THE TRICHILIOCOSM NEEDS NO HEROES. IT NEEDS WORKERS.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. - Karl Marx

The Power System of The Trichiliocosm (of which Hingsajagra is a part of) is inspired by a large number of real life esoteric traditions, stemming from my own experiences in Esoteric Buddhism, to indigenous folk traditions in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, to Hermeticism, Theosophy, Spiritism, Anting-Anting Religion, Kejawen, Anitu, Esoteric Marxism, Soviet Cosmicism, and so on and so forth.

Sidhi has four major components:

Sidhi, a thaumaturgical force that responds to Consciousness, a residue of a billion ancient cosmic Communist Civilizations that have essentially manufactured Marx Particles, but each planet starts off not knowing this truth.

Cultivation Womb. The biothaumaturgical organ that allows the majority of sentient beings (even animals, and sometimes even inanimate objects) to cultivate Sidhi. Blocked by the Five-Armed Demiurge Array of the Heavenly Bourgeoisie, an Antinomian Rite wherein you perform an action so jarring and rupturing that it rips your consciousness out of the World Order for a moment, allowing your Cultivation Womb to reactivate. Others call this Radicalization.

Sidhi Techniques. The only way to harness Sidhi is through tried and true Sidhi Techniques from ancient traditions. Only the highest Cultivators can manipulate Sidhi with pure Consciousness.

Sects, the material organization of Sidhi Techniques, arising from labor fields and accumulated indigenous and marginalized knowledges. It is through Sects that one learns the needed At odds with the Bourgeois Sects, which control the means of Cultivation.

Sidhi

Sidhi is a thaumaturgical force that responds to the consciousness of those that have awakened Cultivation Womb. To strengthen one’s Cultivation Womb requires even more Sidhi. A stronger cultivation womb means they can control more and more sidhi. To control more sidhi is to control more of reality. To strengthen one’s Cultivation Womb is to have a stronger and more powerful Consciousness. To be more conscious of Reality is how you change it.

Harnessing Sidhi is required to be able to transcend the physical limitations of the human body. Sidhi allows for esoteric phenomena: animals speak, informational residue take on the look of phantasmic anomalies, gods and demons become real, and so on.

Sidhi cannot be harnessed and wielded without Esoteric Techniques. Sects teach Esoteric Techniques. Esoteric Techniques manifest as Martial Arts or Magicks.

Every being has outer sidhi known as ardor. ardor is a pool of usable sidhi that they can use to power their esoteric techniques.

Every being also has internal sidhi known as health. this is their life energy and spirit. should this be depleted, they die. injuries and such cause health to dwindle, slicing away from someone’s usable health.

Outer Lore: Sidhi is the vital life force of the universe that responds to conscious and intentional effort, mantras (particular sonar frequencies), and mudras (mystic gestures) that resonate across the world.

Inner Lore: Sidhi is more than just a mystic life force. it is an immanent property of matter, one that can be interfaced with the awakening of a cultivation womb, a biothaumaturgical organ that every sentient being has.

Secret Lore: Sidhi is a constructed mist-field created by multiple ancient communist civilizations that have all attained Mass Enlightenment. To attain Mass Enlightenment is to disseminate one’s consciousness into the Universe, having the materially-arisen return to the divine material.

This means Sidhi—which is a zeptobot—houses the trillion trillion consciousnesses of a thousand uplifted sentient beings in the past. this is why it responds to consciousness. the teleology of Sidhi is that it, with its consciousness driven computer-consciousness, will bring about the creation of the next universe after the heat death of this one.

Cultivation Wombs

Cultivation Wombs house the nascent enlightened one within every sentient being. but to grow the enlightened one requires cultivation of sidhi.

Cultivation Wombs have three parts:

The Third Eye or the Upper Cinnabar Fields which is the Pineal Gland node. The Heart measures one’s Inner Sidhi or their Health. It is the biothaumaturgical center, associated with the Mind and Wits.

The Heart which is the Middle Cinnabar Fields, located around the heart area. It is the emotional and vivacious core, tasked with regulating, wielding, or controlling Sidhi that has been supercharged by energy. Associated with the Cultivations of Eloquence and Psyche.

Their Furnace which is their Lower Cinnabar Fields located in their Liver, which is their Lower Cinnabar Fields. The Sidhi Furnace measures one’s Outer Sidhi or Ardor. This where physical energy or essence of Sidhi is stored, supporting physical stability and vitality. It is associated with Strength and Skill.

