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Simple, power levels scale logarithmically, and I'm pretty sure that stuff about the tower scaling to the user isn't true past a point. The tower can't simulate a challenging scenario for someone sufficiently powerful. Also tortoise is slang for a certain term that got wordfiltered on SA recently, in case that isn't mentioned in the translations.
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Apr 12, 2016 21:31
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Algid posted:Simple, power levels scale logarithmically, and I'm pretty sure that stuff about the tower scaling to the user isn't true past a point. The tower can't simulate a challenging scenario for someone sufficiently powerful. ah, "cuckservative", i'm guessing
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Apr 12, 2016 21:52
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“Dad, I don’t have enough Demon Stones. Please send a few more.” Shameless Hao is my favorite protagonist of any Xanxia ever.
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Apr 13, 2016 01:45
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ISSTH 585: Yeehaw, giddyup little ol' Reliance! I didn't think it could get better after Meng Hao asked for more stones but I am proven wrong. Please read this series - it's probably the only one I've found so far with real plot development and actual humor.
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Apr 13, 2016 17:47
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So the Paragons and other higher ups are aware that they are just a recording, interesting.
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Apr 14, 2016 15:03
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The exact mechanics of what's happening isn't clear at this point, but it's obviously not just a recording. For example, the tower spirit already mentioned that he'll give the technique to Meng Hao if he's still around once Meng Hao gets out.
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Apr 14, 2016 16:35
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Algid posted:The exact mechanics of what's happening isn't clear at this point, but it's obviously not just a recording. Yeah that was when it became obvious this isn't a recording, Night still exists (since Ke Jisui talks to him before he send Meng Hao back) but Night can't give Meng Hao the technique only this old guy at the 99th level can. It also becomes clear that Ke Jisui's father also knows though which is interesting.
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Apr 14, 2016 18:01
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The old guy is the lord of the 9th mountain who the Ji clan betrayed and usurped. Night is the spirit who is running the whole thing, but otherwise as far as we know the only survivors are Jiusi and the self-proclaimed badass bitch. If I recall correctly we don't actually know what happened to Li, just that he disappeared and then the Ji clan took over. I dunno, maybe he included himself in that no immortality thing? The ji clan replaced that with the immortal sealing dais, meaning that immortality is possible but only on their terms. Also, it is kind of strange how Patriarch Reliance, who is not dead, is there. It really blurs the line between illusion and time travel.
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Apr 14, 2016 20:46
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No, old guy is the tool spirit for the tower. There are a bunch of survivors and some of them reestablished the sect, it's just that the power of the current sect is nothing like it was back then, it's basically in name only. That's why she keeps on talking about the curse and how Meng Hao is unaffected, the current sect is so far removed from what it was the curse kills even them. Jiusi is the only one there because he's basically guarding the tomb of everyone he ever knew and he only "survived" because of that resurrection technique he has.
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Apr 14, 2016 21:00
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Algid posted:No, old guy is the tool spirit for the tower. There are a bunch of survivors and some of them reestablished the sect, it's just that the power of the current sect is nothing like it was back then, it's basically in name only. That's why she keeps on talking about the curse and how Meng Hao is unaffected, the current sect is so far removed from what it was the curse kills even them. It should be a tool spirit there, but he is actually Li. Maybe he isn't there in person but that is definitely the head of the demon immortal sect.
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Apr 14, 2016 21:07
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You don't refer to someone in the third person when they're standing right in front of you and you're talking to them, even in affected olde Chinese.
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Apr 14, 2016 22:34
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I'm dropping Murdering Heaven Edge. The awful little poo poo has every possible advantage in the world and still everyone he encounters gushes about how amazing he is. Also, in that setting the two concepts of "cultivators are eternally impoverished and rely on secular authorities for resources" and "there are a shitload of magic beasts running around that even basic cultivators can hunt easily and every single part of them can be sold for ridiculous sums" coexist without anyone mentioning how dumb that poo poo is.
