LCD Death Mage

Discussion in 'Latest Chapter Discussion' started by lygarx, May 21, 2017.

  1. Arha

    Arha Well-Known Member

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    I thought it was confirmed in spoilers that Guduranis was a death mage but just super super secretive about it. One of those really minor detail things that came up in passing.

    Also, I wouldn't really call Googoo a master of souls either tbh. Smart guy who had the raw ability but no interest in, what, exploring non destructive possible applications of his ability? Or just straight up not good at things Van can do.
     
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  2. metazoxan

    metazoxan Well-Known Member

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    I don't know about that so called spoiler. Seems to condradict other established facts as I'm fairly certain it was established Van's power was distinctly different from Gundu's not just that he was simply using the same power in a different way.

    As for if Gundu could have learned other applications of his own powers. It's possible but it was also established by Guf-chan (Forget how to spell that labrynth god's name) that in the world they all came from it was a brutal battle of the fittest. A world where the strong ate the weak and those that rose to become the strongest of their respective races eventually gained godhood through sheer domination. Or perhaps more accurately only those that could acend to godhood could claim unquestioned dominance over their race given being a god made them immortal and thus no one else could usurp them.

    It was Gudu that changed the rules by being able to destroy the souls of god's. So the god's of the various races submitted to him immediately to avoid true death at this hands.

    What all of this means is soul destruction alone made a world that thrived on violence and domination submit to him absolutely. So he wouldn't need anything else and it's also possible he was simply too focused on brute force to consider much else. Assuming he even had the ability to learn any other skills.

    For example Alda was born with the power of the "stakes of law" to seal other gods. But unless he's just too lazy to try it doesn't seem he's evolved this power into any other applications. Meaning it's possible that god's born with unique powers simply aren't able to use it any other way. Van can evolve because he's still techncially a mortal and has a power born from Gudu's power but isn't it directly.
     
  3. Donce

    Donce Well-Known Member

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    I don't think it is really hard to create reincarnation system.
    Vida have created it, but did not had time to develop it before Alda messed up and Vida reincarnation system is running as beta version right now. Origin gods are angry on Rod because he reincarnated souls with memories and special abilities. Meaning they are only angry for few decades at most and this short amount of time may not be enough to create reincarnation system (but they may be creating it already in secret).I don't think it was written how much time Vida took to create her reincarnation system and she even had reference point for it, it would take more time and efforts for other gods in other worlds to do it. But they don't really have reason to do it. Because Rod only messed up with Origin and Lambda. And Origin, very short amount of time ago. Also, Rod have agreements with gods in worlds amount his system, because of it gods may not be allowed to create they own systems and they don't have reason to do it.
    Origin gods may be angry on Rod, but they may not be so much angry to create they own reincarnation system and they are angry only for few decades. In Lambda Vida already created reincarnation system, but did not had time to develop it because of Alda and Alda even wants to destroy it. This may also be problem in other worlds. Even if here are gods who wants and can develop they reincarnation systems other gods may oppose it. So, it is hard to know if it is hard to create one or not, but it is known here may be political problems in creating one. Because of agreement with Rod and because other gods may not want a new system. Alda is angry on Rod, but he opposes in creation of independent reincarnation system. This may be bigger problem in creating reincarnation system in all worlds than knowlage and skills needed to create one.
     
  4. sjmcc13

    sjmcc13 Well-Known Member

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    To be fair, Alda is so resistant to change that if Rod had not been set up when they awoke he would have resisted Rod's system as strongly as he resists getting rid of it.
    No he is not, and that is the problem, he is not a specialist, he just knows a bit more then those with no experience.

    Rod is the non-coder who made a script in VB that handles the "normal" inputs only. A specialist, especially one who cares about doing a good and proper job, would be using a more complex language, and use standard practices like exception handling.

    Rod is the guy who made a tool back in the 70-80's who knows how that tool works but refuses to adapt his tool to new times and insists things be forced to fit in to his area of "expertise". A lot of old code can still function, but does not cover the full scope of what it should cover.

