls it out, and you have to beat it. A rank far above your realm is a wall rather than a challenge, and the stone is spent whether you win or lose.

What to do with one you have beaten

Soul-Bind it into a seal. If that seal already holds a demon, you are shown exactly what changes — every line the swap moves, biggest first — before you confirm. The displaced demon goes back to your reserve; you lose its bonuses, not the creature.

One demon per element. Five fire demons would be the whole system solved, so the pentagram will not take them.

Devour it instead, and it comes apart into essence that feeds another demon — or, from the centre of the star, all of them at once. A demon straight out of its stone is only a trickle. One you have fed gives most of that investment back, so changing your mind about a favourite costs you rather than robs you.

Raising a demon

Feed a demon Qi from your own pool, up to level 150.

That Qi is what breakthroughs are made of, so every level is a breakthrough deferred. Pouring everything into your demons means climbing the realms more slowly and hitting far harder on the way.

It is a real commitment: taking a low-rank demon to level 100 costs roughly ten minor breakthroughs' worth of Qi, and the last fifty levels cost about three times the first hundred.

Every number a demon grants is rolled once, inside a band its rank decides. Two cultivators holding the same rank-12 fire demon hold meaningfully different creatures — which is why the same demon is worth hunting twice. Attunement tells you where yours landed.

Beasts hit hard, not stupidly

A beast's damage has been reviewed across the whole bestiary, and the top half of it was badly out of line — at the highest tiers, every beast could kill an appropriately-levelled cultivator in a single critical hit, usually before you had taken a turn.

Every tier now sits in the same band: a beast's worst crit takes about a third of your health, and the hardest hitters take two thirds. Two blows still kill you. Nothing at your own tier removes you from a fight before you have acted.

Something well above your realm still kills you outright. Walking into the wrong zone is meant to be a mistake with a consequence.

And a bug behind it: certain fights were permanently making beasts stronger — for everyone, cumulatively, until the server restarted. It is why a beast that hit for 67 one minute could hit for 14,000 the next. Fixed.

Crystals and supporter tiers on mobile

Crystal packs and the three supporter subscriptions now work on iOS and Android. Purchases are verified with Apple and Google before anything is granted, renewals extend your tier without you having to open the game, and a refund ends it.

Crafting: a daily limit on new designs

Alchemy research, the Refiner's and Tailor's experiments, and the Array Master's study all end in the same place — a design you can make from then on — and none of them had a ceiling.

You can now work out 2 designs a day, plus one per level of your crafting mastery. A full master gets sixteen.

Nothing is wasted when you run out: insights and understanding stay banked, and the design lands on the next cycle of a fresh day. Recipe variants are not limited.

Fixes

Crafted gear on the market listed as the bare word "Blueprint", showed the base item's stats instead of its own rolled ones, and hid its quality grade entirely. All three fixed — refined pieces now show their grade, enhancement level and real stats.
Talismans now show what they actually do — in your bag, on the market, and in the item list mid-fight, where only healing items were ever spelled out. Folded talismans showed nothing at all before; charged ones understated themselves by up to two thirds.
Sects can be joined from the world map. Tapping a sect in a town's list opens its hall, where the join button lives. Previously the only way into a sect hall was already being in one.
Feeding a soul demon now actually spends your Qi. It was being refunded on the very next read.
The exploration log on phones no longer runs off the bottom of the screen.
Character creation is now all-or-nothing, so a failure part way through can no longer leave a cultivator holding half their origin's starting gear.

1.13.0 13 Sep 2026

Every beast in the game now has a kind — fox, dragon, humanoid, elemental — and bloodlines, physiques and weapons can hunt some kinds better than others. The armoury is rebuilt from the ground up, region tyrants stop being pushovers, the World Boss lives a week instead of a day, and a new cultivator is walked through twenty-two guided lessons.

This release comes with a server reset — characters and worlds start fresh.

Beasts have a kind

All 724 beasts now carry one or more creature types — vulpine, draconic, avian, insectoid, humanoid, elemental, and twenty more. You can see them on the beast's card before you commit to the fight.

They are not decoration. Bloodlines, physiques and weapons can now favour or fear a kind:

122 bloodlines and 117 physiques carry a creature affinity. A serpent bloodline hunts what serpents hunt.
60 weapons across every tier do too — a boar spear really is better against boars.
Rank S and above are pure upside. No high bloodline carries a drawback.

Where they overlap, they multiply. Your bloodline and the blade in your hand both count.

And it is all visible now. The trait card and the item detail each say what that one source contributes; your stat sheet shows the assembled total; and the pre-fight screen tells you what it comes to against that beast — "You deal +23%", "You take +12%". Nothing is shown when the matchup is even, which is most fights.

Beasts drop the bloodline they look like

Every fight — hunting, auto-combat, and the fights you find while exploring — now carries a quiet chance at a bloodline or physique crystal:

  rank D–B      2%
  rank A–S      1%
  rank S+/SSS   0.1%

It is weighted by what you killed. Crane beasts drop crane bloodlines; fire beasts drop fire physiques.

Deliberately not listed in the drop table. A 3.1% chance at a bloodline is meant to be a thing you are surprised by, not a thing you farm.

The armoury, rebuilt

634 pieces of armour, generated from the artwork itself so what you see is what you get.

Within a tier, families are worth about the same in defence and health — you should not be picking armour by which number is bigger. What differs is the second thing each gives: 419 pieces ward and sharpen one element, the rest buy speed, crit, damage reduction or regeneration.

43 families carry a real set bonus. None below tier 3, all of them from tier 11 up, where the choice is between builds rather than between "a set" and "not a set". Set pieces below tier 11 are crafted, never found.

Weapons now state what they are — sword, spear, hammer, axe, dagger, staff, fan or shield — instead of it being guessed from the name, and every weapon's stats were rebuilt to match its type.

437 old pieces are retired. The unnamed starter weapon set is gone, along with its blueprints, and nothing hands them out any more. Seventeen high-tier beasts were dropping tier-2 daggers; they no longer do.

Every material is spendable. 120 materials, mostly at tiers 10–14, were called for by nothing at all. They are now used. Drop rates follow demand, so a material two hundred designs want is no longer as scarce as one a single pill needs.

Tyrants are the hard fight now

Every one of the ten region tyrants was weaker than the strongest ordinary gate leading up to it. Chaoslords Domain scored a seventh of the zone before it.

The cause was structural — a tyrant is one monster with no pack scaling, an ordinary gate is three beasts with it. Each tyrant is now scaled to 1.5× its own region's peak.

Beasts also have their own speed now, instead of every creature in the bestiary sharing one formula.

The World Boss lives a week

It was sized against what the whole world could do at full effort, which on a single day meant it either died before most people had swung, or ended undefeated and paid out to nobody — a claim requires the kill.

Seven days of strikes now go into one pool. You still get ten strikes a day; that has not moved. The panel shows both clocks: the boss's week under its health bar, your day's strikes under the strike count.

Its prize was also the same every week. The roll ignored everything except rarity, so first place took the same legendary forever — and a Foundation cultivator in tenth place was handed gear from seven realms above. It now rolls against the claimant's own realm.

Elemental Escalations start where you are

The mode unlocks at realm 3 and opened at tier 0 — three realms below anything you had fought in weeks.

Worse, all ten chapters covered the identical difficulty band. Chapter ten was tier-for-tier the same as chapter one, differing only in paint. A mode called Escalations restarted, ten times.

Normal now opens at tier 3 and ends where Hard begins, so the three difficulties form one continuous ladder, and each chapter is genuinely harder than the last. Bosses hit harder than the fights leading to them, and the modifier rolls are no longer so sparse that two fights in a row could carry none.