To open one’s Third Eye is the beginning of the ability to manipulate Sidhi—it is to be able to pierce through the lie of the Five-Armed Demiurge Array and grasp at the strands and flows of Sidhi, and wield it. Some are born with this open—they become exorcists or psychics, and tend to be hidden by their respective nation’s governments.

The Next Step

Cultivation Wombs are the biothaumaturgical organ of Desire Realm Cultivators. Cultivators of the Form Realm have a Cultivation Soul, when their Womb finally comes out as a fully formed entity that they consume—or consumes them. Those of the Formless Realm have a Cultivation Mind, arising from the Body itself.

The Cultivation Body

Once the Cultivation Womb has been opened and latent Sidhi flows once again through a being’s meridians, their bodies are naturally empowered. They can endure high falls, can naturally lighten their body to perform advanced lightness techniques that would’ve been impossible for other beings. While they can’t step on air, they can lighten themselves to leap farther or higher than normal humans can.

The sky-dancing Dakini Sect has perfected this application of lightness to allow for greater forms of aerial mobility. Through practiced refinement of the Cultivation Body’s innate mobility, they can flash step, speed blitz, double jump, air dash, and at higher levels, trueflight.

The Cultivation Body becomes naturally more resilient, allowing them to take a greater number of blows as their Cultivation rises in strength. This is the innate Bolster ability.

Sidhi Techniques

In the past, Sidhi Techniques were cut up into various scattered traditions, arising from their own cultures. Traditions of talismanry, shamanism, witchcraft, thaumaturgy, and so on. At the death’s knell of Sidhi, these disparate traditions were forcibly round up together to preserve them from loss, and were categorized rightly as Sidhi Techniques—that is, ways to use, harness, and wield Sidhi.

Sidhi Techniques are often classified into two versions: Martial Arts and Magicks. In Post-Calamity, the main form of attaining Sidhi Techniques is through attaining Licenses from Sects.

Reasons For Cultivation

Each Cultivator has a reason for their Cultivation.

Power. the basest reason for cultivation. it is to strengthen one’s grossest and basest body, to attain a form one can use to revel with the basal instinct for permanent survival.

Enlightenment. the higher reason for cultivation. to strengthen one’s own mind and body to eventually free one’s self from the fetters of Matter and attain a deeper level of Materiality, becoming free from the chains of consciousness and emotion, the forced chemical imbalances of matter.

Infinity. the highest reason for cultivation. to create strength to be able to grasp at the Infinity, the deepest interiority or essence of matter. to grasp at this is to then endeavor the greatest of endeavors: to help all other sentient beings attain infinity. historically, the infinite code or the infinite law has been the reason for many communist warriors for cultivation.

Sects

SECTS STILL LIVE. The richest Sects are those that collaborated or turned into corporations. They've become the Bourgeois Mega-Sects, which subsume nation, state, corporation and conglomerate into themselves. These Mega-Sects hold various smaller Sects within them (for example, Haestann Company having the Mekanician Sect, the Digitarian Sect, the Corsair Sect, and so on). The remains of the cannibalized Sects.

In Post-Calamity, Sects still live. Many of them endure by going underground, others endure by steeping halfway into Capitalism, understanding the immanent contradictions and working to intensify them. There are hundreds of Sects still alive, often with just 5 to 6 members in their coterie. But they are Sects all the same.

Sects have become essentially skillsets. Being part of a Sect means you are trained in that Sects martial arts and/or sorceries, secret techniques, and augmentations. Sects now provide skill training and labor opportunities as a means of surviving. For example: a Wukong is often sought after for higher risk manual labor jobs that they know a Wukong can reliably perform. An Eschatonian is consulted for matters of dark matter and entropic mechanics. A Jyotisha is sought after for matters of astrophysics and astronomy.

In Post-Calamity, Sects are no longer fabled keepers of secret arts and paths to immortality and longevity. They have become avenues for work.

Every martial art discipline and every sorcery has been monstrously turned into an income avenue. There are no pure witches or sorcerers anymore—any sorcerer or witch worth their salt has turned their skills into businesses, start-ups, onstrand personas.

When you say that you’re a professional witch, then you’re doing it to make money. Otherwise, you’re a hobbyist. Why should anyone trust you? Unless, of course, you’re an elder, or a teacher of some kind.

All that is holy is profaned.