    Rod made a tool for a task, never put in proper safeguards against things going wrong or situations he could not predict, then when he ran into such a situation his answer is not to adapt his system to handle it, which he had millenia to do, but to get rid of the sources of the "error" by any means necessary.
    He actually says the opposite, Van's actions were causing issues on a scale not seen since Vida was making her races.
    Vida's action were causing bugs.
    I would actually go with "Lazy" on that one.
    New applications would be change and Alda does not handle change until he is already reaping the benefits of it.
     
    Last edited: Nov 24, 2022
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  5. Arha

    Arha Well-Known Member

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    He's called a specialist rather frequently, is he not? Also, by definition, if you know more than anyone else you're kinda automatically a specialist.

    It does have a way of handling exceptions, btw. It gives out a warning rather than just crashing. Also, honestly, the way it attempts to fix itself honestly sounds like enough to keep things going by itself: If a soul is broken and can't go where it's supposed to, a new soul that was meant to go somewhere else automatically takes its place. Now that soul that had to go somewhere else pulls a soul that was ALSO meant to go somewhere else to fix THAT mistake, and this process repeats. In theory this should really repeat pretty much infinitely.

    Also, the problem isn't that the system is completely unable to be changed but rather that any large changes would require the system to be temporarily stopped, then Rod can fix things. Like if you play a live service game and sometimes it can be patched without taking the game down but sometimes it has to be brought down for large scale changes or to correct difficult errors. The difference here is that his system being brought down for maintenance or upgrades means nothing is born with a soul.

    It should also be noted that a soul being broken or moved to a different system here or there is not really a big deal. All it requires is is some brief personal attention. It's a bit of an annoyance, but nothing more. The only time there would be a catastrophic failure is if millions or billions of souls were being broken, which is something Rod is afraid of because he always assumes the absolute worst scenario.

    If I had to criticize Rod's system, I would probably point out the lack of a redundancy system. If the system ever DID need to be updated, there should really be a way of handling things temporarily while large changes are implemented. But since it's been administering countless worlds for billions of years, it sounds like those kinds of changes just aren't necessary, which is probably why Rod is overreacting so badly.
     
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  6. sjmcc13

    sjmcc13 Well-Known Member

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    By outsiders who have no real knowledge about that area, not be people who actually deal with reincarnation at a professional level.
    No, that is not the definition. that is not even close to the definition. If you want to argue what something is, at least look up the definition instead of making up one that is so obviously false you have to be a idiot to believe it.

    If only 1 person in a company has any experience with a language, he knows more then the rest in that area. But that alone would not be anywhere near enough to rationally call that person a specialist.

    Specialists require high skill and detailed knowledge. The way Rod acts is little more then that of a dabbler who got in early and set up a tiny kingdom of his own before the real specialists showed up.
    That is not handling them though. That is so far from it handelign them it is crazy.

    He gets a warning something is going wrong, and if he does not act on that warning and manually fix the issue then the problem will cause cascading errors that cause the system to break. that is like piece of an assembly line breaking but everything else just keeps chugging like it is fine. the user might get a notification but there are still issues with anything made before the user gets a change to shut down the line. If he has to manually fix the problem then the system is not handling them.

    You know what handling them would be, rejecting the soul fragments or isolating them in such a way so that while they are an error it does not spread through the rest of the system causing a cascading crash.
    Except that is not what he described happening. You want to know how I know that can not be how it works? Because Rod is to lazy to care if that is what would happen. If his system would fix itself with no intervention then he would not even know that there was an issue, and would not have set warnings for it.
    Not if he can add and remove worlds from his system, which it is confirmed he can BTW. He even says how being removed would not kill the world immediately.

    When testing new software systems to switch to a new one a competent admin does not shut down one to make the new, and you do not immediately switch over, you run them both side by side for a while to ensure the new one works then most the data from the old system to the new.

    Plus what sensible manufacturer has everything made in one only plant? There should be a saying about how stupid that is, mabye referring to eggs and I don't know a basket...

    Being able to move worlds pretty much solves all problems with rods system and maintenance, develop a 2nd system that handles the problems then move the worlds to the new system. Or, and this is the better option, make several systems, instead of just 1, so you can spread the load between systems and when it comes time for maintenance on one you can move that systems worlds to other systems temporarily, do the maintenance and move them back.

    There was never anything making Rod unable to do maintenance, other then Rod being lazy and only working when forced to.
     