Dao trials pay differently

A trial topped your Qi pool up by a flat 15% of it — and a share of the pool is the one reward that can never fall behind, because it is the pool.

By the Celestial realms, eight attempts a day came to a breakthrough a day, at every realm, forever. A cultivator who played their dailies reached World Creator in 78 days, against 25.8 years for the same character who did not. The dailies were not a supplement to progression; they were progression.

Qi from a trial now runs from 7% of the pool at Human down to 0.1% at World Creator.

What a trial pays instead has grown, in the two things that are capped and so cannot run away with the pacing:

Comprehension — one hour of idle gain per run, up to three. Dailies roughly double a diligent cultivator's rate of understanding.
Weapon mastery — new. One hour of training-hall rate, credited to every weapon type you are holding, in full rather than split. It lands even with no active manual.

The mortal realms are untouched: through Nascent Soul the trials were never the constraint.

Tribulation talismans finally do something

All fifteen tribulation charms granted a bonus to your odds of surviving the Heavenly Tribulation. The tribulation stopped being decided by odds in 1.12.0 — it is a fight now — so every one of them had been doing nothing whatsoever.

They raise a ward instead. Burn one before you climb; for the next hour it stands ready, and when the lightning comes it closes into an absorb shield for two turns — two, because the trial always strikes first, and a one-turn ward would soak the opening blow and nothing else.

The shield is a share of your maximum health, and the share is the number the charm already carried: a charm that promised +22% odds now absorbs 22% of your health.

Twenty-two guided walkthroughs

A new cultivator is now walked through the game one screen at a time — the dim comes down, one control is lit, and the text talks about the thing it is pointing at.

Six run in sequence: the character sheet, your bag, cultivation, combat, the world map and exploration. The rest wait for something to happen — a battle technique learned, a weapon first trained, a tyrant coming into reach, a sect joined, the Social tab opened for the first time.

Crafting gets its own, at Qi Condensation, laying out the five professions and what each is actually for. It stops at the choice rather than making it for you.

Then one per bench, when you take that profession — and each hands over what its first lesson needs, so you can perform it rather than read about it. An alchemist gets twelve fourleaf clover (six research attempts, because one proves nothing); a talisman master gets a pattern and ten sheets of paper.

Help no longer interrupts, either: every walkthrough can be replayed from the help button.

Crafting

Track what you need. Tick Tracked on any recipe, blueprint, pattern, array diagram or plain material, and the shops answer "do I need this?" for you. The market gets a Tracked filter that stacks with the others; the merit shop marks tracked goods as well as filtering them.

The inscribing bench says what each pattern makes. 175 patterns showed a name, a tier and an element and nothing about what burning the charm would do — so you chose by the picture and found out by making one. Battle talismans now state their effect and duration, and hour-long buffs state their proportion.

Study ×10 was taking the materials four to six times. Every press started a fresh run, and since nothing on the Assemble tab draws a crafting slot, none of it was visible. The bench now shows the run in progress — which slot, understanding, sets left, and a countdown.

52 designs could not be studied by the crafter who knew them. None now.

How you look

72 new avatars — thirty-six women and thirty-six men, each with a clear elemental or thematic motif — and 56 frames, where only twelve were reachable before.

The frames also fit now. Every frame is a ring with ornament hanging off it, and the ring's hole is about half the image; the portrait was being drawn a third wider than the hole it was meant to sit in, so the band covered its edges. Every frame's inner ring was measured, and the portrait is now the same size behind all of them.

Sects have banners. The NPC sects were showing a blank square; each now carries an emblem matched to what it practises. And you pick your own emblem while founding the sect, on the same page as its name, rather than discovering the option in a settings tab afterwards.

Fixes

Sealed caskets could charge you and drop the prize on the floor if your bag was full — tokens gone, nothing gained. Room is checked before payment now, and the casket says what it handed over.
The zone survey clipped its own contents. A rich zone's last materials could not be read and nothing suggested there was more.
The experiment bench offered materials your profession could learn nothing from, then refused the pool after you had chosen them.
The tower, region events, caskets, fortune finds, Caravan kits and the World Boss could all hand back a retired weapon. Only the town shop was checking.
Capes were being hammered out of ore and two cloth families sent to the forge, because "cloth" was decided by a substring test on the filename.

1.12.0 13 Sep 2026

The Heavenly Tribulation becomes a fight worth preparing for, and you can now wager on how hard it hits. Notifications split into things you can switch off one at a time, sect storehouses get bulk tools, and the Soul Tree stops being something one rebirth can buy outright.

The Heavenly Tribulation is a fight now

It was a damage check — one right answer every round, no reason to look at the board — and it was killing people in one or two blows.

Four faults, found by simulating the real engine against real cultivators. Every one of the five tested lost, and two died to a single strike.

The blow was anchored to your attack while survival is your health, and those are not on one scale. The harder you hit, the harder you were hit back: you built your own executioner. The trial now solves for a set share of the health bar instead.

The herald died in about one blow too, so the fight went to whoever swung first — always the trial. It lasts now.

And the lightning was decorative. A herald has no equipped weapon, so its basic attack struck physical, and lightning resistance did nothing at all — a quarter-million points of ward moved the blow by zero. It carries its element now, and a real ward takes 44% off.

After: the blow is 15–20% of health, the trial takes 5–7 blows to kill you and 3–4 to fell, and survival on plain attacks alone runs 54–99% before techniques, crits or consumables.

It still strikes first. That is the scene — it was only unfair when the first strike was most of the bar.

Four tribulation arts

The trial has arts of its own now. None of them is learnable: no manual, scroll or drop lists them.

Heaven-Splitting Bolt — lightning, telegraphed. It winds up a turn, and that turn is worth answering.
Thunder Shackle — lightning, may stun for two turns.
Sundering Squall — wind, strips 20% of your defence for three turns.
Riving Gale — wind, the steady one it falls back on.

Each is on a three-turn cooldown, so it cannot lean on its best move and must cycle at least three of them.

Two elements, deliberately. The trial picks whichever art you resist least. Ward the lightning it is named for and it turns to the wind; ward the wind and it turns back. Measured: against an unwarded cultivator the shackle is loosed 11 times in 60 fights — against a wind-warded one, 78.

Stacking a single resistance is no longer an answer.

Lightning Strikes: name your wager

Before the trial begins you choose one to nine bolts. The number scales the whole fight and decides what surviving it is worth.

bolts   the trial   surviving it
  1       -10%      the realm, none of the vitality it carries
  2      normal     the ordinary breakthrough
  3       +5%       +2% to every base stat, permanently
  4      +10%       +5%
  5      +15%       +8%
  6      +20%      +11%
  7      +25%      +14%
  8      +30%      +19%
  9      +35%      +25%

Two is the middle on purpose — it is the fight that existed before the choice did, so ignoring the wager costs you nothing.

One is the way out for a cultivator who has to advance and cannot win. The realm still arrives; its health, energy and stamina do not.

The boon is permanent and it compounds across tribulations, because it is written to your base stats rather than the derived ones.

Measured survival at each wager, plain attacks only, against live cultivators: nine is a serious gamble even before you notice the reward never goes away.

The Soul Tree is many lifetimes again

Two problems, both of which let a single rebirth rewrite a character.

Node costs were flat while the reward for reincarnating grows geometrically with realm. One rebirth at Immortal Saint banked around nine thousand points — most of the tree. Each row down now costs half again as much as the row above it, so the whole tree runs to about five such rebirths rather than one. The first row is unchanged.

