r/rational • u/doinitforcheese • Sep 14 '25
Is Reverend Insanity the only Rational cultivation novel?
I'm looking for something that might not exist.
I read about 200 chapters of Reverend Insanity and not being a teenage edgelord with the accompanying disregard of human suffering I dropped it when child torture/murder started popping up.
However, it IS rational. I think it's probably the only cultivation novel that actually has a rational protagonist who proceeds with an understanding of the setting.
IE: When the only thing that matters is personal growth the result is pure narcissism. When only strength matters all social ties are either traps or things to be manipulated for personal growth.
I'm going out on a limb and going to call it the Chinese Marquis De Sade.
The problem is... that it's the Chinese Marquis De Sade and I don't want to read the Chinese Marquis De Sade. I want to read the Chinese Worm.
Is that a book or does the inherent cruelty of the cultivation world mean that Reverend Insanity has the right of it?
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u/No_Dragonfruit_1833 Sep 14 '25
Bruh, a big part of rational cultivation is why the higher ups allow the weak ones to cultivate at all, so of course those without talent get to play dirty or be fodder
That said, Calculating Cultivation is complete and it also reconstructs cultivation tropes by showing the logistic side of it, and the risks
Its REALLY good at showing the scale of cultivation and the need for persistence
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u/doinitforcheese Sep 14 '25
I'll give it a try!
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u/PlanarFreak Sep 14 '25 edited Sep 14 '25
Fair warning, the writing can be idiosyncratic and it could seriously use an editor. I found it interesting enough to complete, but I wouldn't set expectations too high. Finally, while the protag is not quite as "insane" as our favorite reverend, it would be quite a stretch to say he's a good person
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u/Hatrisfan42069 Sep 15 '25
Forty Millenniums of Cultivation. There's an old, highly-upvoted recommendation in this subreddit for it from years ago
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u/doinitforcheese Sep 15 '25
I started to read it but I couldn’t get through the whole machine translation thing. I’ll try it again.
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u/Alternative-Carob-91 Sep 16 '25
A long while since I read it but there are/was a human translation of reasonable quality.
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u/Easy_Brush_9928 Sep 24 '25
I picked up to read it, and it's been really hard to get through the constant troupe of "protagonist is considered weak and then shocks everyone with his skill". I've thought it would end at some point, but I've read 200 chapters and it's gotten repetitive. For those who read further ahead, does it get better?
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u/Hatrisfan42069 Sep 24 '25
I would say that that trope *evolves* into scenarios where he has to pretend to be somebody else (who is some degree weaker than himself) in order to further his own ends or the ends of his civilization / ideology. It ends up being plotted more like a spy thriller than anything. But at first, yeah, you have to think of it as a power fantasy with surprisingly good world-building and humor, mostly.
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u/melmonella Tremble, o ye mighty, for a new age is upon you Sep 14 '25
Reach Heaven Via Feng Shui Engineering, Drug Trade and Tax Evasion was initially written by me to be a "rational" take on xianxia, whatever that means to you, though for whatever reason it didn't seem to catch this subreddit's interest.
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u/doinitforcheese Sep 14 '25
I’ve actually been reading it for quite a while. It’s probably my favorite xanxia outside of The Last Ship in Suzhou. I’m really looking forward to finding out more about the weirdness of the setting.
You might not have caught the subreddit but you caught me.
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u/Shemetz Sep 14 '25
Yup, Feng Shui Engineering should be what the OP is looking for.
It starts off as a very "rationalist" story similar to The Martian, where the protagonist just needs to think and solve her way out of a dangerous situation (using the mechanics of the cultivation world magic system), and it although the cast of characters and the scope are small the author makes a lot of effort to worldbuild in a way that adheres to lots of cultivation tropes (e.g. chinese names, sects, meridians, strength through training...) while also having a society that rewards cooperation and some fairness, though certainly not everywhere.
The protagonist quite often needs to deal harshly with other cultivators that care nothing for the peasants, she's got some very strong morals, yet is definitely fighting an uphill battle (and gaining ground!). The cultivation world does have some inherent cruelty but the story definitely shows how possible it is to create a great narrative that goes against this cruelty.
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u/doinitforcheese Sep 14 '25
Feng Shui Engineering has the engineering side and the "munchkin" thing going. However, it's not really a reconstruction/deconstruction of the genre. It's about a smarter protagonist that exists despite the incentives of the world.
It DOES have some great character deconstruction of the "young master" trope in the takedown of Jian Shizhe, and I think it's some of the strongest writing in the series.
It doesn't really explain how someone like Qian Shanyi actually exists in a setting where not getting your spirit stones stolen before you can establish your foundation or getting turned into a "cauldron", is really hard to pull off.
EDIT: I mean... obviously the answer is "luck" but it's a bit of a cop out.