  7. KageTokage

    KageTokage Well-Known Member

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    As people have been saying, Rodiot IS a specialist. He's a god of Reincarnation. This is literally his domain of power.

    Now, gods can expand outside of their domain and branch out to others it seems (Vida: Life -> Reincarnation). However, Rodiot is an idiot and never bothered to do so. He is the oldest and most powerful god in the entire series (that we've met so far), he's just never used his immense cosmic powers to do anything.

    At one point, he almost crushed Zurugarm (Chaos god dog) with a single finger! But after receiving the godly equivalent to a papercut, Rodiot backed off. The guy automated his system and spends his eternity doing nothing! I think it's been mentioned his divine realm is mostly just a blank white(?) space. He can't even be bothered to decorate!

    Rodiot being such an idiot and never using his great power is probably why he was never replaced by another god's reincarnation system. The dude is harmless due to laziness or whatever; he reincarnated the Bravers because he heard such a thing would help fix Lambda's minor errors. Otherwise, he seems to have almost zero self-motivation.
     
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  8. metazoxan

    metazoxan Well-Known Member

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    To be exact he does do one thing besides strictly monitor his system and make sure the automation runs smoothly. He wants the worlds under his management to grow. I forget if we were given a reason for this or if as an ancient god seeing the universe progress is just the only thing that reminds him time is passing.

    The reason he sent the bravers to Labmda was, at least according to him, "To encourage growth as Lambda had completely stagnated". He's never really specific in what kind of stagnation he means but given he specifically sent a bunch of reincarnators and one of their main things is introducing new ideas that was probably his goal.

    The problem is Rodiot is completely incompetent at anything besides managing his system.

    He couldn't grant blessing out properly without messing up because of a damn name.

    He sent them all to Origin to "train" only to send them to a world that took advantage of basically none of the skills they cultivated as they went from a magic fueled sci fi world to a generic fantasy world. One character even bemoans the fact Ridiot brute forced the situation by translating their years of gun training into an archery skill which only somewhat worked as it didn't match their actual experience.

    Not to mention the fact he's just blindly throwing them into Lambda without any guidance and just ... espects them to randomly make progress happen. His plan is ironically working in a way but the ones doing what he wanted are litterally those that want his ultimate demise.
     
  9. sjmcc13

    sjmcc13 Well-Known Member

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    Being talented or pre-disposed in an area does not actually make you an automatic specialist in that area.
    I though it was stated somewhere that is as something simple liek : more souls through his system = more power for Rod.

    Though at the same time Lambda was kind of on its was to a slow death, as Alda's "ideal" was not sustainable and eventually something would have tipped the balance to an Evil God(s) favour.
     
  10. KageTokage

    KageTokage Well-Known Member

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    Honestly, Rodiot's only problem was Guru's soul destruction power. His reincarnation system worked fine otherwise and had been for untold eons.

    If Guru had any other power besides destroying souls, Rodiot would have ignored the invasion (since it doesn't affect him). He wouldn't have assisted in sending Bellwood and co. as champions and Lambda's gods would have been sealed away forever.

    If the world was destroyed, then Rodiot would just disconnect it from his system. Regretful, but no skin off his back.

    Vida wouldn't have tried to infringe on his territory, though Guru might, and everything would be fine. Plus, no Guru soul destruction = No Van either.
     
  11. Donce

    Donce Well-Known Member

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    Rod did not assisted in sending Bellwood and co to Lambda, he objected to it. This is why gods of Lambda got champions from world Rod don't manage. And bringing souls who is not in his system to Lambda made few errors in his system and Rod got very mad. This is why he stole souls of champions who was killed by Guru and threw them in other world he manages and become enemy of Vida.
    This is his domain of power, but because he is lazy and not motivated to do anything he don't try to improve his system, because he don't care about anyone or anything.