Unbroken Meridians was carrying a life, not a trace. It said 5% of your combat attributes per rank — and it handed that over at the moment of rebirth, after which every breakthrough on the way back up multiplied it. Returning from Immortal Saint, that came to 183× the attack of someone who had simply climbed there. One cultivator reached eighteen million Dao Power at Nascent Soul.

It is 0.05% per rank now: still a real perk you can feel, no longer a replacement for the climb.

Skip to the Tyrant

The "Memory of ―" exploration nodes are now "Skip to the ― Tyrant", and they do what the new name says: begin each life with every zone of that region already walked, with only its tyrant standing between you and the region beyond.

They are also unconditional now, where the old ones only honoured the node if your previous life had reached that far.

This fixes a dead end. A tyrant's domain is the one place where unlocked and beaten are two different things, and the perk only ever handed back the first — so the domain showed Explore, as though its tyrant were already dead, while the region past it still asked you to defeat it. Nothing anywhere offered that fight. Now the domain reads the kill, and the fight is there.

Choose what your phone tells you

Push was one switch — the operating system's — and it is all or nothing. Anyone who found the crafting banners noisy silenced the sect war declaration along with them.

Notifications now fall into eleven categories you can switch off one at a time, in Settings: Combat, Exploring, Cultivation, Crafting, Sect, Messages, Market, World events, Fortune, Family and System.

Everything still appears in the in-game feed either way. Quieter phone, same game.

Sect storehouses

One filter instead of the kind chips. A shared pile of several hundred stacks can now be narrowed by rarity, quality, item type, tier, and the stats, affinities and resistances an item carries. The options are built from what is actually in the pile, so no choice leads to a dead end — and the button carries a count, because a filter you cannot see is the commonest reason a storehouse looks empty when it is not.

Bulk distribution. Picking a disciple by name is right for a reward and wrong for a delivery. The distribute pod has an Individual/Bulk toggle; Bulk takes a rank and a direction and serves everyone at that standing and above, or at it and below — highest merit first within a rank. It is a round robin, so twenty pills across seven members is three for the first six and two for the last.

Bulk donation. The same shape as the inventory's bulk-break selector: choose a ceiling on tier, quality, enhancement, type or rarity, everything at or below is ticked, and the ticks are yours to adjust before you confirm.

Smaller things

A white pip on the chat bubble counts unread sect messages, on the opposite corner and in the opposite colour to the red one that counts direct messages — a message addressed to you, and a room that has been talking. Opening the channel clears it.

Crafting opens a bench chooser if you have taken more than one profession. The rail of tabs above the tabs is gone; you pick a bench from the same cards you saw when choosing your first craft, each showing its own mastery.

Fifty-two designs could not be studied by the crafter who knew them — their own ingredients spanned more tiers than an experiment pool allows. None do now, across all four craft files. The experiment bench also stops offering you materials your profession can learn nothing from, rather than refusing the pool after you have chosen them.

Fixes

The merit shop was locked to everybody. The rank ceiling had never moved past tier 4, so even a Sect Leader could not buy a tier-5 item.
Array plates could not be collected when the sect already had that formation — the forge became permanently stuck with the materials spent. They now keep as a personal plate instead.
A sect could be left with members and no leader. Opening a sect now fills an empty seat down the same hierarchy succession uses.
The world boss named the wrong slayer — the panel kept whoever killed it last, days ago, and the final-blow bonus was paid on that name.
The Celestial Realm was reachable from below. Its first region could be seen and its first gate fought without the Mortal Realm's road finished.
Randomize could hand you an avatar you never unlocked, and then the wardrobe refused every later change to your look. Fixed at both ends, and anyone already stuck can edit their appearance again.
Pack portraits resized mid-fight as beasts fell, moving the target under your finger.
Breakthrough notices arrived while travelling — the road halves Qi gain and the background sweep did not know.
Town events were unreachable. The badge counted them and nothing opened the door.
Masters taught variants of pills you could not make. They teach the base recipe now.
Android's system bar covered the fullscreen map controls — on the one screen whose only way out is that button.
"Loading…" that was never loading — you were on the road, and the panel now says so.
Rider pills could not be eaten, reporting "inventory operation failed"; that hit every battle-effect pill, the good ones included.
Following a beast or zone out of the Collections book left the book sitting on top of the fight you had just opened.

1.11.1 13 Sep 2026

A hotfix for 1.11.0. Five essences and a herb had no source anywhere in the world, and the tyrants above the clouds were fighting on blank ground.

Six materials nobody could get

A balance pass in 1.11.0 was meant to stop zones handing out things far below their own tier. It went too far and removed the only source of six materials, which left them in the catalogue and nowhere in the world:

Lightning Essence
Mind Essence
Physical Essence
Yang Essence
Yin Essence
Ghostflame Herb

All six are back where they came from. Lightning Essence in particular is a crafting input, and it had six homes across the storm regions before it had none.

The mistake was treating a low-tier material in a high-tier zone as an error. Usually it is — but the elemental essences are placed deliberately, in the elemental zones that thematically own them, and the pass could not tell the two apart. It no longer makes that call, and it can no longer remove the last place an item comes from.

The celestial tyrants fight on their own ground

Every tyrant in the Mortal Realm fights on its home terrain, with the weather that comes with it — volcanic ash, bitter frost, a raging storm overhead.

The ten above the clouds were fighting on nothing at all. They named their home correctly; the game simply had no terrain on file for any region in the Celestial Realm, so the last fight of each region ran with no environment.

All ten now have their own:

Ninefold Gale over the Celestial Cloudsea
Primordial Blaze in the Sunfire Expanse
Abyssal Tide on the Azure Immortal Sea
Deathless Winter in the Eternal Frostlands
Origin Thunder under the Thunder Sovereignty
Worldroot Verdure through the Serene Wilds
Devouring Dark across the Astral Wastes
Eternal Dawn over the Radiant Dawnscape
Black Moonlight in the Voidmoon Dominion
Omniscient Radiance within the Heavenly Light Sanctuary

Each favours its region's element and carries a hazard that bites every round, the same way the mortal ten do — a little harder, as befits the sky.

1.11.0 13 Sep 2026

A second sky opens above the mortal world. Exploration becomes a map you climb, with fifteen towns to walk between, and the last four tiers of the ladder finally have pills, talismans, materials and cores of their own.

This one needs an update to play. Exploration changed shape too much to keep older clients working — a zone is a place on a trail now, not a name in a list — so an old client would draw you a map with no road on it.

Exploration is a map you climb

Each region is now a seven-zone chain with three forks, gates guarding the way up, and a tyrant holding the domain at the top — the one fight that opens the next region. The domain is drawn larger than the zones below it, because on a map of equal vignettes the boss stage read as just another stop on the trail.

Fifteen towns, and the roads between them

Above the trail sits the world. Towns are one to five hours apart, and travel leaves you cultivating on the road at half Qi — with a Soul-Tree perk that shortens the journey.

Sects now keep their halls in towns rather than floating in a region, and random events happen where people are.

Inside a town:

Shops with finite daily shelves, and a counter that buys back at a third.
NPC refiners and tailors who will hone a piece to +5 for a steep fee, and never fail.
Profession masters who take a student on five dice — and only in the craft you have actually taken. A master teaching blueprints to an alchemist would be teaching something they can never use, so the door says no before the dice are thrown.

The shop window now shows what a thing does. A pill, a talisman or a blade reads on the shelf exactly as it will in your bag.

Reading the world map

Two controls in the corner.

Fullscreen, the way Explore already does it.

And an eye. Fifteen lettered vignettes tell you where everyone lives while hiding the land they live in — so closing it folds the towns down to points and writes the region names across the map instead. It runs in reverse on the way back up.