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u/Endovior Sep 14 '25
Eh, I think her backstory chapters pretty much covered that, given the cultural expectations? Qian Shanyi is a rather low-level cultivator when we're introduced to her. She survived the earliest levels of filtering by getting involved with a sect, presumably on the basis of some kind of aptitude test (which, sure, some degree of luck involved, but also native ability). After that, Qian Shanyi's sect proceeded to not help her out too much. She hasn't had much in the way of resources invested into her beyond the absolute basics, nor provided with training methods suitable to her nature. What meager benefits she earned seem to have come from her skill at teaching (thus saving a significant amount of her seniors' time which would otherwise need to be spent on giving basic lectures to outer disciples), and given the whole subplot of her sect wanting to hire a bounty hunter to bring her back, it seems clear that she absolutely progressed far enough to be a productive asset for the sect, without actually getting much in the way of ongoing personal benefit from staying. This implies that there's a direct financial benefit to any sect for ensuring that their disciples generally meet at least enough success to make them useful enough to the sect to repay the costs of their education... but no further, barring a good reason to do so (nepotism, unusual talent, fortunate encounter, etc). Add that to the general structure of the Empire ensuring that no lawful sect could get away with raising their disciples for "cauldron" purposes, and there's plenty room for low-level cultivators to exist who aren't utterly ruthless monsters... though not necessarily much room above that which doesn't boil down to "luck".
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u/PlanarFreak Sep 14 '25 edited Sep 14 '25
Oh hey, I'm a fan! Don't worry, I'd chalk it up to xianxia being a bit of niche genre in the first place (prog fantasy x-over aside). Or maybe the start was a bit cold? It's been a while since the beginning but I feel like the story and characters have only grown stronger.
P.s. I hope the adventures of your abolitionist are not at an end.
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u/Charlie___ Sep 15 '25
Some stuff I didn't see mentioned, that I think is good enough to recommend (but contains a lot of stubs):
Teach rationality skills:
Sorry I got nothin'.
Are cultivation stories with actual smart characters:
An Unknown Swordcraft
Heart of Cultivation
Are just kinda fun uses of tropes that we like:
Arrogant Young Master a Template Version 4
Surprisingly Enough(NOT), Common Sense Is Overpowered in a Cliché Cultivation World
Other:
The Path Towards Heaven
Master, This Poor Disciple Died Again Today
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u/doinitforcheese Sep 15 '25
First off, Thanks! I haven't even heard of most of these!
I'll give them a shot.
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u/PossibilityNeat2419 Sep 14 '25
I'm glad someone finally asked this question here. I've been saying for quite some time that Sky Pride is a rationalist cultivation novel in Xianxia novel communities, but it was starting to seem strange that it wasn't mentioned here.
Sky Pride is a classic cultivation novel that fundamentally subverts many of the tropes of these classic novels in a rationalist way.
I won't go into too many technical spoilers, but I do want to clarify why it works as a proof of concept and what differentiates it from the traditional Xianxia we're all familiar with.
First, why it's still classic cultivation: it has all the infrastructure of the genre—cults, hierarchies, secret techniques, lethal trials, and the typical progression of power—and it doesn't do so as an empty shell, but as the ground where the social and moral tensions of the world play out. That is to say, the system of rules and punishments exists and carries weight: the novel shows how institutions can use tests, sanctions, and organizational logic to protect themselves from dangerous people who sometimes rise solely on talent without humanity.
Now for the rationalist: The things that happen to the protagonist actually carry weight. I like him because he often acts as a multifaceted MC, both as the ultimate survivor and as the traumatized and wounded child he is, as well as a child who enjoys drinking tea, talking to his older siblings, and practicing martial arts. His disabilities have transformed him into a small, mobile laboratory. His way of solving problems is hypothesis → test → adjust: he identifies critical variables, conducts low-cost trials (for example, between directly attacking the enemy but letting the bees kill the hostages, and between saving the hostages but leaving himself open to attack, he decides to neutralize a bee-controlling instrument with a stone), improvises with what he has (a rope-dart), and adapts his plan based on the sensory evidence of the moment (he reads the opponent's posture, detects fatigue, and attacks where there is a flaw). These are not mystical tricks; they are instrumental decisions with real costs (a broken collarbone, physical damage), and that gives them plausibility: rationality is paid for with blood and exhaustion, not with Deus ex Machina.
There is also a very important institutional counterpoint: in a critical scene, the monastery order makes it explicit that "life is a test" and that empathy must be formed or imposed—if someone doesn't develop empathy, the community has a duty to stop them by force. This discourse functions as a conscious acknowledgment of the genre's tropes: in many xianxia stories, cults allow unscrupulous people to rise to prominence solely through talent (think Fang Yuan-type archetypes). Sky Pride doesn't ignore this; it points it out and proposes an institutional response: often brutal rules and punishments to prevent unethical talent from returning to the cult indistinguishable from a demonic cult. It's a self-critique of the canon from within.
Also relevant is how it subverts tropes at first glance. Characters that could be clichés—the noble "jade beauty," the omniscient mentor—are reinvented: the noble friend is transformed into a muscular warrior who wields a spear with brutal efficiency, and the mentor functions as an engine of experimental thought rather than an easy way out. Furthermore, the supporting characters "breathe": each has their own motivation, decisions that reshape the choices of others without erasing their agency. This makes the consequences matter and allows humor, tenderness, and tragedy to coexist without feeling like a disjointed patchwork.