When the world governments returned they had to make sure all martial arts were pacified as well. This meant that any martial art being practiced must be in the context of sport. Otherwise, while not strictly unlawful, it is not encouraged to be practiced in public. Old sect masters and martial hermits have turned their dojos and clubs into revenue streams. Some of them do it to support the club. others do it to keep themselves afloat. Capitalism creates businessmen out of martial artists.

Aall that is solid melts into air.

The THOUSAND LOTUS VANGUARD MANDALA [TLVM] of the Martial Underworld is a coterie of Sects that operate under the same organizational structure, less out of camaraderie and more out of necessity. There are a hundred hundred Sects out there, some only having one or two practitioners, but they are protected as a piece of revolutionary counter-hegemony and violence by the Communist Party, which continues to survive as the underground force against the rest of the world.

The Communist Party of the World is sometimes called the Earth Womb Coterie or the Knights of the World.

These Sects not only teach physical martial arts, sidhi techniques, cultivation, and so on, but also teach a particular Skillset that the individual can then use to greatly benefit their own community or integrate into the proletariat.

Sect Specialties

Each Sect has a Specialty that colors how they approach situations. These Specialties are organized according to their own prescriptions cross-referenced with their actual performance out in the field by the TLVM.

[STRIKE] Sects deal damage. they avoid damage by either being very mobile or being very far. In non-violent situations, their teachings promote forward thinking, work towards creating and/or strengthening regional vanguards, participation in electoral politics as praxis, direct action, strikes, and protests.

[DISRUPT] Sects afflict debilitations. Intercept harm. Mitigate loss. or applies battlefield manipulation or control. In non-violent situations, [DISRUPT] Sects are all about spreading agitprop, cultural counter-hegemony, engaging in dialectically materialist analysis of concrete conditions (otherwise known as the Enxonian Think-Tank, named after Fulang Enxo’s tactics of dialectical analysis) infiltration, sabotage, riling up the workers, and exploiting class antagonisms.

[SUPPORT] Sects organize, strengthen, enable, and heal. In non-violent situations, [SUPPORT] Sects mobilize the masses into protests, strikes, and peasant revolutions. They create grassroots political movements. They teach true political education and create durable power within mass communities, workplaces, and trade unions to bind the disparate struggling proletariat together.

The Philosophy of Sects

Sects are an attempt at creating a power system that is still rooted in working class, proletarian contexts and milieu, while mixing it with the material reality of a xianxia setting, and incorporation multiclass buildcraft. Sects in classical Xianxia literature are not just social organizations, but knowledge organizations that have secrets that teach Martial Arts, Magics, Dao, and Cultivation Techniques.

What happens to all these Martial Arts and Sorcery Sects in the time of increased automation, efficiency, industry, and the death of these fantasies as the bourgeoisie strip them away?

The old structures of a Xianxia Sect after all presuppose a largely Feudal economic reality. Against a dangerous world of magic and monster, a Sect can teach you ways to protect yourself, or save yourself from the feudal toil.

I’ve found however that the Xianxia obsession with personal power, individual strength, and hoarding of material wealth from others is actually very conducive to a Capitalist economic reality. And in fact, I believe the evolution of Xianxia and other such Spirit Cultivation fantasies naturally moves into a Capitalist mindset.

But in a world that now tries to hoard its martial art and magic even further away from the lower classes, how does one manage to even make a dent? Is it really all up to fate, being born in the upper classes or being born into some sort of fated bloodline lineage with a long clan?

In Hingsajagra, the reality that happened was this: the massification of Sect Supernatural Martial Art created a new slew of guilds, companies, collectives, and unions that wanted to share these supernatural knowledge to as much people as possible. The forces of Reaction had to crack down on this, which caused the Five Armed Demiurge Array.

The Sects that now still thrive and are alive are the ones that are associated with the Bourgeoisie. Competing Sects are cannibalized or subsumed. What happens to the Sects that fight back and have attained Class Consciousness and do not want to be part of the Ruling Class? They disperse into the Working Class as skillsets, job-avenues, gig work, freelance work, and so on.

One of my main objectives for this was to essentially do a “Class” system without retreating to the D&D style “Class As Archetype” or the Final Fantasy style “Job as Combat Role.” I wanted to ground these Classes and Jobs into the world. I wanted them to be real, not just convenient game mechanics.

I did this by combining the idea of a social organization (that is, like the Jobs in FFXIV, where each Job had a social organization or guild attached to them) with a skillset. The previous version had this named Specialization, but even that felt a bit too contrived and stepped on toes of other labor-related terminology.