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Apr 15, 2016 14:34
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I did it. I read every last thing on Novel Updates that actually seemed nice. Now I can stop wasting all my time on poorly translated YA novels wooooooooo I did not find a single thing good enough to seriously recommend. EDIT: The OP should be updated to recommend OSO, ISSTH, Kumoko, Konosuba, Kenkyo, Evil God Average, and I dunno maybe Sevens? Those seem like a pretty good sampler for the various LN/CN genres. BlitzBlast fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Apr 16, 2016 |
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Apr 16, 2016 21:33
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Amber Sword, Cook of the Mercenary Corp, Duke's Daughter, Magi Grandson, and Parallel World Pharmacy are also pretty good, and updates often enough for me to keep up with them.
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Apr 16, 2016 22:25
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It'd probably be easier to update if we write up our own summaries, huh. Only Sense Online VR MMO stories got popular thanks to Sword Art Online, but by and large they're awful overdramatic messes based on MMOs so poorly designed you have to assume the developers were completely drunk. Enter Only Sense Online, a story that is just about some people playing a cool game. They don't get trapped in it. They're not crazed weirdoes with no lives outside of it. And they most certainly do not die in real life if they die in the game. OSO is a relaxed story centering on Shun, a dude so pretty that the game's automatic avatar creator actually thought he was a girl and made his character female. "Yun" proceeds to meet new people, mess around with a highly detailed crafting system, and in general actually have fun. OSO's strong suit is that it never forgets it is telling a story about a MMO. There is almost no drama, nobody is a mustache-twirling villain, the world does not revolve around the MC, and most of all the game actually sounds pretty fun. Oh and I guess there's this idea that Yun assembles lovely skills and somehow turns them into an overpowered as gently caress setup but we're eight volumes in and none of that has happened at all. It (and the gender bending) mostly seems to be there just to attract people who like that sort of thing. Evil God Average So there's this girl who is pretty normal, except she has the creepiest gaze ever. Through the whims of a god, this girl (now named Anri) is thrown into a RPG-like world and gets a bunch of downright villainous skills. In particular, her gaze has been upgraded so literally everyone she looks at will be too terrified to move. This and a few other problems makes living a normal life as an adventurer impossible, so Anri decides to go with plan B: take over a dungeon, knock out all of the adventurers who come in, and sell their equipment for cash. But a few poor decisions later and... well, let's just say the title doesn't have "Evil God" in it for nothing. Extremely funny and very relaxed, Evil God Average is just an all around excellent story. Also in its favor is that the author knew not to stretch things out: there are only two volumes (four if you count the two sidestory ones), and they are just the right length. If you want to know if you'll enjoy LNs at all, I definitely recommend this one. Gifting this Wonderful World with Blessings! (Konosuba) Kazuma, just an ordinary teenage boy, is run over by a truck while trying to save a girl's life. He meets a goddess in the afterlife, who asks him to help save another world. Kazuma accepts, and the goddess follows him to this new (video game like!) world. Starting off as an ordinary adventurer, Kazuma assembles a party of beauties and begins his quest to save the world from the Demon Lord! Hahahahahahaha just kidding, that's not what happens at all. Konosuba is the story of two douchebags meeting, screwing each other over, and then attracting two weirdoes into one dysfunctional as hell party. It is the epitome of a story not taking itself seriously, and is overall a complete blast to read. Or watch, since it just got an anime! I'm actually kinda mixed on recommending this as a starter, because it is first and foremost a parody of the entire Reincarnated Into A Game genre. It is absolutely an excellent comedy on its own, with one of the best casts I have ever seen and a tight narrative (if something is mentioned, no matter how minor, it's probably going to come up later!), but I kinda feel like it's even better after you've flipped through a few other stories of its ilk first. Sevens Once a child prodigy, Lyle Walt's life turns for the worse when his sister Celes suddenly becomes the apple of everyone's eye. Fast forward a few years of isolation in his own house, and Lye is stripped of his status as the heir and thrown out of his family. But before he leaves, one of the servants gives him a family heirloom. Much to his surprise, it turns out to contain the consciousnesses of the first seven heads of his family! With their advice guiding him and their abilities empowering him, Lyle starts a new life... that ultimately sets him against his sister again. I'm mostly only recommending this because it's a decent baseline for stories set in a fantasy world with RPG mechanics as a whole. The MC starts off weak but gets strong, he attracts girls like crazy, everyone he runs into thinks he sucks at first but then realize he's cool, etc. A lot of stories have done the concept better, but even more have done the concept worse. If you just want to try a long runner, then you could do a lot worse.
