Question [CN] continents with an area of 1 quadrillion miles, the sun is not a star and so on. (Cultivation)

Who is an expert in Chinese cultivator novels? I have a few questions.
1. Why are the continents so big? Already with an area of 1,000,000,000,000,000 miles. This is the smallest continent in one of the most popular novels.
2. And in general, is the continent a planet in the world of cultivators?
3. Why is the sun not a star for them? Especially in those novels where it comes to galaxies/universes.
4. Why is their sun source so powerful? Since there are galaxies / universes in the novel, then there should be stars that are tens times more powerful than the sun.
5. One breath is how many minutes / seconds?
6. Why is a MC, when he breaks into another level of power, is he always on the verge of death? Why doesn't this happen to other geniuses?

P.S. Sorry, could not stand it. I don’t know how to contact the authors. Maybe someone asked the author similar questions.

 

Miles is not used to measure area

Measure it yourself, it's not supposed to be exact

Silly, because MC is not a genius, of course

 

Ultimately, landmasses, planes and planets need to be that big because it needs to account for things like the ability to teleport and some people who can fly at luminal speeds. If you could run circles around your planets in a matter of nanoseconds, distance would become pretty meaningless.

 

1. Exaggerating. But just assume that any cultivator world is larger than Earth.
2. Not sure exactly what you mean there. Are you referring to the lower and upper layers of cultivation worlds, or actual continents?
3. Because they didn't care as much about science they didn't reach the same scientifical answers.
4. Why not ? We know little about the universe , who's to say there isn't something like that?
5. Depending on the cultivation level and techniques
6. Because any other genii either belong to some clan or family and has a lot of backing, meaning they don't need to risk to progress , and they get all the help they could need. MC usually has little to no support, and the best way for them to improve is either through combat or cultivation items they gather , most of which they either have to fight others for, or others decide to fight them for it

 

First, let's get this clear:

1. CNs magnify everything without considering the effects of scaling. No, physics doesn't apply here.
2. A continent is like an Earth continent but million times bigger... refer to point 1.
3. The Sun is not simply a star but the symbol of Yang, one of dualities of which the world is composed of (the other being Yin represented by the moon). It's like the source principle of an entire microcosm.
4. Refer to point 3.
5. Spoiler: time measures (Chinese)

   The time it takes an Incense Stick to burn (一炷香 yī zhù xiāng) (一柱香的时间 yī zhù xiāng de shíjiān)
   

   • Meaning: a poetic way of referring to a short time span… depending on the author, generally either 5 minutes or 30 minutes

   The time it takes to drink a Cup of Tea (一盏茶的时间 yī zhǎn chá de shíjiān)
   

   • Meaning: a poetic way of referring to a time span of about 10-15 minutes

   The time it takes to eat a Meal (一顿饭的时间 yī dùn fàn de shíjiān)
   

   • Meaning: a poetic way of referring to a time span of about 30-45 minutes

   One Breath of time (一个呼吸的时间 yī gè hūxī de shíjiān)
   

   • Meaning: a poetic way of referring to a very short time span (how long it takes a person to inhale and exhale once)… usually about 1-3 seconds
6. Plot armor activating to save MC from deadly situations (when breaking thru during dangerous fight) or their cultivation bases being so solid that it is much harder to break thru them.

P.S. I only hv a limited understanding of this subject.

 

1. Cultivation is about getting stronger. Now think about this: How is the author supposed to describe a 9th stage cultivators speed, if a 6th stage cultivator can run around our world in the blink of an eye? How could our MC escape, if he does not have a massive head start?
The answer: Just make the distances bigger. That way the cultivators can move faster and faster, and deal more and more damage (area wise), without ever having to worry about such paltry things as logic or physics.

2.-4. Okay those questions all probably lead back to the same answer: Ancient chinese culture.