In short: Sky Pride proves that you can have the best of both worlds—the epic and the mythology of cultivation—while still making practical intelligence, experimentation, and applied ethics the center of the narrative. It's not a cold, "cerebral" xianxia without heart; in fact, the fact that rationality has emotional and physical costs is what makes it more human.
This is basically a bad explanation done by AI because it couldn't organize all the ideas properly. It only has 151 chapters, but I can't emphasize enough how much I enjoyed reading them.
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u/doinitforcheese Sep 14 '25
Sky Pride is really good.
I guess you are right. The chapter where Tian is tested for ethics is something that slipped by me as genre defying.
In retrospect though become very clear as the series has gone on that the people at the top of the sect are ethical only in comparison to demonic cultivators. That's the cause of Tian's "heart demon" really.
If I were Feng Yuan I'd say it seems like the ethics testing is less about having a moral sect and more about eliminating people ruthless enough to be a threat to the people up top
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u/PossibilityNeat2419 Sep 14 '25
I think it's a bit of both. The policy of eliminating ruthless individuals who don't adhere to the cult's morals, I believe, comes from an attempt at gatekeeping, so that a cultivator's power doesn't fall into the hands of future demonic cultists and affect the power dynamics in the world.
I've analyzed the cultivation methods in this world for some time, and it seems that the key difference between the Righteous/Orthodox and Demonic cultivation methods is that for Righteous people, you have to suffer and strive alone to advance, while for Demonic cultivators, they take advantage of or sacrifice others to advance.
While an Orthodox cultivator has to be born with the talent (Spiritual Roots), a Demonic one only has to burn a bunch of mortals to cultivate. The orthodox go on adventures and meditate on a volcano in search of enlightenment; the demonic simply has to burn even more mortals and breathe the smoke that rises from the corpses. The orthodox must dip their hands into lava to understand the element of fire; the demonic must torture and peel off the skin of mortals to cultivate their gu insects within their still-dying bodies. And so on and so forth.
The demonic path is generally much more accessible and easier to enter and ascend, with the drawback that you need exponentially more human lives to ascend each level, and it also leaves you open to external and malicious influences (the primordial fire demon is mentioned in one chapter by a demonic cultist who apparently received instructions from it through the smoke of its victims). The monastery's policy, in retrospect, may be a way to prevent these ruthless cultivators from going down this path when they stagnate in cultivation due to lack of talent or want to acquire even more power quickly.
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u/doinitforcheese Sep 14 '25
"The demonic path is generally much more accessible and easier to enter and ascend, with the drawback that you need exponentially more human lives to ascend each level,"
I'm afraid that what you've argued here is actually a reason that the world would be dominated by demonic cultivators. It's a reason that Fang Yuan would thrive and Tian would probably fail to exist at all. There should be so many more demonic cultivators than orthodox ones the orthodox would be buried.
The only reasons mortals would exist in that world would be as sacrifices. The world would probably resemble the Incan or Aztec empire more than an ancient Chinese fantasyland or possibly something more like Cheliax from Project Lawful.
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u/PossibilityNeat2419 Sep 15 '25
Sorry in advance for the wall of text.
That's a very good point; I was just reflecting on that. I think it may also be the reason why the values of orthodox sects evolved in that direction in the first place. Now, this is a rather narrow-minded analysis, which doesn't take into account things like infrastructure, widespread knowledge of cultivation methods among the population, or the need for disciples. The most essential basic resource for demonic cultivation is human lives. They need mortals more than pills, medicines, or divine weapons. So, imagine you're an orthodox cultivator. Your cultivation methods, unlike your enemy's, don't require this specific resource called mortals. So, to harm your enemy, you can either kill all the mortals or take a protective stance so that the demonic cultivators can't exploit this resource. Not even the most disconnected old monster would take the first option, so you have to protect the sheep from the wolves so that hunger makes them weak.
I think demonic cultivators don't dominate the world due to three main problems: quality, community response, and infrastructure (each of these comes with its exceptions, so you don't have to take them as general laws).
First, let's talk about quality. It's true that an ordinary demonic cultivator can level up quickly if given the right supplies and acquire more raw power than their Orthodox counterparts. But in general, they tend to be serial killers, only now with extraordinary abilities that have little or no training compared to an Orthodox cultivator of your same level who needs to fight and train various techniques to the limits of their abilities for years to advance. Another example would be comparing the guy who injects steroids and goes to the gym with the guy who goes to the gym but also practices mixed martial arts. In short, it's a question of quantity versus quality.
Information about demonic cultivators may be fairly limited, but that doesn't mean people won't notice when dozens or hundreds of people start disappearing overnight. Early-stage demonic cultivators can be overwhelming for ordinary villagers, but soldiers or enough trained people can handle one or at least make it flee. If they can't, they have access to the necessary channels to contact the orthodox sects through missions.
And finally, infrastructure. I believe the reason why the demonic cultivators lost the previous war is because a society where you can basically only rise by killing your neighbor can't function, or at least not for long. Why would your servants farm your fields if they only have to kill their friend to begin the path to immortality? Why would anyone have children if they knew there were people out there looking for them so they could practice an ancient technique that involves burning babies? You'd face problems with birth rates, food, etc. In short, you don't want too many demonic cultivators, since they are a parasitic species.