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Apr 16, 2016 23:17
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jwang posted:... Magi Grandson... I really liked this in the beginning because it seemed like, finally, an author was going to make good use of the whole "reincarnated in a medieval fantasy world with modern scientific knowledge" thing whereby the main character actually uses his knowledge of science to improve his magic. For the first 10 or so chapters, it totally delivers on this but then the premise described in the summary kicks in. The "I forgot to teach him common sense" thing. Apparently, common sense is to be terrible at everything? I don't understand most of the characters' reactions. The MC is an OP magician. Fine. But everyone treats that like it's an obnoxious personality quirk. Like, he has some problem where he farts constantly or something. This may make sense if he was careless or dangerous in some way and everyone was just putting up with the danger so they could get the benefit of his awesome magic but that's not the case. If someone saw an olympic sprinter run and make a really good time that they didn't think would be possible, you would expect their reaction to be to congratulate the sprinter. Not so in this story. The characters would groan and complain and say things like "don't you know people shouldn't be able to run that fast? well, whatever, you don't know any better and it's a good thing we like you" and then the sprinter would feel ashamed that they did something out of the ordinary. This LN is that scenario over and over again. It truly baffles me and I don't understand why anyone would write characters like that.
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Apr 17, 2016 04:34
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If someone has never been exceptional or praised for much of anything they might misunderstand how it works. Or it might just be a lovely author's idea of humor, who knows?
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Apr 17, 2016 05:16
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organism posted:I really liked this in the beginning because it seemed like, finally, an author was going to make good use of the whole "reincarnated in a medieval fantasy world with modern scientific knowledge" thing whereby the main character actually uses his knowledge of science to improve his magic. My Disciple Died Yet Again has been pretty good with this, as far as I've seen, but the translator got a job and seems to have stalled out on it.
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Apr 17, 2016 05:29
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booksnake posted:My Disciple Died Yet Again has been pretty good with this, as far as I've seen, but the translator got a job and seems to have stalled out on it. It's satire though and mostly plays those sorts of situations for laughs and absurdity value. It's really good satire though and I'm very sad the TL got a life =(
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Apr 19, 2016 19:52
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So what's the thread's opinion on DanMachi?
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Apr 19, 2016 20:36
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I read up to about volume 5 before Yen Press took it over. The translation wasn't the greatest, but it was alright. Worst I can say about it is that Hestia is kind of awful. She's about as actively detrimental as Aqua in Konosuba, only nobody calls her on it and she doesn't have nearly as good chemistry with the rest of the cast.
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Apr 19, 2016 20:49
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BlitzBlast posted:I read up to about volume 5 before Yen Press took it over. The translation wasn't the greatest, but it was alright. Yeah, I can't really think of any aggressively bad things about it beyond Hestia. The rest is just okay to good dungeon diving.
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Apr 19, 2016 20:54
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"Bell is so obsessed with getting a girlfriend because he was raised by Zeus" was a pretty good joke though. I remember a friend of mine being bugged by the grandpa's advice until the reveal. Her reaction was "This suddenly makes perfect sense."
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Apr 19, 2016 21:01
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BlitzBlast posted:She's about as actively detrimental as Aqua in Konosuba
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Apr 19, 2016 21:47
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Yeah, I guess that's rude to Aqua.
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Apr 19, 2016 22:44
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BlitzBlast posted:"Bell is so obsessed with getting a girlfriend because he was raised by Zeus" was a pretty good joke though. Can you spoiler me this? What was the advice, and what was the reveal? I've only seen the anime and it doesn't cover this
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Apr 19, 2016 23:16
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It does, at the end Hermes is like "AS EXPECTED FROM ZEUS' GRANDSON". Though the anime doesn't clarify that he's just adopted. And the advice was like, every last thing Bell ever flashbacked to. Gotta get a girlfriend, ROMAAAAANCE, etc.