And then I realized I already had a good name for. That’s what Sects are: social organizations that teach you martial arts (or in this case, skillsets).

Final Fantasy Tactics, did a hugely great flourish when it came to the thinkspace I had for this system. For those that don’t know, FFT’s classes were known as “jobs”. Is the name “job” a good fit for the hypermedieval fantasy of final fantasy tactics? That’s a discussion for another time.

Having your classes be named “job” inherently carries a subtext of “labor” to me, and I think to many more too.

Some History

The earliest versions of 10,000 Swords Against Heaven already had this idea, actually, back when it was still called Sundang Langit and its tech level was a bit lower. when i had it changed, Sundang Langit wasn’t as outwardly Marxist as it is now, it was a tad more just weirdo fantasy. More JRPG fantasy grounded in communist principles and dialectical materialist views. at this time, i had read a lot of theory but i hadn’t synthesized much of it, and partly because i was reticent on making such an overtly commie game.

And so, the old specialization system was removed for the standard martial arts and sorceries split that was inspired by exalted.

Unfortunately we greatly opened up our play space since then, especially fictionally speaking. Finally able to make my own Bas-Lag, my own Xianxia Perdido Street Station, I decided to go whole hog. Cyberpunk by way of thaumaturgicals, thinking machines, all my SF favs (Neuromancer, Dune, Titanfall, Marathon, KOTOR, Armored Core, Book of the New Sun). SF literary greats that I haven’t been able to write in the space of ever since i decided to focus on writing fantasy.

so now, with the moving up of tech level, this more importantly allows me to be more transparent about the setting’s communism. trying to do marxism in a more or less feudal timeframe risks the anachronism that marx warned about: trying to apply post-industrial problems into a timeframe that had completely different material/economic situations is idealist and not dialectical after all.

so now i get to set hingsajagra a very familiar communist setting—one where the forces of World Capitalism have stamped out Communist Insurgencies both through normal and psychowarfare, creating what is essentially a dystopia of hyperexploitation. a post-calamity if you will. this place is called southeast asia.

so setting the game in a more or less urban post-apocalyptic dystopia that has large urban centers built up from capitalist infrastructure has me also rethinking how the power system might have moved forward. while hingsajagra started out as a “filipino xianxia”, i more importantly wanted to apply diamat to the concepts of xianxia, especially when it moved forward.

i could just let it go and just do martial arts and sorceries not evolving along with the rest of the world, as secret knowledges that evolve but keep their form, but i feel like that wouldn’t be so diamat. much of the modern world’s conception of martial arts is built on hyper-real caricatures of martial arts or sports applications of it.

martial arts, in a sense, has been defanged. it seeps through in the employment of the word: when one says martial arts, you don’t think the arts in which someone commits violence or strategy. no, instead one thinks of kung fu and silat. martial arts has been mystified and turned into yet another commodity to be sold.

Same thing of course with magic and sorcery. especially with magic and sorcery, i feel. the cultural hegemony has completely upended understanding of magic and sorcery, traditions that existed even before the establishment of religion as an institution (one could argue magic and religion were one and the same before the Enlightenment-era split of them).

Sects are these essentially skillsets that arise from labor fields. they’re not separate from the working class—they arise from the working class. a lot of old martial arts and sorceries have been incorporated into these Sects so that they could survive.

Worker Sects arose during the Second World Revolution. they had to be mass-taught. without a central standard, mass-teaching would’ve been impossible. The Thousand Lotus Vanguard Mandala of the Second World revolution created this international standard of Sects, and sought to preserve as many martial arts and sorceries and other esoteric traditions as possible, before they were subsumed into capitalism.

the problem of translatability

A lot of this came about when i was writing red bodhisattva cultivation. While writing the powers and the mechanics, i couldn’t help but feel like having technicks and magicks be essentially these video game buttons. they were limited to their application and they had an optimal application.

in real life martial arts, “techniques” you learn rarely come out like you practiced them. much of the techniques you learn are things to train your body and muscle reflex to intuitively, non-thinkingly know what to do next. martial arts are holistic things: you don’t learn them to learn techniques, you learn them to become a weapon.

i think the greatest inspiration for these came from jujutsu kaisen. there, everyone essentially has 1-2 techniques that they can do, but they use it in conjunction with the rest of their powerset and knowledges, using the environment, and using it creatively.

also in higher levels, you start thinking less of creative applications of your technicks and magicks since you have more of it in your disposal, especially around Level 6 or Level 8. Now every problem could potentially be solved with one of your technicks or one of your magicks, and it doesn’t become a dialectical conversation between the player and the world.

so i began looking back on how to sublate these two problems. i wanted to write something that was fun to explore in a literary environment, but also fun to play in a ludic environment. a fool’s task, but that’s what artists are supposed to do.