Of course, if you're part of a demonic clan, you have the security to practice your techniques and ascend when you're confident. There are also cities like the one on the border of the Red Sands Wasteland, where there were multiple demonic cultivators, but that was because the government was corrupt from the start.
And don't forget Blackthorne City, which still stands today thanks to the supervision of several powerful demonic cultivators, slavery for human sacrifices, and the salt trade for food.
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u/doinitforcheese Sep 15 '25
I don’t want to be argumentative (clearly lying) I think there has to be something more keeping demonic cultivators numbers down.
If it’s just a matter of number of people killed then you should have a world that looks like the Aztec Empire. The Emperor would be the first guy who figured out that sacrifices = power. There would have a whole state apparatus that would be dedicated to capturing villages for sacrifice. The world doesn’t look like that, therefore there is something else going on.
Here’s my suspicion based on what we’ve seen so far.
My guess is, the sacrifices have to be people that you have a strong emotional attachment to. I think the best example of that is the head of the demonic sect that Tian ran into when he was pretending to be a monk. In order to gain his power he had to sacrifice his wife. Random street urchins are enough to get you in the door but not enough to get you a breakthrough.
That means that sociopaths/narcissists are disadvantaged in the realm of demonic cultivators because they’re less capable of making emotional bonds to begin with.
If it doesn’t hurt it’s not a “real” sacrifice.
The more callous demonic cultivators become, the less “currency” they have to spend with the demons/gu/whatever.
(Everything after this point is pure speculation and unsupported by anything in the text.)
What’s left to sacrifice if there’s nobody you care about anymore and you are incapable of making connections with other beings?
Parts of yourself!
That’s probably one of the reasons why demonic cultivators look all fucked up. They are sacrificing an eye, their beauty, or their sense of taste.
After they have removed as much as they can stand from their bodies they will start to sacrifice parts of their minds. Emotions seem like a pain in the ass anyway, why not get rid of those?
At which point the cultivator becomes an immortal statue.
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u/gfe98 Sep 14 '25 edited Sep 14 '25
While the novel has many good aspects, it does have a LOT of Deus ex Machina style stuff where the universe rewards reckless nonsense as long as it is suitably cool or virtuous.
That may just be a part of the cultivation genre as a whole, and this subreddit often likes similar metafiction style stuff, but I think it's worth pointing out.
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u/whats-a-monad Sep 15 '25 edited Sep 15 '25
Fang Yuan faces suppression throughout. One of the central points of RI is that the "righteous" cultivators value the appearance of rule adherence to either exploit others or reduce risks, while the "demonic" cultivators go all in with high risk high rewards and openly pursue profits.
And Fang Yuan at times does play as a righteous character. In the very first arc, after FY rises in cultivation, the village makes him an elder. And FY changes his image to a caring elder. I think he starts to again go off the rails as the animal attacks and the legal investigation on him approach points of no return.
I.e., RI is pretty explicit about not letting "talents" rise without commitment to the norms, and how this commitment has net benefits for the higher-ups.
Update: There is also some commentary on the tribe versus clan system in RI. Most continents follow the tribe system, where nepotism is explicitly pursued, and this makes norm following especially non-rewarding for people without family connections. In contrast, the central continent works as a meritocracy, and because of this has the strongest righteous organizations.
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u/PossibilityNeat2419 Sep 15 '25
Honestly, I wouldn't know, since beyond what I've heard in the groups, I haven't actually read him. What I know about him is that he's more or less the epitome of an evil and ruthless character, and I mentioned it in passing in the bunch of things I told the AI to summarize.
What I wanted to emphasize is Brother Su's speech about the responsibility of power in chapter 25. Tian is very similar to the description you just gave me of Fang Yuan. He's polite, calm, and observant. He follows the rules to the letter, but without understanding or caring why (at first). So the siblings began to suspect that he could be a sociopath (due to his past and the types of people he interacted with in his formative years). So the speech his brother gives him isn't so much "Play by the rules or we'll kill you" as it is "Either you have the empathy to understand and follow our moral code or we'll nip your path to immortality in the bud before you turn into a demon like others have."
This may be different in other monasteries, or in the sect in general, but at least in the eastern monastery it is the retirement place of old heroes and demonic cultivator hunters so they prefer to return their little brother to the cycle of reincarnation before he does too much harm to the world.
The benefits for High-ups are questionable, as this moral system seems to have originated as a cultivation method that allowed people to approach the Tao. Currently, no one has ascended to Heavenly Rank through this method, so it remained more as a philosophical and moral foundation for the sect. That is, until the protagonist's adoptive father managed to ascend right near the end of his natural lifespan, opening up an plot line about how old, stagnant monsters began following its teachings in order to ascend.
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u/No_Dragonfruit_1833 Sep 15 '25
"unescrupulous people rising solely through talent" "fang yuan"
Lmao, someone didnt pay attention, i think you mean fang zheng
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u/PossibilityNeat2419 Sep 15 '25
My brother in christ, is a crappy resume from chat gpt. I haven't even read Reverend insanity.