2. Continents are generally not planets (whether planets are round~ish our planes depend on the novel I guess), but due to the size of continents being so large, the distance between them has to grow as well. Add that to the fact that traveling the open sea always has been something dangerous and that the MC usually travels to other continents that people only know legends of and you get why the continents are so far away from each other

3. In most cultures (chinese included), the sun always was special. For those novels with galaxies/universes, there are various attempts to verify that (stars are other planets, every galaxy has one sun and many stars, etc.)

4. What is "warmer" sunlight or starlight? The sun is considered absolute yang and thus extremely powerful. Whether the sun or the stars are more powerful depends on what technique the MC gets his claws on (aka authors whim).

5. Not sure, but I guess the amount of time you need for one normal breath (aka 1-2 seconds)

6. Because MCs are "special". Aside from obvious plot reasons, it's because MCs tend to use drug overdoses to get stronger which leads to problems, while other geniuses control their supplement intake.

 

Read cultivation chat group and I might be a fake cultivator

 

1. That depends on the novel, but my first assumption is always that they screwed up massively. If I’m feeling generous I decide they might have looked up how much surface area the Earth has then added a bunch of zeroes so they have room to make mistakes and describe a mountain the size of our planet.

2. Depends on the novel. In Swallowed Star, for example, there’s both absurdly massive Xianxia flat-world “continents” drifting in space, as well as our conventional planets and solar systems

3. If it’s fully Xianxia, their world is just flat, actual stars don’t make sense.

4. Sounds like that’s how they do it in this novel you’re reading, though that isn’t usually the case when there’s other worlds as well.

5. What Otaku31said, 1-3 seconds. Or if you’re asking how long a normal human can hold their breath if they really need to, 1 minute untrained or 10 minutes trained.

6. Depends on the novel, but usually the novel itself will say the MC is pushing the limits in some way so the heavens are sending a harder test. It’s basically a desperate attempt to make a tribulation scene exciting even when you’ve read the same thing 10 times already in one novel, or in a hundred other novels each.


I feel ya though, there’s quite a few novels I’ve stopped reading entirely because they explain everything so poorly my head hurts whenever they go somewhere new.
Especially one novel I can’t remember the name of now, where the MC had a mirror with a demon in it and he can use the mirror to control demons, and one time he turned himself into a sea snake-dragon to infiltrate an meeting of sea dragon-snakes. The MC and his girlfriend left the surface of the world together to do crap in the asteroid belt or something (??????) surrounding the world or above a flat world but everything was suddenly so wrong and bad I just stopped caring and stopped reading.

 

IIRC, the first question is mostly due to translators translating 里(Li)=Chinese Miles into just plain miles.. 里=.5km while miles = 1.6km, then again there is still exaggeration on the author's part

 

Because where 7 denotes large.
Chinese is 3.33
So as long as it's not 3.33 billion, it's tiny.

Correct me if I am wrong @ToastedRossi

 

can you throw off the link to the chat group about cultivators? I'm generally poorly oriented in the forums.

 

Cultivation Chat Group is a novel.

All the questions can be boiled down to: Authors suck at scaling and all that entails. Half the time, even the scaling of the cultivation system in question will contradict itself to suit the plot.

 

Treat it as something along the lines of Indian Astrology. i.e the Earth is a flat plane on top of a turtle standing on the back of an elephant etc.

If you already got people flying around without help, why not just toss the rest of reality out? lol.

 

Deathblade asked the question about the ... slightly exaggerated ... scale of 'things' to Er Gen and the author was just baffled that any reader (Westerners) would even care about it ... they use it the same way as beauty is described in throwing over countries etc. ...
The target audience of these novels doesn't care about it - as long as the story is halfway consistent in itself.

 

It is a common issue of the shonen genre.
It is more obvious because unlike in anime where you have editors who are professionals.
This is written without editors, it's a completely amateur space

 

These numbers aren't meant to be taken literally. They're just figurative ways of representing vast distances and the like. It's very much a thing in Chinese literature to describe things in evocative terms rather than concrete figures. You could try analyzing them if you want, but it probably won't be very productive.

It's just to make the story more dramatic.

 

most of 'em are flat earthers