Region and town names were also never being translated. They are now, in all six languages.

The Celestial Realm

Ten regions above the clouds. A hundred and twenty zones, eleven cities and fortresses, ten tyrants, and thirty beasts at a tier that did not exist before.

Getting there is its own act. Roads run under one sky, so travel stays inside a realm and crossing is Ascend, which lands you at the realm's lowest-tier town rather than anywhere you pick.

Two conditions gate it, and both must hold: Immortal Emperor, and the fall of the Endless Rifts tyrant. A number alone was the wrong shape of gate — cultivation and world progress drift a long way apart, and every other door in this world opens on a tyrant rather than on a realm.

A locked sky is shown rather than hidden, with both conditions ticked off as you meet them. A door that says only "locked" is a wall.

Tyrants hold the top of their region

A tyrant now sits at its region's ceiling rather than one tier under it.

One under meant the last fight of a region was not the hardest thing in it — an ordinary beast a zone earlier could hit harder than the tyrant guarding the way out, which is a strange note to end a region on.

The mortal ten are untouched and still sit one under theirs.

Whatever is holding the thrones above the clouds, you will want to be ready for it.

Tiers eleven to fourteen have something to brew

Every consumable in the game stopped at tier ten. A cultivator who crossed into the celestial world kept swallowing the same pills they had carried for the whole climb.

Seventy-six new consumables — nineteen a tier: eight pills, three buff scrolls, eight talismans. Two families are genuinely new, a speed-and-crit pill and a healing pill, so the top of the game is not just the old effects with bigger numbers on them. No two items inside a tier do the same thing.

Forty new materials to make them from, and forty-four talisman patterns to observe, spread across the celestial zones so every pattern can be found before any is found twice.

138 new item icons are in and live.

Cores go past transcendent

The beast-core ladder ran low / mid / high / supreme / transcendent and stopped at tier 8. Everything above shared the top rung: whether you were making tier 8 or tier 14, the reagent never changed. Six tiers of climbing on one material.

Twenty-two new cores, eleven elements each:

Transcendent — tiers 8-9
Celestial — tiers 10-12
Sovereign — tiers 13-14

Supreme gives up tier 8 to make room, which fits better anyway: a tier-8 beast was dropping a tier-6 core and now drops the core of its own tier.

327 beast drops, 128 zone yields and 276 recipes moved onto the new grades. Every grade is obtainable in every element, and no recipe asks for a core nobody can farm.

The legacy beast cores are retired

beast_core and its seven siblings were a holdover from before the graded ladder existed — and beast_core was the worst of them: one flat material dropped by 674 of 684 creatures across tiers 0 to 13, standing in for the whole game.

They are replaced tier-by-tier: a monster's drop takes its band from the monster, a recipe's from the recipe, a zone's from the zone.

Your bags are converted automatically. Quantities are preserved exactly. The total core drop-rate is unchanged for all 684 monsters — the tables just got simpler, with 516 creatures now listing one core where they used to list two.

Nothing hands out an item far above its own tier

Eighty-eight sources did. The worst was the first tyrant in the game, at tier 2, handing out a tier-5 blade 85% of the time — three chapters of progression arriving in the first hour. These were not lotteries; the equipment offenders took a median 30% share of their table.

An opportunity prize now sits at the zone's tier plus two, and a zone's own yield sits at its own tier.

Substitutions stay in the family — an ore is replaced by an ore, a herb by a herb, and frost zones keep their cold. Fixing tiers by number alone would have had snow zones handing out desert flowers: one failure traded for another.

Six starter beasts dropped a high honing essence at 2%, five tiers above themselves. That is a real treat and worth keeping, so they drop the low one now — the same thing at the right tier.

The World Boss

The rank above the leaderboard disagreed with the leaderboard itself — listed third, told fourth. Two separate reads with strikes landing between them. One statement answers both now, so they cannot disagree, and it is still right for a player outside the visible top ten. The own-row highlight had also never once fired.

And the boss was sized against blows nobody throws. Its health was priced against a plain attack, but a real strike carries a technique multiplier running up to 2.5x — and nobody who cares enough to fight the boss swings bare-handed. The world's actual output was roughly double what the boss was built for, so it was dying in about a third of a day to a handful of strong cultivators.

The multiplier is now in the sizing, with a floor set by what the strongest ten could manage at full effort — a world with its power in five people is a different fight from one with it spread over fifty — and a ceiling over both, because the boss resets daily and a claim requires it dead. An unkillable boss pays nobody.

Also in this release

The Empowered Tyrant is a real rematch, at two tiers above the one you felled. The scale factor was being silently discarded.
Masterworks are capped at two equipped, and cannot be applied to a piece you are wearing.
Every daily reset moved to the UTC day rather than the server's local one.
The world map and town streets fill the screen properly on a rotated phone. Fitting to height was right until you turned the device, at which point the map stopped short and left a black band down the side.
Celestial zones were searching for 82-97 seconds each, which quietly collapsed their search repeats to one and left the whole realm yielding a quarter of what your crafting slots drain. They match the mortal pace now.

1.10.0 13 Sep 2026

Talisman crafters get two new verbs, every weapon in the game has been renamed and rebuilt across fifteen tiers, the World Boss pays properly and tells you when it falls, and every herb can finally be found by looking for it.

🧧 Talismans: folding and annotation

Talisman was the only craft with a single tab. It has two more.

Folding presses two or three finished charms into one that carries all of their effects, each weakened. It always comes out weaker than using the charms separately — what you are buying is a turn. Two talismans cost two actions in a fight; a folded one costs a single action, and a fight decided in four rounds does not have two to spare.

Mastery finally reaches the charm. A fold keeps 50% of each effect at mastery 0 and 80% at 14. Inscribing already scaled with mastery, but the charm itself never got better — a tier-14 master made exactly what a beginner did.
Elements that agree keep more. All one element: +12%. Three that disagree: −8%.
The folded charm burns for as long as its shortest input, and only the strongest trigger technique survives, so a three-fold is not a battery of free ultimates.
Fold a ward with its own spare — a stack can supply two of the three slots.

Annotation moves power between the effects on a single charm. Higher mastery loses less (55% → 88%), and about one move in eight goes better than it should: either nothing is lost at all, or the charm keeps a fifth to two fifths of what it gave up.

Folded and annotated charms keep their own artwork and show what they actually do in your bag.

⚔️ The armoury: 480 named weapons

Every weapon has been renamed and rebuilt. Sixty per type across eight types — swords, daggers, hammers, axes, staffs, fans, spears and shields — spread over realm tiers 0 to 14, four of each type per tier.

Weapons carry real elemental affinity, read from what they are: one element below tier 8, two up to eleven, and three at tier 12 and above, so a blade at the top of the ladder answers to several daos at once.
Stats now run the full ladder to tier 14 on the same curve as everything else.
A handful of the old favourites were kept and reforged rather than replaced — Emberblaze Katana, Gaia's Fist, Joltspike, Mindcleave, Mindbreaker Maul, Mental Convergence Trident, and the Blood Demon three (Pride, Frenzy and Anger), which each carry fire, yin and metal.

Your old weapons are safe. Superseded weapons no longer drop and cannot be newly discovered, but everything you are holding keeps working, keeps its artwork, and can still be sold. Every recipe you have already learned stays craftable — nothing you spent time discovering has been taken away. Monster drops, zone loot and starting gear all point at the nearest new weapon rather than simply losing an entry.