    And this is super bad. Rod is not a god of judgement. So, he don't judge souls for the action in life, so it is meaningless to pre-order souls for reincarnation in some body. It is more logical and practical to have a pool of souls. Souls of dead go to pool of souls, someone is born? Take random soul from pool of souls and reincarnate. It will not matter if someone destroys a soul or just steals it, if soul pool have souls, here are no errors and so on.
    New world have 0 souls. This means souls needs to be created or just come in to existence. Reincarnation system manages not only human souls, but all leaving organism souls as it was mentioned Van uncle or someone was reincarnated as pet. Rod also isn't god of the future, so he don't know when someone will die, so he can't really assign soul of leaving for someone who will be born in future.

    This only happen if game developers don't have money or don't want to use money. Look at facebook, youtube and so on. Have you seen them offline for update? No. But they are updated constantly. They needs to be shut down for system cleanup and so on, but they are always online. This is because here are many servers running facebook and youtube. They also are modular. Database is run on one server, user management is run on second server and all logic is run on third server. If developers want to update database, they make new database on new server, copy data from current server to updated server and change logic server to get data from new database. And so major update is made and system was not offline even for a second. Only cheap things go offline for update.
     
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  12. metazoxan

    metazoxan Well-Known Member

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    I have a few head cannon ideas that might explain some of these issues (Meaning non cannon but it's interesting to think about). One idea I'm stealing from "Kumono desuka" is the idea of what I'll call soul strain. Without spoiling anything in the series itself the basic of the idea is that each time a soul goes through reincarnation it gets strain put on it. If this is done enough times in a row to the same soul it eventually causes the soul to collapse and be destroyed. The way to avoid this in that series was to basically recycle souls regularly to make entirely fresh ones.

    Now we know Rodcorte isn't recycling old souls to make new ones as we know he threw Van's soul into the system when he mashed the 4 champions together and he didn't bother to keep track of it but that soul eventually became Van so his soul just drifted in the system that entire time.

    BUt what we don't know is how many lifetimes he experienced within that time. He doesn't remember any lifetime prior to Earth but we know tends of thousands of years passed. so unless one of those lives was really long lived he had time to go through thousands of lives in theory. But it's POSSIBLE to consider sometimes a soul needs to be allowed to rest between reincarntions. This could be why his system needs to actively track each soul to a degree and not just blindly toss them into a pool. Random selection like that could cause some souls to get picked multiple times and other souls not get picked once and goign off the strain theory that would be bad for the over used souls.

    Again none of this is supported by what's currently translated but it's a possible reason for why Rodcorte made the system the way he did. After all I doubt someone as lazy as him wouldn't create a pool of souls if that was an option.

    EDIT: I just had a thought. Van's soul is a composite of 4 souls, and Legion is a less closely fused union of 4 souls that got partly bound together. Perhaps the reason there is no pool of souls is letting sould just ... flow into each other has a change to cause them to bond together and create soul amalgamations. So it's necessary to manage each one seperately to a degree to prevent this? Just another theory that popped into my head last minute.
     
  13. Arha

    Arha Well-Known Member

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    a person who devotes himself or herself to one subject or to one particular branch of a subject or pursuit.

    possessing or involving detailed knowledge or study of a restricted topic.
    "the project may involve people with specialist knowledge"


    These both seem to describe Rodcorte.

    You do know that any program is probably going to have bugs, right? Or things it wasn't designed to handle that cause issues? And removing his system doesn't immediately kill the world, it just causes everyone there to be born without a soul or it becomes a nightmare world where people are possessed by the dead at best. More likely, every type of organism with a brain just never does anything after being born and the plants and bacteria take over the world.

    I don't know if it was implied or stated outright, but a world that doesn't grow doesn't become better 'food.' He doesn't get more energy out of it and, if something goes wrong, it could easily collapse and then he loses all of his gains from it. What he wants is population growth so more souls are using his system and it becomes unlikely for the world to just collapse.

    To be picky with details, it wasn't said that it was definitely going to collapse, only that it easily could. If, for example, Alda had actually stuck with the plan of focusing on the Evil Gods first and then dealing with Vida's kids later they might have been able to make some progress.

    He didn't really help though. Vida and the others just went on their own despite his objections. It's why Alda for a long time assumes Rod had nothing to do with the Van situation: He was against making champions in the past, why would he move someone over now? Also, Lambda collapsing actually would hurt. It wouldn't be a fatal wound by any means, but it's something he would rather avoid.
     
  14. CountryMage

    CountryMage [XSanguine8] not my blood...

