v0.8.0 — Beyond the Peak

Void Refinement Peak was the end of the road. It is now a door. Ascension is the longest, hardest ritual in the mod, and the cultivator who survives it chooses whether to stand at the summit or come back down and climb again stronger.

Around it, the world stopped being a backdrop: Secret Realms open and seal on their own, Celestial Events sweep the whole server, alchemy became a craft with a mastery ladder of its own, two fully mastered arts can be fused into one that did not exist before, a sect turned into an economy with a pavilion and a tournament bracket, and a cultivator can finally take a disciple — or lose their mind to Qi Deviation for trying to do too much too fast.

Ascension (飛升) — the trial past the last realm

• At Void Refinement Peak, /ascend opens the capstone. It runs fifteen minutes at default tuning, and it will not progress on ordinary ground: the chunk must hold 4,500 Qi, which in practice means a dragon vein or nothing.
• Crimson tribulation lightning falls every twenty seconds, each bolt heavier than the last — so an attempt begins survivable and ends fearsome — and unlike a realm breakthrough it is lethal by default. Walking away, or dying, costs a stage and an hour before you may stand up again.
• The sky over an attempt turns crimson for 160 blocks in every direction, so a whole valley knows what is happening in it. The server is told when someone begins and when someone lands it, and the cultivator who does keeps a permanent title for it.
• Then the real choice: stay at the summit, or /ascend prestige — go back to Body Refinement with 0 Qi and keep everything that is not Qi: skill tree, arts, Dao, sect, equipment, titles. Every completed loop permanently grants +4% Qi from every source and eases every timed ritual by 2%, stacking ten times, and each loop is deliberately longer than the one before it. Prestige is off by default — it is the server owner's call whether their world has one.

Secret Realms (祕境) — places that open, and then close

• A realm opens on its own every few hours, somewhere near where the population actually is — or the moment somebody uses a Realm Map Fragment, which any creature anywhere may drop. It is announced server-wide and pinned on the world map, because a realm is meant to be found, not stumbled into.
• Inside is genuinely better ground, seven chunks across: ×1.75 on every Qi you draw, stacking on top of the vein's own tier, your formations, your abode and your sect hall rather than replacing any of them.
• It stocks itself with the rarer half of the tameable spirit beasts, and a kill landed inside carries an extra roll for a technique manual on top of the ordinary table — the reason to make the trip rather than hunt the same species at home.
• Its own violet sky, and its own rules: Foundation Establishment to set foot inside, and nobody mines, builds or opens a chest on preserved ground.
• It seals after forty-five minutes — but nobody is punished for a fight running long. You are warned a minute out, and for thirty seconds after the barrier falls stragglers are walked to the boundary rather than yanked out of where they were standing.

Celestial Events (天象) — the sky keeps its own schedule

• One event runs at a time, chosen at random after a quiet interval, each with a sky of its own. /celestial tells you what is overhead and how long is left.
• Spirit Tide (灵潮) — every Spirit Vein on the server refills faster at once. A tide lifts every meditation spot, not a favored few.
• Meteor Shower (流星) — some of the chunks a cultivator meditates in turn out to hold a fallen meteor, and their vein is lifted to a far richer tier for as long as the shower lasts, settling back to what it truly was afterward. Nothing is permanently rewritten, and a site nobody visits never manifests at all.
• Blood Moon (血月) — a cultivator on the Devil path strikes harder and one on the Righteous path strikes weaker, in every fight, not only against each other.
• It is an open registry: an add-on can hang a fourth phenomenon off the same scheduler and sky. See Registries.

The Pill Cauldron (丹道) and Spirit Fields (灵田)

• Alchemy stopped being a recipe and became a craft. Place a Pill Cauldron and refine beside it: the ritual drains your Qi for as long as it runs, spends its herbs the moment it starts, and can fail — or botch outright and take the explosion with it.
• The old recipe is gone. A pill used to be two Spirit Cores at a workbench; it is no longer craftable at a bench at all. Pills you already have keep working exactly as they did — they simply carry no grade, and count as the plain version they always were.
• Every pill now comes out at a grade — low, mid, high, or perfect — rolled from the quality of the herbs that went in and the alchemist's own skill. The grade is what the pill is worth: longer duration, or more charges banked.
• Alchemy mastery is a ladder of its own, climbed only by refining and entirely separate from your realm — and it feeds straight back into the grades you roll, so a career alchemist genuinely makes better pills than a cultivator who owns a cauldron.
• Spirit Herbs grow. Plant a Spirit Field plot in your Cave Abode and it yields every real-world hour whether you are online or not — faster and finer on a rich or dragon vein, and better still under a Qi-Gathering formation, which now lifts quality and not only yield.