🐲 World Boss

Claiming tells you what you got. The button used to change to "Reward Claimed" and that was it — you had to compare your own currencies to find out what a World Boss was worth.
Premium crystals are actually paid. They were advertised and never granted: 50 to first, 25 to the top three, 10 to the top ten, 5 to anyone who helped.
The boss is sized to its world. A flat 20 million had gone stale — health is now scaled to what the realm can actually produce in a day, so it stays a real fight as the world grows.
The killing blow is worth something. 25,000 spirit stones, 50 quest tokens and 25 crystals, on top of whatever rank you earned. Deliberately smaller than first place: landing the kill is a matter of striking at the right moment, and a prize that beat the damage board would turn the fight into a race to snipe the last sliver.
"Felled by" is on the boss for everyone to see.
Everyone who struck it is notified when it dies — in game and on your phone. The kill is when the payout becomes claimable, and nothing announced it, so anyone not watching at the right minute never learned there was something waiting.

Quest tokens buy sealed caskets: one random piece of gear at a random rarity, from a band of tiers — 0–2, 3–5, 6–8, 9+ — at 60/120/260/550 tokens.

🔮 Arrays

Any formation can serve a sect. Sect grade used to be the formation's call and two thirds refused, so what a sect could field was decided by a flag rather than by the sect. The choice is free now and the trade is real: a sect array reaches every member and gives each of them less for it — an ordinary formation keeps about half its figure when spread, one designed for the work keeps around two thirds.
A sect holds one copy of a formation. Racking the same array twice buffed the roster twice and drained the treasury twice. Duplicates have been collapsed.
Diagrams come in 2.5× faster — 3% a search cycle, 5% a victory. You need one diagram of each of the four kinds before the bench does anything at all, and at the old rate that opening set was most of a day's exploring.
A sect can rack the arrays its masters actually design. Assembled formations were invisible to the sect rack in five separate places, so an Array Master could work one out, forge it, and have nowhere to put it.

There are 7,634,250,000 distinct assemblies, 1,316,250,000 of them sect-capable.

🗡️ Every blow looks like the weapon that landed it

Basic attacks used to land as the same coloured bloom regardless of what you were swinging. Now:

Five families of strike. A sword cuts corner to corner, a spear drives in level, a hammer falls and rings, a staff sweeps, and a creature rakes. The slash is a tapered crescent with a hot core and a burst of sparks where the edge bites; crits swing wider and throw further.
A weapon's element imbues your basic attacks. This was quietly dead — the metal on an Azuresteel Greatsword added nothing to the swing it belongs to unless you happened to know a metal technique. It lands on the blow now, and the defender answers with their resistance to that element.
Hit animations work on phones. They never painted a blow at all: the element flash has been missing from the mobile battlefield since it was written.
Battleground weather stopped stealing credit. A 256-damage sword blow was showing the hazard's "1" in the hazard's colour with no strike at all, because the weather bit first and the animation read the wrong hit.
Solo/Pack is one button beside Fight Beasts, red when set to Pack.

🌿 Exploring, sects and fixes

Every herb can be foraged. Eighty-nine of a hundred and ten could not be found by exploring at all — they dropped from beasts, so nothing was strictly unobtainable, but an alchemist who needed a particular herb had nowhere to go and look. Eleven ores were in the same state. All of them now grow somewhere.

A sect invitation reaches the person invited. Clicking Invite on the friends list did nothing anyone could see — it sent a direct message and nothing else. It now arrives as a notification with Accept and Decline on it, and buzzes your phone.

Also fixed:

Reincarnation forgot your craft. Carrying mastery through a rebirth dropped the specialization, so array diagrams stopped dropping entirely for anyone who had reincarnated.
Four legendary origins granted craft level 30 where the cap is 14.
Duplicate-looking Spirit Pill stacks are not duplicates — a pill brewed from a variant carries a rider that was never shown. They are named now.
Experiment pools refuse a material no design of that craft uses, instead of burning it.
Character select opens on the cultivator you were last playing.
The pack penalty is 5% per additional foe, capped at 15%.

1.9.0 13 Sep 2026

Array Masters get a whole new craft to work out by hand, alchemists choose a school, combat stops being decided before the first blow lands, and the beast ladder was rebuilt from the bottom.

Arrays are assembled now, not bought

An Array Master used to forge a plate from a recipe. Now you work the formation out yourself.

Diagrams are found in the world — turned up while exploring, and dropped by beasts (capped by the toughest thing in the pack, so a hard fight is worth taking). Each diagram is one part of a formation, and a formation needs four: you pick one for each slot, tune five dials, and study the result to learn what you have made.

Studying takes time and occupies a crafting slot, like any other work at the bench. Understanding is not instant.

A few things worth knowing:

Parts span the whole ladder, tier 0 through 10, staggered — so there is always a next one to find.
Two parts on the same rung cost different materials. Which one you can afford is a real choice.
The formation pattern decides whether an array can serve a sect, not the dials. A sect-grade array has to be built as one.
Assembled plates wear the artwork of their formation, at their own grade — twelve formations, four qualities each.
Forged plates can be sold, and sect crafting orders can commission an assembled array.

Three ways an array lied about what it does

All fixed: crafting arrays claimed no crafting benefit (nothing in crafting read the stat — it does now), every array reported -1500% to -1800% health from a percentage applied twice, and the Fast/Slow deployment dial changed nothing at all.

Alchemists pick a school

Four of them — Soul, Life, Empowerment, Elements — and a concoction to develop over 100 levels within the one you choose. Steeping gives you two draws a day, plus one more every ten levels.

Pill descriptions also stopped quoting numbers that were written once and never updated. They read the pill now.

Combat is no longer decided before the first blow

Defence used to be checked against damage one line at a time, and about 1.8x defence made a fight unwinnable — not hard, arithmetically over. Damage now pools all mitigation together and resolves once, so gear advantage bends a fight instead of ending it.

Two more changes:

A hit always lands for something — the smaller of 0.2% of the target's maximum health or 10% of the attacker's combined attack. You can be outclassed; you cannot be reduced to nothing.
Weapons vary. Daggers and two-handed weapons swing wide, fans and staffs land close to their average, everything else sits between. The same character with the same stats no longer plays identically with every weapon.

The beast ladder was rebuilt

An audit put weak, average and strong characters against the beasts at every realm, and the results were bad in both directions: ungeared characters were one-shot at every realm, and high realms collapsed to one-round kills.

Beasts now climb within their tier. The 27th beast of a tier is meaningfully stronger than the 1st, and the last sits about 15% below where the next tier starts. No more flat plateaus with a cliff at the end.
They unlock from humble to fearsome rather than alphabetically.
Tier 0 is weaker as a whole. A realm-0 character with no gear can now struggle through the first few fights instead of dying to them, which is the only realm where being ungeared is realistic.

What beasts drop

Materials were falling out of everything. Now beast cores are the common drop — roughly one kill in three — and materials are genuinely uncommon. Exploring pays in materials; killing pays in Qi and cores.

Every material in the game now has at least one source you can go and get it from. Some had none. Honing essences also drop, at a low rate.

Exploring: rare finds stopped arriving in sixes

A cultivation manual was turning up as "Azure Breath Manual x3" or x6. One resolved search stands in for several real ones — which is right for ore, and nonsense for a manual, where a second copy teaches you nothing. Manuals are authored as a single find and are handed over as one now. Rare finds are no longer multiplied.

And materials came back down

Last version raised exploration to keep up with the cauldron: about 76 materials an hour against crafting's 80. Then crafting slowed right down — a Qi Gathering Pill went from 90 seconds to 27 minutes — and nobody moved the other half. Six slots running flat out now eat about 27 an hour, so exploring was supplying roughly three times what could be burned.