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    In that story those souls only needed the rest, I don't remember any mention of lost souls getting recycled, the souls were just made of the generic energy of everything else, including gods, so it would probably just get slurped up. That too is an interesting thought though, maybe the way new souls come into being is from the lint rubbing off of other souls and gods, and that's also what Rod gets from contracting his services out?
    No it wouldn't have hurt Rod in any way other than his metaphorical wallet, not until Van started making him famous. Now that he himself has ties to Lambda, it would be like chopping off a limb. He was going to cut Lambda off when the Demon King started attacking as it was, especially after Gudu became aware of him.
     
  15. Arha

    Arha Well-Known Member

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    Hmm. I think you're right, actually. I remembered him being reluctant to do cut Lambda off but I think he was just worried about losing a source of energy.
     
  16. Kaithar

    Kaithar Well-Known Member

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    From memory, Rod gets more power from having more souls. I strongly suspect, but can't remember if it was spelled out, that a large part of the point of Rod's system is to limit the power growth of any of those souls. It collects souls, cleans off their experience, then throws them at a different world. Souls getting more power means they have a higher chance to "escape" the cycle.

    This logic for cutting off a world seems entirely based on things happening there that would damage his system, part of the reason he's reluctant is that he links multiple worlds together, so cutting off Lambda also means cutting off Origin and Earth at the very least. That's also one of the reasons he's so miffed about Van pulling souls out of his system, it represents a drain on what's supposed to be a closed loop. Van's "depleting" the amount of souls available to cycle through all those worlds, not just Lambda, presumably forcing Rod to make more new souls than he'd like. At least, I'm assuming Rod's system is responsible for creating new souls for growing populations, otherwise there's questions to be considered.

    I think I remember there being mention at some point that Rod can't destroy souls either... can tamper with, damage or split a soul, but not completely destroy it. I could be wrong on that though.
     
  17. xacual

    xacual Well-Known Member

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    I don’t remember it ever mentioning anything about power level of souls. Also it was stated in the story that it was extremely rare circumstance for souls to reincarnate in different worlds, it only happens when there is a severe catastrophic event in one world that affects the number of souls. Which is where the connected together worlds come into play with souls flowing to or from the other worlds. It’s not normal operation for them to change worlds.
     
  18. Mastine

    Mastine Well-Known Member

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    Lambda was stagnant for 10k years. The population was pretty much fixed to roughly 1 birth for every death. Rod wanted progress not for its own sake, but because population growth would mean more deaths for his system.
    The whole send reincarnators plan was suggested to him by someone unnamed. Which was meant to forcibly spread knowledge from other cultures.
     
  19. CountryMage

    CountryMage [XSanguine8] not my blood...

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    The system shifts souls across all the worlds in the system, that's why Van's Earth parents weren't even on the same world. As far as we know Van was the only soul locked to just one world. That's why catastrophic events like all these missing souls are such a grave matter, faults in Rod's system could affect multiple realities.
     
  20. Donce

    Donce Well-Known Member

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    From all novel I don't think souls get strains. In time souls lose memories and mind and become just energy, like most of souls following Van. System just remove all memories faster and find target for reincarnation. And I don't think Rod system or Rod have power to create souls. Gods them self are souls, but they come to be on they own or from religion of mortals. My option how souls come to be is this. All living organisms needs to have souls, be it human, animal, bug or plant. But they need different level of souls. Plant souls may be the start of soul. No soul is reincarnated as plant, but plant absorbs soul energy from environment and create one. Rod system would take plant soul after it die and reincarnate as bug or something. For animal to be born without soul would be obvious, for plant - no difference.

    Lambda have many souls who was resting for 100k years, for example vampires sealed in Vida resting place or champion dungeon Van cleared.

    Rod did not create pool of souls, because he did not got idea to create one after he created his system. You can't create something if you don't have an idea about it. Rod also don't look at mortals to get ideas from them and he would be too lazy to make modifications to his system now.

    Souls don't bound together. Van souls was made by Rod forcibly, they don't bound together on they own. Legion the same. All souls was just forced in to one body. So, soul pool will not have any effect on souls. It is just Rod never come up with it and he don't have any motivation to improve his system too.