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Apr 19, 2016 23:46
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Since I liked its anime but could definitely see it was getting stretched a little thin (animation was straight up awful at times, huge subplots were getting condensed), I picked up and read through the first two Yen Press Durarara!! novels and I'm amazed how easy/quick it was to go through them. I'm not sure how much of that was that those first two arcs were just really good and how much of it was the writing but man that was fun. Figured I wouldn't have anything LN-related to read once I finished Spice & Wolf but looks like that won't be the case.
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Apr 20, 2016 13:35
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Finally finished the second Kumoko novel. I haven't found any scans online, so have some low quality pictures of the illustrations instead. Overall, the Kumoko parts are mostly unchanged. A few bits were streamlined (mostly summarizing Kumoko grinding skills and reordering some events), but I didn't notice any important changes from the web novel there. The human parts on the other hand had a lot of changes, with like half of the chapters being completely new. More details following in spoiler tags For Kumoko, the story has her discovering and entering the magma layer, gaining a bunch of overpowered skills, including getting Appraisal and Detection to level 10 and getting D to make her a new title after she complains about not getting anything. It ends after she defeats the fire drake, the fire dragon fight wasn't covered. The human parts start with 2 new Julius chapters. The first one has him and his party entering the Elro Labyrinth to go after the spider that has been reported there. This chapter is mostly there to introduce his party members. In the next chapter they come across the "Vestige of the Nightmare", i.e. one of Kumoko's bodies on autopilot (or one of her children?), accompanied by 3 Great Taratekts. The spiders immediately attack and while the hero party easily gets rid of the Greater Taratekts, they probably would've lost against the Vestige of the Nightmare. But it suddenly stopped in its tracks and seemed to be scared of something. They use that hesitation to restrain it, and Julius deals the finishing blow. They leave, and the viewpoint switches to the Demon Lord being distracted by something. When asked, she replies "I was just dealing with someone jumping the gun, don't mind me". Another interesting point in these chapters is Julius remembering the spider he fought (and lost to) "more than 10 years ago", clarifying the timeline a lot sooner than the web novel did. Next, there are two new Shun chapters. The first one is their first magic lesson. The students get wands with the level 1 water spells, and use those to cast that spell at some targets until they acquire the relevant skill. Shun has a great affinity for water spells, so he has no problems there, but most of the other students including Yuugo (Natsume-kun) are struggling. He gets angry and attacks the targets with lvl 4 fire magic, Shun extinguishes it, which starts the whole "Yuugo hates Shun"-storyline. The next new chapter is about Fey, the new earth dragon character the novels introduced. She's getting to old for a baby dragon and needs to evolve soon, so Shun sends her off with Anna to powerlevel her. When she comes back a few days later, she's evolved to the next form. She's now "large dog" sized and has stats in the 600s (more than most humans, twice as much as Kumoko at that point in the novel). The "Yuugo attacks Shun at the training excursion"-chapter happens without any changes except for an ominous "but we didn't notice the monster following us" at the end. That monster is the earth drake Yuugo's henchmen brought with them. In the web novel, that drake just remained in its cage and Kumoko notes how that's kinda weird. In the novel, it broke free and attacks when Shun's group reaches the school. They manage to fight it for a while until it readies its breath attack. Shun spends skill points on the Blade of Light skill to block it, but he's being pushed back. Fey rushes in and bites the drake in the neck, which stops the breath attack, allowing Shun to defeat it. After the battle, Shun is freaking out over having killed something/fought for his life for the first time, when Fey runs up to him and tells him to appraise her. Turns out that she gained the Kin Eater title from biting the drake, which doesn't exactly improve Shun's mood, even though Fey herself doesn't mind. The webnovel chapter K1 (Katia talking to a bunch of different people) is expanded, but split up into interlude chapters spread throughout the novel. The last of those chapters has her talking with Fey and Yuuri (Hasebe-san, crazy religious girl/Saint candidate). Two pieces of information there: The Saint changes when the hero changes, even if the old Saint survives (she died in the web novel, but maybe they're planning to have her survive in the novel?) and the demon race looks exactly like the humans (something the web novel only revealed later in the Blood-chapters. The chapter ends with them discussing rumors that the demon race has been gearing up for war recently. They wonder if the current demon lord is one of their classmates, since it appeared around the same time as they all were born, but dismiss the idea because "You aren't just born as a demon lord so you'd have to level like crazy as a baby". The chapter end's and we're back to Kumoko fighting the fire drake, which gains her the Demon Lord skill  (not the title).The final chapters are, in order, the demon lords pre-war strategy meeting, Julius preparing for the war and finally Shun gaining the Hero title, skipping the main chapters of the Human-Demon war for now. The novel ends with D watching Kumoko (and laughing at the part where she set herself on fire).