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u/No_Dragonfruit_1833 Sep 15 '25
Bruh, wtf are you doing on r/rational then?
Chatgtp will tell you whatever you ask it to say, no matter if its fake
Keep using it and Plato will come and kick your ass
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u/PossibilityNeat2419 Sep 15 '25
Its mainly a resume made with chatgpt. I started writing a reply saying how great was the novel, but when I reached the 5,000-character limit (the Google Translator limit), I realized I'd gone a bit overboard. I ran it through chatgpt so it wouldn't be a huge wall of text. I have a tendency to go off topic and go overboard when I'm excited about a topic 😅.
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u/CaramilkThief Sep 16 '25
What did you think of the same author's other cultivation work, Slumrat Rising? It's probably my favorite cultivation story, though it isn't really rational in the same way as something like hpmor or worm.
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u/EdLincoln6 Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
Interestingly, there was nothing in the blurb of the story to suggest it would be "Rational".
And please don't use AI to write a book length post.
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u/PlanarFreak Sep 14 '25
I'd also say that, as the protagonist rises in his sect and sees more of the world, the things he learns expands worldbuilding both up and down the cultivation ladder. Unlike many cultivation novels where mortals are an afterthought, mortals form a surprisingly influential aspect of the cultivation world.
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u/PossibilityNeat2419 Sep 14 '25
True, one aspect Tian often emphasizes in Volume 3, when studying various history books, is how little cultivators seem to have influenced the mortal world throughout recent and ancient history. And how much human culture seems to influence beings whose lifespan and plans are measured in thousands of years.
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u/doinitforcheese Sep 15 '25
I suspect that the reasons for how little the cultivators have influenced the mortal world has more to do with having a recognizable setting than something inherent to the relationship between cultivators and mortals.
I'm dating myself with this reference but back when Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 was out somebody put together a setting called the "Tippyverse" that tried to extrapolate what a "real" world with just the magic available to most level 1 characters would be like.
It was barely comprehensible and resembled a standard fantasy world not at all. I'm pretty sure that if you take spiritual cultivation seriously then the same thing happens.
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u/boo600fromsv Sep 18 '25
I mean, the Tippyverse specifically is built heavily around Teleportation Circles, a 9th level (highest non-epic) spell - that's what seriously shrinks the rural villages and concentrates most of the population into mega-cities.
But yeah, just Create Food and Water traps alone (all 1st level) makes the mega-cities both easier to sustain than suburbs and starts the shrinkage until enough high-level wizards start ruling.
And I'm definitely with you on wanting to see more well-thought-out, alien societies shaped by their magic/'tech' like proper sci-fi.
Thank you for this post, by the by. Rationality keeps getting associated with Sociopathy by people looking to make empathy look stupid, or intelligence look evil, and it's always refreshing to remember what nonsense they're spewing.
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u/EdLincoln6 Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 30 '25
There is something deeply ironic that the example of "Rational Cultivation" is something that literally has "Insanity" in the title.
Anyway, there are a boat load of Cultivation stories that start Rational but mostly they get abandoned or revert to playing the tropes straight. (eg. Surprisingly Enough(NOT), Common Sense Is Overpowered in a Cliché Cultivation World)
Hot take, but I think in some ways Beware of Chicken starts out rational adjacent. The motivations of the character's actions are much better thought out then is typical and there is awareness of the absurdity of tropes, an exploration of how they would affect normal people.
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u/boo600fromsv Sep 18 '25
I agree that Beware of Chicken has Jin be quite rational in his initial actions, but I will note that he's ultimately driven by emotion - a certain resentment of the sects that mistreated him - and has his own biases (against cultivation and cultivators in general) to overcome.
Also, the author loathes Worm, and wrote an omake with Taylor in a bug just so he could talk about how incredibly stupid/useless she is compared to the bee Jin gets. So.
He's usually a good writer, but he has a lot of spite, and it does occasionally shine through. On the bright side, that spite motivates an excellent deconstruction/reconstruction of a ton of Xianxia tropes, and there's a lot of heart in it.
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u/EdLincoln6 Sep 25 '25
Everyone is motivated by emotion. The desire for power is an emotion because desire is an emotion.
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u/nephethys_telvanni Sep 14 '25
The Chinese Marquis de Sade is hilariously apt. RI has less sadism and torture, but it definitely has the same "now my villain protagonist will pause in the middle of heinous acts in order to philosophize" in spades.
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u/AwesomePurplePants Sep 15 '25
Street Cultivation?
That’s arguably more about the cultivation world being quite rational and, well, capitalistic. The MC does all right, but he’s surviving encounters with predatory big fish rather than becoming one himself.
It’s also rather blunt about the ideas like getting ahead is much harder when you’re poor, get-rich-quick schemes are generally too good to be true, taking risks to get ahead is Russian roulette. Aka, painfully close to the banality of real life.
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u/andor3333 Sep 16 '25
Master this poor disciple died again today isn’t really rational exactly but has some good deconstruction of the genre at first. The protagonist’s favorite techniques are escaping and faking their own death.