Material yields are scaled back to match. A herb valley pays about 30 an hour instead of 76. Searches still find something nearly every time — that part is not going back; you simply find a sensible amount of it.

The guard that watches this ratio now works the drain out from the recipe itself, so a future change to craft times moves it automatically instead of quietly going stale.

Crafting is a season's work

Mastery XP scaled far too gently — tier 14/15 was a weekend. It now takes months, and experiment progress no longer scales with your level (which quietly meant every level cost the same 100 cycles, forever).

Craft times went up to match: roughly 20 minutes at low tier, up to 4 hours at tier 10.

Reincarnation

Eleven new Soul Tree perks, and a pile of things a rebirth was quietly forgetting to wipe.

A granted starting realm now arrives at that realm's strength. Perks that started you higher were handing you the realm without the stats, so you were weaker than if you had climbed there yourself.
Adaptive Blood and Malleable Physique — three ranks each, one bloodline/physique reroll per rank. A reroll replaces what is on offer: you can still take what your last life carried, but the roll you walked away from is gone.
Polymath Soul lets you commit to more than one craft — and the workshop now lets you switch between them, each with its own mastery.
Two nodes that kept the first two zones unlocked did nothing at all, because those zones were always unlocked. They are now Wayfarer's Instinct and Prospector's Eye.
Carrying a technique over no longer also hands you a scroll for it.

Fixes

The World Boss is a fight you play, not a button pressed ten times.
Qi Gathering on iPhone — about nine taps in ten missed the spheres. The hit test was being done per-mote instead of at the arena.
The combat background now applies on mobile.
Locked things say why, and a consumable that is refused tells you the reason.
Slot tiles in the assembly bench rendered as 2x2 pixels.

Under the hood

The app downloaded all six languages on every load. It fetches the one you use — about 30% off the download.
A refund that failed used to fail silently. It is recorded now.

1.8.0 13 Sep 2026

Exploring finally pays for the crafting it exists to feed, materials stop going negative, and a sect no longer loses its leader forever when they walk the wheel again.

Exploring pays properly now

Someone searched overnight for ten hours and came back with three ores. They were right that it was broken, and it was worse than a slow drip: three separate settings were each overruling what the zones themselves are written to do, and between them they cut the yield to about a fiftieth of the intent.

Ten hours of searching paid roughly 33 materials. Ten hours of crafting consumes about 800. Exploration could not feed the profession it exists for.

All three are fixed:

Zones have their own pace again. Every zone is written with a search time of 22–34 seconds; a floor was rounding all of them up to 180, so every zone in the game searched at exactly the same speed. The floor stays — it keeps the event log and the job queue sane — but a cycle that stands in for several searches now pays like several.
Zones yield what they are written to yield. Each zone authors its own split between materials, opportunities and creature encounters. That was being ignored in favour of one hard-coded 85/5/10 for the entire game, so a beast-heavy warren and a herb valley handed out the same things in the same proportions. Fortune now shifts weight toward the rarer outcomes rather than piling on top of them — a lucky cultivator finds better things, not simply more.
Most cycles turn up something. 88% of them used to return nothing at all.

A herb valley now yields around 76 materials an hour against crafting's 80 — for the same number of events, so nothing got noisier. Combat-leaning zones still pay less in materials and more in Qi and drops, which is what they are for.

Materials could go negative. They can't now

Two things happening at the same moment — a craft cycle and a pill, or two workshop slots finishing together — could both check your stock, both decide there was enough, and both take it. The count went below zero and stayed there.

Stock is now locked while it's being taken, and the database itself refuses to hold a negative quantity. Any stack already below zero is reset to zero on update. If that was you: the materials are gone and there is no record of how many there were. Sorry.

A ten-run craft pays for itself up front

Starting a run of ten used to take materials one cycle at a time, so anything else that touched the same materials in between could starve it halfway — you asked for ten, got six, and nothing told you why.

The whole run is now paid for the moment you start it. The materials leave your bag immediately, which will look odd the first time, and anything unspent comes straight back if you stop early. If the craft was accepted, everything it needs is already set aside and nothing can reach it.

Runs set to go until materials run out are unchanged — running out is how they're meant to end.

A sect always has a leader

A sect leader who reincarnated left the seat simply gone. Nobody was promoted, nobody was told, and if there was no Vice Leader there was no way back at all — the challenge that takes the seat needs someone holding it.

The mantle now passes down the hierarchy, and the new leader is notified:

Vice Leader outranks Supreme Elder here even though the roster lists Supreme higher. That is the entire point of the seat.

Sect daily missions no longer ask for bloodline essences or physique items. A turn-in was quite happy to demand the one consumable that permanently defines your character, in exchange for merit points.

Set bonuses that say +7% crit chance give +7% crit chance

They were multiplying instead of adding. A 5% base times 1.07 is 5.35, which is why a set promising +7% left you sitting at 5.6% — and at zero crit it was worse still, because anything times zero is zero, so a crit set granted nothing at all to a character who hadn't got any yet.

Both crit chance and crit damage now add points, as every set description has been promising. Everything else in a set keeps scaling with your own magnitudes.

Finding things, and getting to them

Tap a source in Collections and it takes you there. A zone opens Explore, drilled to the right region with the zone scrolled to and ringed; a beast opens the fight roster on its tier, scrolled to the beast. A brief fade covers the jump so it reads as travel rather than a flicker. (Turn it off with Disable transitions if you'd rather not.)

Studying pays now, even when it finds nothing. Experimenting in Refining and Tailoring awarded XP only on the moment a design was finally learned, so the dozens of cycles it takes to get there were worth exactly zero. Every cycle now gives a small amount of mastery XP. Discovery is still where the real reward is.

Dao trials are worth twice as much. A par run was half an hour of what you'd gain sitting still; four to eight attempts a day came to two to four hours against a day that has twenty-four in it. A par run is now an hour, a strong one two, and a poor one twenty-four minutes rather than seven — the old floor paid so little that abandoning a bad run was the correct move.

Meridian Flow tells you when you're right. A wrong arrow flashed red and a correct one did nothing, so pressing the right arrow looked identical to pressing a dead button. It flashes green now.

Bags, breaking, and screens that fit

Bags start at 50 slots per category, up from 30.
The break menu offers filters that exist. Gear is graded Low / Normal / High / Supreme — "High" was missing entirely, because the menu was offering the pill grades for everything. Pill grades no longer sweep up talismans. All ten gear slots are always listed; the picker used to be built from what was in your bag, so breaking your last chestpiece made "Chest" vanish from it. And there's a tier filter — break everything from the realms you've left behind.
Top-nav windows are pods on a phone, held clear of every edge with the content scrolling inside. They used to sit flush against three sides and read as though they were running off the screen.
Windows no longer hide under the clock. The height was a flat percentage, which is comfortably clear on a tall phone and less than a notch on a short one, so the close button disappeared on exactly the devices with least room.
Rankings keeps its size whichever section you pick.
The ＋ that starts a message works. It always opened — behind the chat window, where nobody could see it.

Achievements on both stores

Every achievement is now mirrored to Google Play (all 162) and Game Center (100, Apple's limit), with artwork, so they show on your profile alongside the ones you earn here.

1.7.0 13 Sep 2026

Bags have a size, the Caravan has a lot more in it, chat has faces, and a great many things on a phone finally fit on the screen they are drawn on.

Your bag holds a certain amount now

Equipment, consumables and manuals each get 30 slots. Materials are untouched and always will be — a crafting economy that asks you to throw away ore is not one anybody wants to play.

A slot is a row, not a thing. Ninety-nine identical pills stack into one slot; ninety-nine different pills take ninety-nine. Topping up a stack you already have is never refused, however full the category is.