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Apr 21, 2016 21:45
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Interesting to think that Meng Hao has almost reached the same level of Patriarch Reliance (or at least, the human clone of Patriarch Reliance). Spirit Severing seemed so incredibly far away before, and now he's knocking on its doorstep. It's just Dao Seeking, which we've heard basically nothing about, and Immortal Ascension left, right?
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Apr 22, 2016 16:35
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The Lord of Hats posted:Interesting to think that Meng Hao has almost reached the same level of Patriarch Reliance (or at least, the human clone of Patriarch Reliance). Spirit Severing seemed so incredibly far away before, and now he's knocking on its doorstep. It's just Dao Seeking, which we've heard basically nothing about, and Immortal Ascension left, right?
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Apr 22, 2016 17:25
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Algid posted:Remember how he was thinking about how the sect was named 'Immortal Demons Sect', and if that meant everyone was an immortal? Of course the power levels don't end there. Just a few chapters ago, Ke Yunhai described that the realms go Mortal, Immortal, Ancient, Dao. Or something along those lines. I assume within each level there are power distinctions as well
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Apr 22, 2016 18:42
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I like how after most of the series Meng Hao has been seeking enlightenment, treasures and spells but now he is so swole that none of that stuff matters much.
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Apr 22, 2016 18:48
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Algid posted:Remember how he was thinking about how the sect was named 'Immortal Demons Sect', and if that meant everyone was an immortal? Of course the power levels don't end there. Oh, I know that that's only going to be the beginning, but he's still closing in (sort of) on the top of the current power scale. He's come a long way!
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Apr 22, 2016 19:50
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Also, Meng Hao is totally a muscle wizard now. Huyan is sending out crazy ancient spells and warping reality but Meng Hao just kinda flexes in response.
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Apr 22, 2016 20:00
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For perspective these are the power levels in ISSTH that are relatively up to date with the full version: Mortal Stages:
Immortal Stages:
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Apr 22, 2016 20:41
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I like how when the Ji clan were serving Lord Li, they had a status and power that was far superior to the Demon Immortal Sect, but after betraying Li and taking over the Ninth Mountain they've been reduced to the point where they have to send their best and brightest to scavenge the ruins of the Demon Immortal Sect. I'm guessing that wasn't a part of the original plan.
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Apr 22, 2016 21:31
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I'm really digging Meng Hao's current power level. It's just the right amount of total bullshit.
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Apr 22, 2016 21:38
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Avulsion posted:I like how when the Ji clan were serving Lord Li, they had a status and power that was far superior to the Demon Immortal Sect, but after betraying Li and taking over the Ninth Mountain they've been reduced to the point where they have to send their best and brightest to scavenge the ruins of the Demon Immortal Sect. I'm guessing that wasn't a part of the original plan. That Ji clan on Southern Haven is probably just a branch of the main Ji clan
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Apr 22, 2016 22:03
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The power levels in ISSTH is just as ridiculous as in Coiling Dragon, even up to 'Ascension' which is literally becoming a God and making your own universe. To put things in proper perspective, Meng Hao basically isn't even a saint yet at this point. edit: Just realized you guys probably got to the point where he spent half a chapter powering up and growing a hair boner via flexing. Thankfully that only happened the once. Algid fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Apr 22, 2016 |
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Apr 22, 2016 23:04
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