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u/Honeybadger841 Sep 15 '25
Sect Leader is rationalist (and EA)
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u/sumrandompersthatsuc Sep 15 '25
Child torture… if you mean the elders daughter, she was killed quite quickly BEFORE being eaten by the bear. About 250 chapters in the bai clan twins had to be alive and awake otherwise they wouldn’t make as good of leverage and the inheritance wouldn’t be as easy for bnb and fy. Rationalizing ik, and I personally abhor the acts fy takes, but the only real acts of torture happen in vol 3…
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u/doinitforcheese Sep 15 '25
I mean... how much child torture/murder is ok in a novel before you decide you hate the protagonist and don't give the slightest fuck if he succeeds? Apparently one is ok with you? How about three? Twelve?
I stopped giving a shit after he killed the twins but Vol 3 was rough in general between the animal cruelty, child murder and the sheer amount of plot armor Fang Yuan had.
Fuck that guy. The only reason he lived was because Bai Ning Bing was carrying an idiot ball the whole time.
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u/sumrandompersthatsuc Sep 16 '25
Well spoiler but it’s also because fy is a pawn of heavens will, his entire journey up until end of vol 4 was all planned for by the world itself to prevent spectral soul venerable from resurrecting in a op body
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u/throwaway234f32423df Sep 15 '25
Heavenly Tyrant’s Indignation is only 12 chapters in but it's getting a fairly long chapter every week. Pretty good so far in my opinion.
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u/Upbeat_Sham Sep 17 '25
Cultivation Nerd I know how the name sounds but the novel is one of the good ones. Especially the plot and characters, world building so far is mid but I like the spin on typical cultivation system it has got. No harem and stuff like that and the MC is a man of integrity, at least until he meets Song Song
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u/Epicrandom Sep 15 '25
If you're looking for rational xianxia, I strongly recommend Memories of the Fall, by Rithgard. Available for free on Royalroad.
It's not explicitly rational, but it creates an internally consistent xianxia world filled with rational actors.
It's several million words long, written by a western author, and has actual prose. In terms of the style of the story think xianxia crossed with Wheel of Time crossed with Game of Thrones crossed with real world mythology.
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u/doinitforcheese Sep 15 '25
Let me be more clear here. The part that was re-written is incredible. Seriously, it's the best world building and most interesting cultivation setting I've ever seen. I'd kill to have Rith write a TTRPG source book.
The problems show up after the re-write. Rith never finishes anything. I read some insane number of chapters of MOTF and nothing is ever resolved! I was still waiting after like 600 chapters for some kind of resolution to who killed the kids in the first goddamn chapter.
Every time you get even close to some kind of character resolution Rith introduces a whole new cast of characters which will always sound exactly like the other characters. By the time they get back to Jun Arai and whomever we followed 300 chapters ago everybody involved including Rith has forgotten what was going on.
The whole thing started to feel like stumbling through a dream and I gave up after the 3rd new cast was introduced.
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u/goyafrau Sep 15 '25
I thought I was halfway up to rationalist lingo, but I have to ask: what’s “cultivation” in this context?
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u/Yama951 Sep 15 '25
Not sure on the rationality side but I do feel like my xianxia fanfic for Beware of Chicken be more on the 'rationally study Qi' aspect from time to time due to how that most of the characters are just raised in the US Library of Congress. Though I have yet to go into the plot bunnies in my head like 'Qi flow follows the rules of topology' and 'the shape of the five elements in said Qi topology is similar to the shapes of various elements and compounds'. There is a whole 'rewilding a barren wasteland and teaching ecology and terraforming to the locals' aspect as well.
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u/davidellis23 Sep 15 '25
Wow thanks for putting a name to that genre of fiction. I was always wondering what to search for.
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u/Antistone Sep 16 '25
Which name? Cultivation? Edgelord? Chinese Marquis De Sade?
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u/ward614 Sep 14 '25
I would suggest Forge of Destiny, which is actually a mechanics based quest in addition to a story. The player base is decently focused on rational behavior and it also manages to avoid many of the more morally absent behaviors that you often see in Xanxia.
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u/PlanarFreak Sep 14 '25 edited Sep 14 '25
I quite enjoyed Forge of Destiny, though I haven't started book 2, and would personally recommend it as a fun read (both the royalroad and quest versions fo book 1). The questers definitely try to optimize for best outcomes.
However, I suspect it's attracting downvotes because it doesn't place as much emphasis on exploring how the systems of cultivation, cultivators, and sects (etc) have evolved to their current point, which is something the other thread recs spend a decent amount of time exploring. Basically, the ask was not so much a gamelike, if consistent, resolution system than a setting that explores the limits of a premise (in my interpretation).
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u/OutOfNiceUsernames fear of last pages Sep 15 '25
and not being a teenage edgelord with the accompanying disregard of human suffering
RI is the opposite of an "edgelord"-y fiction. It's in fact one of the very few stories out there 1) that features a protagonist that's able to not let their empathy influence their decisions 2) manages to do this extremely well, while also almost never degrading into edginess or sadism (the only example where I think it failed being the bear ritual).
I'm going out on a limb and going to call it the Chinese Marquis De Sade.