The bag shows what you're using at the top of each category and turns red at the limit. When it's full, new items of that kind are lost — so that readout is worth a glance.

More space is sold in the Celestial Caravan under Character Upgrades, and from a + slot at the end of the bag itself, which is where you actually want it. Each purchase adds 10 slots to every capped category at once — it's a bigger bag, not a choice to optimise. It costs 50 crystals, rising 20 each time to a ceiling of 500 and no further. If you can't afford it, the prompt takes you to where crystals are sold rather than just saying no.

A red hammer beside the category selector clears a bag by the handful. Pick a rule — quality, rarity or gear slot, each meaning this or lower — and it selects everything matching, marking each one with a green tick. Nothing breaks until you press Break selected on a set you can see, and you can add or remove ticks by tapping first. Breaking runs the same way it always has, one item at a time, returning materials to anyone with the profession that made them.

The Celestial Caravan

Ten new wares, and a shop that is legible on a phone.

Time dilation — these run the real cycles you would have run, not a lump sum, so they are worth exactly the hours they claim at whatever your rates actually are:

Crafting Time Dilation Talisman (and Greater / Supreme) — two hours of workshop time across your first 2 / 4 / 6 crafting slots. A slot set to experiment gets that many cycles of experimenting.
Grand Exploration Array — two hours of searching your current region, resolved at once.
Blood-thirsty Rage Talisman — two hours of repeat-fighting the beast you're already hunting.

Each refuses if there's nothing to advance, rather than quietly burning itself.

Fortune Gathering Arrays I–IV — +100 / 200 / 300 / 400 Fortune for an hour. They never stack: the strongest one wins, and a lesser one laid over a greater is simply wasted.

Rousing Spirit Pill — ends a knockout on the spot and restores full health.

Emote packs — three sets of ten illustrated emotes, unlocked account-wide.

Mythic supporters now get knockouts that end in half the time, replacing "early access to new realms" — a promise about a release schedule was never something an account could actually be given.

Chat has faces

Emotes are pictures, inserted from a button beside every message box — world chat, sect chat, DM replies and new messages. Tap one in a conversation to see it full size.

You can see every emote anyone sends whether or not you own the pack; owning it puts it in your picker.

The chat window is also taller and a fixed height on a phone — it used to jump every time you switched between Chat and Messages — and the tab strip has moved up into the header, which was previously spending a whole row repeating the word "Chat".

Combat

Beasts unlock at the end of a fight, not after a walk back. The result screen now offers Next — the next beast in the tier, started immediately — and Return takes you back to the tier you were fighting in, scrolled to the beast you just fought, instead of the highest tier you've unlocked.

A charging enemy is now visible. A foe winding up a heavy blow carries a pulsing aura in its element and a countdown saying how many turns until it lands, or NOW when it's next. On a phone this warning did not exist at all before.

Qi Surge has been rebuilt around your element — see 1.6.0's notes if you missed it — and the button says Focus until it's charged.

Also: the round counter and speed bar hold still while the log scrolls, the fight no longer slides sideways, and the battlefield effect announces itself as a toast at the bottom rather than clipped off the top right.

Fixes

Crit chance and crit damage were invisible on items. Eight stats — speed, both crit stats, fortune, stamina and the three regens — were missing from the inventory's display list entirely, so a hammer whose whole point is +23 crit damage showed a lone attack number. They all show now, and both crit stats read as the percentages they are.
Claim All told you nothing. The receipt listing what you claimed and what it paid was rendering behind the achievements window. It shows now, with a combined total. Claimable achievements also sort to the top of the list.
Blood Cleanse Pill said Removed: *. It now names the conditions it actually cleansed, and says so when there was nothing to clear.
"Theory of All Things — you've learned Pure Spirit Charm" sent people to the Techniques screen. Pure Spirit Charm is a talisman pattern; the message now names the kind and where to find it.
Weapon power comparison was measuring a one-hander against the wrong hand, so a free second weapon read as a downgrade. A one-hander now shows both hands (▲254 / ▲512), and a two-hander is judged against the pair it displaces.
Talismans in sect crafting orders showed no effect when selected.
Weapon mastery from fighting is worth 3× what it was, and the weapon-mastery pill no longer reports "0/s" while working perfectly.
Buff pills of a kind no longer let a weak one refresh a strong one's timer.
Commissioned arrays and talismans are all available (20 arrays and 132 talismans, up from 2 and none).
Market listings expire after 7 days, and sellers are notified when something sells.

On a phone

A long pass over everything that didn't fit:

The page itself no longer scrolls — only the pods on it do. That's what was producing white and black bars at the top and bottom of the screen.
The top bar scrolls to both ends; the first icon used to be clipped and unreachable. The chat and help buttons stay centred but give ground rather than letting the currency pod paint over them.
Buttons whose labels were cut off now shrink the label instead. "Equipment" was rendering as "Equi…", "Main Hand" as "Main …".
Inventory, combat and shop controls are shorter, giving the room back to what they sit above.
Qi Vessel controls are one row instead of three stacked buttons.
The Caravan has a section rail at every width, collapsible to icons, and its window no longer changes size depending on which section is open. Consumables are one per row and grouped by what they're for; supporter tiers keep a readable width and scroll sideways.
The Dao Trial is a toggle in the corner beside Reincarnate and Soul Tree, and the tab strip that used to name it is gone.
The character actions menu leads with the cultivator's portrait, and — when opened from chat — is now visible at all.

Under the hood

Google Play Billing updated to 9.1.0.
Version tags now publish a GitHub Release carrying these notes.

1.6.0 13 Sep 2026

Crafting discovery has been rebuilt, the market opens on its goods, and a cultivator can now leave something behind.

Experimenting is a body of study, not a guessing game

Discovery used to be a guess at an exact answer. A blueprint's ingredients were a fixed list in fixed quantities, and an experiment only matched if the bag you submitted equalled it exactly — three ore and one core taught you nothing if the recipe wanted three ore and two cores. Nothing told you the quantities. A wrong guess cost every material you put in.

That's gone. Refiners and Tailors now pool materials within one tier of each other and work through them:

Each cycle has a chance to use up one unit of the pool — 50%, falling 3 points per mastery level to a floor of 10%. A practised hand wastes less.
Each cycle also has a 15% chance of an insight into some design those materials go into.
Two to five insights (by tier) and the design is yours.
A pool can't be wrong, only slow. Materials leave your bag as they're actually used, so stopping early returns everything unspent.

Already know a design? Aim the bench at it. Surplus insights past learning tighten the grade you roll — at 5, 10, 25 and 100 — and that bonus applies whether you craft it yourself or fill a commission.

The crafting screen shows your insight count on any design you tap, and designs you're still working out sit dimmed among the rest with their progress on the tile.

New Soul Tree node — Artisan's Eye (Crafting): +5% insight chance per rank, up to 4 ranks.

An experiment over materials that can teach you nothing new is now refused up front, rather than quietly burning your pool for two minutes a cycle toward a result that was already decided.

The market

It opens on its goods now. Browsing used to return nothing until you'd guessed a filter — if you didn't already know what was for sale, you had no way to find out. The stalls now show everything, sixty listings a page, cheapest first, with page controls and a count of what was found.

That gate was hiding something: behind it sat a hard cap of 300 results, so any filter matching more than that silently dropped the rest. That truncation is gone.

You're now told when your goods sell, and for how much. A listing sells while you're elsewhere — that's the point of a market — so the only evidence used to be a stone count that had quietly changed.
Listings expire after 7 days and come home to your bag. A stall nobody clears fills with things priced for a realm the world passed long ago.

