v0.9.0 — Beyond the Peak, Extended

Ascension shipped in v0.8.0. Everything below is what got built up around it since: Talismans, a spirit that can wake inside your own blade, sworn Oaths between cultivators, beasts that breed true, and a player-run Auction House — five real systems, not add-ons to existing ones. Ascension, Celestial Events, the Beast Tide siege, and your sect's Spirit Arrays all traded their command-only interface for a themed dashboard. Elemental Dao is now Spiritual Root, with a set of rarer mutant roots a server can allow, and Yin-Yang, Path and Karma moved to a new page, The Way — which also introduces two tracks that never existed before: Heavenly Dao, the heavens' own standing meter, and Personal Daos — Sword, Slaughter and Space — deliberate Ways a cultivator manifests through practice. And past all of that: a bonded beast you can now send off on its own Expedition, a Journal that writes itself as you climb, a rotating Bounty Board of solo contracts, and Spirit Fields that finally answer the weather overhead — plus two real bugs closed, including one that could disconnect a player outright.

Talismans (符箓), Heavenly Oath (天道誓言), and Weapon Spirit (器灵)

• Talismans. Place a Talisman Desk and inscribe one of six — Explosive, Flying-Sword-Recall, Barrier, a temporary Formation Flag, and two that turn a hostile's attention aside, Breath-Concealing and Concealing (the latter makes other players lose track of you, not invisibility). A 60-second ritual, real Qi drained the whole time, and a real chance to botch. Grade is rolled from your own 50-level talisman mastery and your elemental affinity — the one roll in the mod where your Dao genuinely sweetens the result.
• Heavenly Oath. Swear a binding pact with another cultivator — Non-Aggression, Sect Loyalty, a wagered Duel, or Master-Teach — offered and accepted, never imposed, with a clean no-penalty mutual dissolve if you both agree. Break one instead and it costs 15% of your current Qi plus a 30-minute Dao-Heart Flaw that blocks breakthroughs outright while it lasts — cured over time, or three times as fast meditating beside the person you swore to.
• Weapon Spirit. A well-refined Life-Bound Treasure — tier 5 or higher, 30 kills landed by its own bonded owner — can wake a spirit inside it that climbs a 5-level ladder of its own, fed by nurturing it with your banked Qi, and speaks as it grows. At its peak it lends you a bonded technique.

Beast Breeding and Expeditions

• Breed your spirit beasts. Two bonded beasts, one shared Beast Pen, an offer and an accept — a successful ritual hands you an egg rather than a beast outright, incubating for a random 4 to 12 hours, entirely offline-safe. The offspring's species and element lean toward its parents rather than roll blind.
• Send your bonded beast on its own Expedition — Forage the Misty Vale (2 hours), Hunt the Ridge (4 hours), or Delve the Old Cavern (8 hours), away from you the whole time and unavailable to summon, mount or feed until it returns. Rewards scale on the level it left at, and nothing is lost to a full inventory — whatever cannot fit stays claimable.

The Auction House

• Trade at a player-run Auction House — list an item stack for a Spirit Stone price, anyone else buys it, cancel your own listing any time, and nothing is ever destroyed: a sold, cancelled, or 72-hour-expired listing always becomes a claimable parcel. Off by default — a server owner turns it on.

Spiritual Root, and The Way (天道)

• Elemental Dao is now Spiritual Root. Same Five Phases, same counter cycle, same switching and drift — reframed terminology, not a mechanic change. The five shadow-ring elements are now explicitly mutant roots, and off by default: Dao-Mutant-Roots-Enabled gates whether they can be chosen or drifted into at all. A cultivator who already walked one before it was disabled is drawn back, once, to its fixed classic counterpart.
• Yin-Yang, Path and Karma moved to a new page, The Way — nothing about how any of the three works changed, only where you find them, alongside two tracks that are genuinely new:
• Heavenly Dao (天道) — a single meter, grown by productive meditation, surviving a tribulation, an advancement, or a breakthrough. Five ranks from Unheeding to Heaven-Aligned, and a fuller meter softens tribulations, speeds Qi gain, and improves your odds at Dao Enlightenment (悟道) — a rare bonus-roll moment that can hand you comprehension and Qi on top of whatever you were already earning.
• Personal Daos — an open registry, three built in: Sword Dao, grown by fighting with a blade; Slaughter Dao, grown by kills, with a stacking streak; and Space Dao, grown by entering Secret Realms and hidden until found. Comprehend one far enough and it manifests, granting a real payoff while active — up to 2 manifested at once by default, with a global cooldown on taking up a new Way once you set one aside.

Four dashboards, and Beast Tide (兽潮)

• /ascend, /celestial, /tide and Formations all traded chat-only commands for a themed page this release. Nothing about how any of them works changed underneath — the same gates, the same checks, the same events fire — only how you see and use it. Formations gained a genuinely new capability alongside the reskin: remote disperse, taking down an array without a trip back to the chunk it sits in.
• Beast Tide joined the celestial system, registered alongside Spirit Tide, Meteor Shower and Blood Moon. It takes the celestial slot for its warning sky, but it runs on its own timer and the scheduler never picks it. It is a siege of five waves against a sect hall or Cave Abode's beacon, capped by a scaled-up beast lord, non-lethal by default and won or lost on the beacon's integrity.

The Cultivation Journal and the Bounty Board

• The Cultivation Journal — a new article in the in-game Codex, not a new page, that writes itself as you play: every breakthrough, every tribulation survived, every technique mastered, every beast bound, logged automatically with the totals that matter read back to you.
• The Bounty Board — a rotating set of solo contracts, independent of your sect and the Auction House: hunt a named creature, retrieve a named item, or survive tribulation strikes during a real breakthrough, for Qi, a pill, or a manual. A contract you have already made progress on is never lost to a rotation.

Spirit Fields answer the sky

• Three new elemental herb varieties join the original Spirit Herb — Sunpetal (Fire), Mistcap (Water), and Bramblewort (Wood) — each favoring a different pill effect, and each growing faster and finer when the weather overhead actually matches its element.

Fixes

• A Secret Realm or Immortal Court announcement now names the actual world coordinates of where it opened, not a chunk index — the number you were shown is finally one you can walk to.
• Closed a bug where a tribulation's storm sky could, in rare circumstances, never lift — a relog was the only fix. The restore now survives a disabled system, a config toggle mid-storm, and a plugin reload, and force-repeats itself for a few extra seconds after every tribulation just in case.

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.
• Twelve new config files appear beside the existing ones — Talisman, Oath, Weapon Spirit, Breeding, Tide, Market, Bounty and Dao Comprehension among them — each written with working defaults and its own in-file documentation. See Config.
• The Auction House ships off. Market-Auction-Enabled defaults to false — a server owner switches it on deliberately.
• Mutant roots ship off, too. Dao-Mutant-Roots-Enabled defaults to false. If your world already had cultivators walking a mutant root from before this release, each one is drawn back to its classic counterpart automatically, once, the next time they log in — no Qi cost, no cooldown spent.
• A new permission node, cultivation.bounty, gates the top-level /bounty command.