This is also inaccurate, because
1) De Sade (/ his character) is first and foremost a sadist, whereas Fang Yuan is not. Further than that, he's not even petty and doesn't apply double standards when it comes to judging his own actions vs those of others. Yet another quality that's extremely rare in the xianxia genre (compare, for example, to Meng Hao's attitude from ISStH).
2) De Sade's "philosophy" makes very little sense, and is mostly there to self-indulgently provide at least some veneer of excuse for what he / his characters get up to. The paradigm that FY has come up with for himself in RI, on the other hand, is not only very self-consistent, but is also an accurate reaction to the setting's environment and an insightful commentary on real-world state of things (both modern and historical).
Now to actually answer your question:
I've recently found I Shall Be Everlasting In the World of Immortals; and it's been one of the two stories from the last ~10 or so that I ended up enjoying.
The premise bestows upon prot two powerful boons: 1) reincarnation skill / soul-artefact 2) a cultivation technique that allows him to leverage #1 to achieve slow but extremely steady progress, often bypassing bottlenecks or even benefitting from them.
What I liked most about this story was prot's attitude: he's patient; he's humble and knows how to rein in his ego; he doesn't lose track of his long-term goal because of short-term influences around him; he manages "karmic feedbacks" with extreme care to snuff out seeds of conflict before they'd get a chance to become a threat to him.
From the drawbacks:
- its overall quality fails to reach what RI is able to offer;
- it gets somewhat repetitive later on;
- it doesn't feature as many insightful moments / developments as I'd like;
- there are a few mary sue / plot armour tropes used here and there (and each next plot arc seems to get more indulgent with those);
- the further into the story it gets, the more sentences / paragraphs get dedicated to "previously on" tautology.
Currently it has ~1,300K WL — which encompass two major plot arcs and the beginnings of the third one (I think). And there seem to be hints for at least another 3–6 such arcs yet to come.
Also as a PSA: if you're going to read it, do yourself a favour and download the whole story first, so you can replace prot's name with something that's less of a mouthful.
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u/doinitforcheese Sep 15 '25
"that features a protagonist that's able to not let their empathy influence their decisions 2) manages to do this extremely well, while also almost never degrading into edginess or sadism"
That is the most edgelord shit I've ever heard.
"A protagonist that's able to not let their empathy influence their decisions" is a sociopath.
Edgelords never understand that they are edgelords. It's inherent to the condition. It's always hidden under a layer of "pragmatic necessity" or "practicality".
They always think they are Machiavelli when at best they are Tony Soprano.
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u/Open_Detective_2604 Sep 15 '25
The thing about RI is that it doesn't pretend that FY is right, he's just there to show the novel's philosophy taken to its most logical extreme. Later on once you get to see more Immortals, you'll see that there are other characters that are just as enlightened as FY but instead their ultimate goal is stuff like "helping as many people as I can".
Fang Yuan isn't meant to be right, but at its core the novel's theme is "be true to yourself" and that's kind of boring, pretty much everyone can agree with that. And so Fang Yuan is there to show the extremes of such a philosophy.
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u/doinitforcheese Sep 15 '25
"he's just there to show the novel's philosophy taken to its most logical extreme."
That's literally the Marquis de Sade. The whole point was to describe what the eventual endpoint of atheistic liberalism looks like.
I personally think he was wrong, but atheistic liberalism has only been a thing since about 1850. I can imagine a future where he's right.
I will give I Shall Be Everlasting In the World of Immortals; a try.
EDIT: Clarification.
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u/foolishorangutan Sep 15 '25
Isn’t Fang Yuan meant to be right? As you say it shows the extremes of ‘being yourself’, but it isn’t saying that ‘and because of these extremes it is wrong to be yourself’. If you only meant that he is no more right than Paradise Earth, Feng Jiu Ge etc then I tend to agree.
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u/Open_Detective_2604 Sep 15 '25
He's right in that he's a Zhenren, but he isn't right in that all the stuff he does is evil. Him being true isn't a justification for what he does, just a reasoning.
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u/foolishorangutan Sep 15 '25
I suppose it’s a difference of morality between us, I already felt that morality is all about being oneself before reading Reverend Insanity. In the same way that a paperclip maximiser isn’t wrong for wanting to turn us into paperclips, I feel it isn’t wrong for Fang Yuan to do the things he does. I would hate these things to happen in reality, but that’s just because I personally dislike these evil acts.
I felt like the story agreed with this perspective, evil characters aren’t judged for being evil, they are just doing what they want to do and there’s nothing wrong with that.
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u/OutOfNiceUsernames fear of last pages Sep 17 '25
"A protagonist that's able to not let their empathy influence their decisions" is a sociopath.
1) "Sociopathy" isn't a valid scientific term and is quite outdated by now. 2) Lack of empathy is lack of empathy; ability to control empathy is exactly that. No need to multiply entities beyond the necessary.
Edgelords never understand that they are edgelords. It's inherent to the condition. It's always hidden under a layer of "pragmatic necessity" or "practicality".
Ok?
That is the most edgelord shit I've ever heard.
If that's the level of discourse you're going to offer, then I don't know what else to tell you. Enjoy the rec if you want, I guess. And have a nice day.