Sect crafting orders

Every profession is commissionable now. The orders screen showed two entries under Array and none at all under Talisman, because the system only understood recipes — and array plates and talisman patterns aren't recipes. Array now lists 20, Talisman 132.

A commissioned array plate is delivered as a personal plate, and its lifespan comes from the mastery of whoever forged it — which is the whole reason to commission one rather than make it yourself.

The screen itself got a rework:

Profession tabs replaced by a Filters button — type, tier, rarity, effect and material, applied together. The default is all 1,157 commissions. The tabs were a filter you couldn't turn off or combine, so "every legendary pill" meant knowing which tab to look under first.
The builder shows what you're paying for: a pill's effect, gear's stats, an array plate's bonuses. Commissioning something used to name it and stop there.
+/- steppers on ingredient quantities.

Treasured Inheritance

New Soul Tree node (Cultivation). At major realm 8 or beyond, a cultivator may name one legendary-or-better possession a treasure at the end of a life and hand it down — to their family line, or to their sect.

Its stats rise 10%, compounding every time it is handed down. An heirloom passed through five lives is worth 1.61× what it started as, so a family's oldest possession becomes its best one.
Only that line or that sect may ever wear it.
It can never be sold. It changes hands by inheritance or by conquest.

A family treasure goes to the head of the line; a sect treasure goes to the vault. Winning a sect war carries one off — the most storied one — and rebinds it to the victors, who can now wear what the losers no longer can.

The sect storehouse has a Treasures tab, listing each heirloom with how many souls have handed it on and the bonus that has earned. Elders and above may take one out to wear, and put it back.

Reincarnating also now offers to empty your materials and consumables into your sect's storage rather than lose them. No merit for it — this is a bequest, not a donation.

Combat

The battlefield is no longer chosen. An ordinary fight rolls its own terrain when it starts: half the time neutral ground, half the time one of the ten. Picking it before every fight was a chore, and since the attunement helps whichever side matches the element, the answer was always "whichever suits my build". A tyrant still fights on its home ground, and the banner still tells you what was drawn.
New setting — Compact fight selection. Pick a tier first, then choose a beast from its artwork alone; details, drops and the fight options open on tap.
On a phone the combat log collapses to its icon, freeing the header row.

Alchemy

The pill catalogue has been rebuilt onto a proper matrix. Duplicate effects across tiers are gone, effect combinations are spread far more widely, and Qi restoration now scales as a share of your realm's own pool rather than a flat number.

Tier 0 pills are single-stat, covering every main stat plus an all-affinity and an all-resist.
Bonuses grow with tier, and pills start carrying more than one stat as they climb; tier 7+ carry three.
Single-stat pills always give more of that stat than a multi-stat one at the same tier.
Blood Burst pills at tiers 1, 4 and 8, each stronger than the last.
Hour-long buff pills for Qi generation, comprehension, weapon mastery and regeneration, scattered up the tiers at rising percentages.
Every element now has a pill raising its attack or resistance at least every other tier.

Every origin now grants starting equipment — some a piece or two, some a full set, some a weapon.

Masterworking

The daily limit — 3 pieces, 4 at refining mastery 5, 5 at full mastery — has always been enforced, but nothing in the workshop said so. The only way to find out was to spend a full bar of stamina and be refused. The Masterwork tab now reads "2 / 3 today", and at the limit the button says why.

It also didn't entirely hold: two requests arriving together could both slip past, producing four masterworks against a cap of three and paying for two of them with one bar of stamina. Fixed.

Interface and fixes

The top bar fits on one line on a phone. At 320px it was three rows and 158px tall, with Dao Power stranded on a line of its own. It's now 112px, with Dao Power left, chat and help centred, and currency right — and it still holds one row at 280px.
Blueprint scrolls draw as a scroll with the design's item on it, whether or not the design resolves.
Heraldry banners and family crests have their artwork.
Twenty-four new pill illustrations.
The bottom nav's expand caret is back to the full-width strip it had in 1.5.0.
Tap targets across the achievements panel, the help button and the currency pod now meet the 44px minimum.

1.5.0 13 Sep 2026

New

🗂️ Collections

A new tab beside Achievements: every item and beast in the world, in one book.
Items split six ways — Equipment, Consumables, Manuals, Ore, Herbs, Cores — and beasts by tier. Each group shows how many you have found of the total.
What you have collected is in colour; what you have not is dimmed.
Tap an item to see where it comes from — which beasts drop it, at what chance, and which zones turn it up.
28 new achievements for reaching 10%, 25%, 50% and 100% of each category.
Your existing bags, learned manuals and past boss kills already count, so the book does not start empty.

⚔️ Sparring & Duels

Sparring in the sect now opens a roster of sect-mates who are actually in the world — portrait, name and realm — with a Challenge button beside each and a confirmation before it goes.
Once sent, the button reads Challenged until they answer.
New: Duel. In the actions menu wherever you can tap a cultivator — the online list, chat, your friends list.
The difference is what losing costs: the loser of a duel is knocked out. A spar is practice and now leaves you standing, which it did not before.
When someone accepts or declines, you are told. If they accept, the notification carries a button straight into the fight.

Combat & Rewards

💰 Spoils

Spirit stones now drop from every beast you defeat, scaling with its tier.
The victory screen groups what you won: Qi and stones, then Equipment, Consumables, Manuals, Materials, then Mastery — each item on its own line and coloured by its rarity.
Weapon mastery per swing is five times what it was. Fighting now moves the bar at a pace worth noticing.
Mastery reads plainly: ⚔ Swords +60 XP.

🎒 In battle

The item picker now shows what each item actually does, not just its name, in a list that scrolls.
With paced enemy turns switched on, the combat log now reveals a turn at a time alongside the animation, instead of the whole round appearing when it ends.
On a phone the combat log stays inside the combat pod — the log scrolls, the fight stays where it is.

⚗️ Balance

A pill well below your realm now takes up more of your daily limit, so a high-realm cultivator can no longer chain dozens of starter pills. At Core Formation that is 20 starter pills a day instead of 40. Pills at or above your own realm are unchanged, and the limit itself has not moved.

Interface & Fixes

👥 Social

Social is now two tabs: Family Line and Friends. Messages and Gathering live in the chat bubble in the header, which already carries the unread count.
Family Line: tap any member to open their details, with Make Head there behind a confirmation. The family banner is a compact slot beside Leave Family. The family tree scrolls inside its own pod instead of running off the page.
Friends: one Actions button per friend, opening the same options as tapping someone in chat, with Remove Friend in place of Add Friend. The add-friend search stays put while the list scrolls beneath it.

🏛️ Sect

Locked buildings now explain themselves. Tapping one tells you what is needed instead of doing nothing at all — the reason used to live in a tooltip a phone could never show. The same goes for locked buttons in the bottom bar.

👤 Character creation

Rebuilt to fit a phone: Previous and Next stay on screen, and each step scrolls in its own pod. On the Origin step the Next button used to sit well below the fold.
The avatar grid now matches the one in Settings, and on a phone you choose a cultivator, then the portrait style, then look at the result — one section at a time.
Fixed the avatar picker locking up part-way through scrolling.

🐛 Fixes

The Bounty Board went black once you had claimed every bounty for the day. It now says the board is clear until it refreshes.
Achievements: the search box and type list collapse into a single Filters button, with type, rarity and search applied together. The "Claim On" picker is gone — rewards land on the cultivator you are playing.
Resets is collapsed by default on desktop.
The VIP badge now sits beside your title instead of on its own line.
The "client out of date" screen now returns you to the sign-in page instead of reappearing endlessly.