Master and Disciple (師徒), and Qi Deviation (走火入魔)

• A higher-realm cultivator may formally take on a disciple — offered and accepted, never imposed, with a required gap in realms and a cap on how many one master may hold. Meditating together lifts both of you, a master can teach an art directly, and a disciple's breakthrough pays the person who got them there.
• Losing your composure in a Heart-Devil Trial now leaves something behind. For fifteen minutes your meditation yields a third less, and the next inner demon presses half again as hard — an unstable cultivator inviting more instability.
• Three ways out, and none of them is helpless: wait (the clock runs while you are logged off), drink a Clear-Mind Pill, or meditate beside someone bonded to you — a spouse, your master, your disciple — which burns it away three times as fast. /cultivation deviation tells you where you stand.

Technique Fusion (合道) — what mastery is finally for

• Two arts carried to the top rung of the mastery ladder can be fused into a single stronger art that did not exist before. Three recipes ship: Thunderous Blade Requiem (Sword Qi Slash + Nine Heavens Thunder Palm), Diamond Sovereign Ward (Iron Body + Qi Barrier), and Vital Ascendance (Healing Pulse + Qi Infusion).
• Fusion consumes both parents. 合道 is the two becoming one — keeping all three would make it a free extra art rather than a decision. (Per-recipe switch for owners who want the generous version.)
• It asks for a realm above the higher parent, a one-time Qi cost, and a cooldown, and it can fizzle — but a failure only ever costs the Qi and the wait. Nothing you already hold is ever taken by a failed fusion.
• A fused art is a real technique — keybindable, listed, with its own five-rung mastery ladder starting fresh. And it is the only way to get one: enlightenment and breakthrough gifts can never hand you a fused art. /cultivation technique fusions lists every recipe and how close you are.

A sect is an economy now

• Contribution points are a member's standing, earned three ways: /sect donate hands over Spirit Stones, taking a rival's vein in a war pays every member of the winning sect, and the mission board pays whoever finishes a task.
• The Pavilion. Each sect stocks its own shelf — items, or the one-time right to inscribe an art into the hall — at prices and ranks its own leadership sets. Nobody is handed a server-wide shop list.
• The mission board. Repeatable tasks — gather an item, hunt spirit beasts, put in meditation hours, win duels — each with its own target, reward and rank gate, all editable by the server owner.
• Tournaments. /sect tournament builds a single-elimination bracket out of whoever is online right then and runs every match as a real duel with nothing wagered but standing, announced round by round, ending in contribution and a title for the champion.
• Four rungs instead of two: Outer Disciple, Inner Disciple, Elder, Patriarch. Any manager can move somebody through the lower two; only the leader makes or unmakes an Elder, because an Elder who could appoint Elders could hand out their own authority.
• Every sect wears a tag — three to six characters, chosen when it is founded, unique on the server, changeable by the leader with /sect abbr, and shown everywhere the sect's name appears.

And the smaller things

• A spirit beast that flies is now a real alternative to Sword Flying. Ride a flight-capable species that has reached its mount realm and you actually fly it — with a new vulture mount to fly.
• Tribulations bring their own weather. Night falls over the ritual ground and a cloud deck rolls in, colored by how far the cultivator has climbed — white, blue, then gold — with the lightning colored to match. Everyone within about 96 blocks shares the storm; the rest of the server keeps its own sky and its own time of day.
• Open your inventory and your whole cultivation sheet stands beside it — realm, stage, Qi, breakthrough readiness, body tempering and what your armor is costing you, Dao and Yin-Yang, race, title, sect and rank, arts, Spirit Sense, bound beast. Rows fold away when there is nothing in them, so a new cultivator sees six lines and a sect Elder sees the full page.
• Purchases reach the buyer in game. Anything bought from the Treasure Pavilion at xianxia.dev/store now applies on any server running Cultivation, and brings its own cosmetic title with it. The mod reads a public list of account IDs and nothing about your server is ever sent; a refund revokes itself at the next check. Switch it off in one line.
• /cultivation admin bypass — a session-only toggle lifting requirements, costs and cooldowns so staff can test a thing without a week of climbing. It deliberately never lifts a system the owner switched off: a rule about the player is waived, a decision about the server is not.
• Two new permission nodes: cultivation.ascend and cultivation.celestial.
• All five languages ship complete. English, Simplified Chinese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian and Ukrainian all carry every line of this release — the roadmap item about keeping the last three current is done rather than deferred.

What this means for an existing save

• Realm, Qi, Dao, arts, mastery, sects, abodes, beasts and treasures are all untouched. Nothing is reset and nothing is taken back this release.
• A sect founded before v0.8.0 simply has no tag until its leader sets one, and every plain member comes back as an Outer Disciple — exactly the standing they already had.
• Ascension prestige is off by default. Turn it on deliberately, or leave the capstone as a one-time summit with a title on it.
• Pills are no longer crafted at a workbench. The two-Spirit-Core recipe is gone and the Pill Cauldron replaced it. Pills already in a chest keep the exact effect they always had — they read as the plain grade, so nothing you own got weaker either.
• Six new config files appear beside the existing ones — Celestial, Secret Realm, Master-Disciple, Qi Deviation, Tournament and Web Store — each written with working defaults and its own in-file documentation. Web Store and the new Ascension block are editable live from /cultivation admin; the other five are JSON-only for now. See Config.