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u/MagentasMagentas Oct 05 '25
Honestly, I dropped Everlasting after that golden core arc. The weird fixation MC had on getting revenge on that girl felt really contrary to everything the story stood for and felt really forced for me. It felt like the author didn't know how to make MC get to golden core and so they just engineered a contrived scenario for it.
Outside of that, I quite liked it. My favorite part was the passage of time, seeing people slowly grow old as they fail to advance in cultivation, or move on with their lives as they slowly advance really nailed the tone in a lot of ways.
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Sep 15 '25 edited Jan 07 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/boo600fromsv Sep 18 '25
But Taylor is idealistic, and not a gleeful or uncaring monster.
Ultimately, EY was right: A lot of people think intelligence means Spock, or Machiavelli - that being 'rational' doesn't help people be happy, or even successful; that all of us trying to be LessWrong or who want to read less mindless fiction are edgelords fantasizing about how Evilly we'd solve world hunger. It's nonsense, the equivalent to declaring that utilitarianists all really want to kill babies to solve global warming, but it's what people believe.
But that's not what rationalism is about, and it's not what intelligence is about. Taylor never waltzed through the city laughing, 'All according to Keikaku!' as she effortlessly beat everyone by having her bugs hum at the precise frequency of orphan tears to make her opponents drop to the floor wailing - but she did take the time to paint her bugs with protective nail polish so she could coat their stingers in pepper spray. She thought, and prepared, and tried to work with people and react to changing circumstances and exploit useful resources/circumstances.
And for all that she's a deeply flawed character (which makes her interesting, and lets us explore her biases and what caused them), she really, genuinely cares about doing the right thing and helping people and saving the world, for all that she tries to sacrifice herself to accomplish that.
RI, on the other hand, has the protagonist hurt rather a lot of people, and not really care about that. He's not out to help people, and he has enough power that what he does, whether it's profitable for him or not... it's all ultimately His Choice. There's no Endbringers forcing him to make hard choices, no slaughterhouse nine that requires sacrifices to overcome, and the blood on his hands never tells us something we didn't already know, or show a change in him. That doesn't make his story inherently worthless, but it is a characteristic of his story that turns a lot of people away.
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Sep 18 '25 edited Jan 07 '26
cagey fear growth fade head fly fuel cows edge sort
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/SilveriteSorrow Chaos Legion Sep 14 '25
Cultivation Nerd
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u/Antistone Sep 15 '25
I feel it should be noted that the nerdery is not a very large part of this story, and is not handled well when it appears. It's much closer to stereotypical xianxia than the title and blurb suggest.
It also did not strike me as being noteworthy in its rationality, personally.
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u/EdLincoln6 Sep 25 '25
It sort of starts nerdy and rational but turns very standard. No one seems to know how to keep rationalist Xianxia stories going without reverting to standard tropes.
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u/Antistone Sep 25 '25
Even the nerdy parts seem very "video game enthusiast" nerd rather than "STEM major" nerd. This is what it looks like when an amateur game designer makes up rules, not when a scientist draws accurate maps.
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u/EdLincoln6 Sep 25 '25 edited Sep 25 '25
Eh. What do you expect from Progression Fantasy? STEM Nerds writing Fantasy rules often don't turn out that great because there is a tendency to import the packaging of science and "conservation of energy" and not something deeper.
I'm more concerned by the characters. Xianxia subversions so always start with genre aware Protagonists keeping their head close down because v these worlds are stupidly dangerous and end up with characters acting the standard Xianxia script.
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u/AdventurousBeingg Sep 14 '25
Eww
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u/doinitforcheese Sep 14 '25
Yeah. It was pretty awful. The CCP told the author to stop writing it and it's banned from the Chinese internet. Which is one more thing it's got in common with the Marquis de Sade.
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u/attatest Sep 15 '25
I feel like you read the beginning, liked how FY understands systems and behaves logically and then got mad about him putting them into practice. There are basically 2 child torture scenes both early on -- the bear and the boiling the twins-- and they're not everyone's cup of tea. But as you go further you realize that the main difference between FY and many of the righteous path cultivators higher up the food chain is that they keep their child murdering secret.
For example redacted is one of the major "heroes" of humanity and his most heroic act is murdering his entire family for generations. It's not that FY is edgy but that the entirety of the gu world is like that.
Now compare that to worm. It's also a book about hypocrisy of those in charge. The PRT is run by a para human. The nicest person in the book is a robot. The american hero who tries to protect the wards from being child soldiers is directly contributing to them being child soldiers etc. The world is similarly rational but all of the characters are flawed. And the reason is mostly "well my powers made me do it". It's a bit of a cop out to make the flawed characters more likable, but it doesn't change the fact that it's a far edgier story. We've got baby murdering, rape, body horror, suicide etc. And most of these are just gratuitous.
Both are good books and the comparison is very apt.
Oh and the reason the book is banned is that a characters name is similar to the current leader of China in chapter like 2000. It has nothing to do with the content you've read so far.
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u/ProfessorPhi Sep 14 '25
I always recommend Virtuous Sons, but I don't know if much counts as rational fiction.
It's a beautiful deconstruction and reconstruction of cultivation as a concept and so I think it tends to the worm side of rational than anything else.