Arhats, Buddhas, and Bodhisattvas

The terms Arhat, Buddha, and Bodhisattva come from truly hyper-primeval languages. scientists have found text-slabs and ancient datahedrons containing these words, with the material of the slabs and hedrons dating back 91 mahakalpas (118,300,000,000,000 years ago). This is far far far beyond even the beginning of the planet’s beginning, which is some 300 kalpas ago (5 billion years ago).

The ultimate form of material cultivation is the ascension into consciousness. All matter has the capacity for consciousnesses, but it requires a specific and precise array of neurons, electrical arrays, and chemical interactions to create true self-awareness.

With self-awareness however comes separation and distinction, which is one of the first problems. With distinction and separation comes ignorance. with ignorance comes craving. with craving comes attachment.

Through compassion and wisdom, one can flense through these problems of self-awareness and perform Self-Negation. To self-negate means to attain Enlightenment. To attain Enlightenment is to finally glimpse a refraction of the Infinite—the true state of Matter. To attain this is, also, to realize one’s own Revolutionary Consciousness.

the ultima-minds are those that have attained this state of Consciousness Self-Negation and have essentially “melted back” into Matter, removing separation and distinction and living in utter bliss in a state free of imperfection and suffering.

All communist states work to attain Enlightenment for all their constituents and citizens. The ancient Communist civilizations that have attained this Mass Enlightenment for their Citizens are few and far between, but they have preserved and sent forward their teachings to the far flung edges of the universe for others to discover.

Mudras

✦ Crane: Two hands spread like wings, palms outward.✦ Dragon: Hand reaching out, fingers curled, like a claw about to grasp.✦ Ego-Cutting: Both arms slicing outward, with both hands needing toslide against each other.✦ Heat: Both hands touching pointer and thumbs, other fingersoutstretched, with the hands placed crossing over the heart, facing outwards.✦ Intent: All ten fingers spread out in the direction of the target.✦ Lotus: Both hands cupping together, touching at the wrists, fingersstretching up to look like a blossoming lotus.✦ Man: Both fists together, knuckles-touching.✦ Noose: Both five fingers in pinching gestures, both pinching gesturestouching fingertips, one above and one under.✦ Earth: Like Heaven but the hands pointing to the earth.✦ Heaven: Hands folded together at the heart.✦ Spear: Three fingers stretched out at the target.✦ Shield: Pointer and middle finger on both hands crisscrossing, palmfacing inward✦ Stillness: Both hands cupping, right hand under left.✦ Sword: Pointer and middle finger outstretched, together, and thencutting diagonally.✦ Thunderbolt: Pointer, pinky, and thumb pointing at summon pointdirection.✦ Violence: Thunderbolt Mudra with both hands, pointing at target direction but in a pulled back motion, as if drawing a bow.✦ Wave: Cup hands together, directed palms first at the target.✦ Wisdom: One hand. Palm forced outward, fingers pointing up.✦ Wheel: Hands facing each other, cupping gesture, fingertips touching to form a circle.

Incoming Game Changes

Learning new Sect Licenses requires performing 3 Missions/Contracts or as a Reward for particularly difficult contracts with the Sect involved. Expertise take 1 for elegibility.

Normal humans are Level 0 Wanderers. As Level means Sidhi Level, normal humans without Cultivation cannot raise their Health, Ardor, nor perform the innate Lightness. However, they can gain different Cultivations depending on the Gear they wear and use, as well as the Traits they might gain.

Cultivator Wanderers can go up Levels and they have the following benefits:

They add their Level to their natural Health.

They do not suffer damage from falling down 15m or lower.

They can easily leap and climb vertical surfaces without needing Skill Checks.

Also, this means we don’t have Divine Empowerments anymore as a separate thing. They’re built into the systems.

Bolster is now…

The +Level to Health bonus.

The ability to burn Sidhi to empower the Check (roll 3d6, keep higher 2).

Getting to push targets away or knock them away becomes a matter of describing how you push them away, and so on.

Lightness is now…

The ability to burn Sidhi to empower the Check (roll 3d6, keep higher 2).

Empowering a SKL Check to leap up higher or move quicker, empowering a WIT Check to respond quicker.