Big update here, highly recommend starting a new soul to see all the new content. Your old souls are safe still.
Something on the stairs
Someone has been waiting at the top of the tower for a very long time, and he has started coming down.
You will know his work when you see it, and you will not see him until he decides you should. The tower has a story now that runs its whole height, from the low bands to the last door before the summit, and it ends with a question the door has always asked and nobody has ever answered well. Climb, and keep your guard up. Moye may be quieter than usual on some floors. She has her reasons.
The Quartermaster's Board.
Sect rank finally buys something. Every duty you fell for your hall now banks merits alongside contribution, and each waystation's sect hall posts a quartermaster's board: two offers a stop, better ones the higher your robes hang. Rations and salves for an Outer Disciple, an elder's pointer or a war-chest draw for Inner, furnace pills and technique rubbings at Core, and the Founder's Cask if you wear an Elder's robes. Spending merits never touches your rank. Members from before this update wake with back pay, half of everything they ever contributed, so nobody meets the new board broke.
The waystations themselves have grown personalities. Each stop now keeps a specialty: a working forge where sparring teaches more and a body cultivator tempers at half the blood, a mountain shrine where meditation reaches deeper, a market day that puts a fourth ware on the peddler's stall, or a tea house where standing a round costs half and warms twice.
Bonds go deeper too. People who trust you offer what strangers never see: sworn friends confide what sits under their fear, allies show you the flaws in their own forms, friends stay past the second pot, and a respected rival will hold a truce to the next gate or wager the true reason they climb. And when your sect is at war, the climb finally shows it: refugees on the roads, supply relays short of backs, a parley table missing a third signature, a deserter who has read the manuals, war prices, a press gang, and a dispatch tube that must not stop moving.
And wars end now. Serve your hall while a war burns; every duty counts and the enemy champion counts double. When the era turns the war settles: victory opens the war chest for those who served, a hard-fought defeat still pays the survivor's share, and your hall keeps a war record old enemies remember when the wheel matches you again. A war you never lifted a hand in leaves no record.
Your hall has a face now. At Inner Disciple an elder takes you on: your master, who teaches priced lessons, keeps the roll of every student the hall has spent, and speaks his mind by what he knows of you. Sit with him at the fire and he has nine conversations' worth of the hall in him. At Core rank, if he gives his word for you, the quartermaster will sell you the hall's own manual, merits the whole price: a technique nobody outside its robes can hold, one per hall, sixteen in all. The Iron Sword's clean-through cut, the Ninth Draught that mends, the Sentence of Thunder, Rain on the Peak. The master hands the book over in the hall's own words.
And for those who swear to nobody: the Wandering Hermit. He sits at every waystation fire, but only the unsworn ever find him there. He teaches for spirit stones, names a fair price and rounds it down, gives corrections away free when you were there anyway, and if you earn his friendship he will tell you why a cultivator of his realm never took an oath. The unsworn road finally has a teacher of its own, and a title at the end of it.
Moye has grown into the bond.
Twenty-five new lines, including a whole new register for the deepest bond tier, reactions to every verdict she witnesses, and something to say at the killing blow she turns aside.
The record remembers all of it.
Settled wars listed in the Records hall, deeds for the banner carried back and the hall's method bought, and new lifetime goals to chase.
Smaller things
About seventy new encounters spread across the mortal tower's most-repeated moments, two new habit moments for each of the newer companions, and the Stats panel's lightning row now always shows a number (when your blade cannot cut the storm's guard at all, it reads the honest one).
Character creation opens all the way. Talents, spiritual root, meridians, arts, and Heaven's Trials are on the creation screen from your first soul. The old first-forge gate that hid them until after a climb is gone. Rebirth lets you pick innate talents too.
Fixes and smaller things. The Swordmaster's Ledger curios have their seven icons in the Compendium instead of letter tiles. Plus the usual round of mendings.
Hope you enjoy this update! Let me know if there are any issues in the discussion board, and thanks for playing!