Damn I'm never going to see the main character shapeshift am I, hell I didn't even get to see the mom shapeshift.

This does not seem like that kind of game, like it's an MMO I don't think there's an offline, and the fact that he does know a lot of the story stuff despite not actually paying attention to it means he didn't skip the dialogue...so my confusion still stands.

Please, call me Balls.

That is fair, I did make the too long didn't read also like three sentences, enjoy your sleep Mr. poolhttps://i.postimg.cc/8PJRV1m2/i.jpg

I know, I think I said as much in the second half of my comment, it was more in regards to feeling sympathy towards someone even though they're shitty, and why someone might. Like the circumstances of your birth aren't the only contributor to your actions but they do contribute to your actions and worldview, and when you commit negative actions only partially by choice but partially by circumstance, sympathy may be drawn from the circumstance even if a choice was still made. For instance, if the main character's mother was similarly cruel to him but he still turned out kind and merciful, you would have less sympathy for someone who was raised in the same circumstances but turned out cruel, but in contrast the only differences that contributed to the main character being kind (at least kinder than the antagonist so far) is that he had a kind mother who died, and he grew up with very little, in comparison several of the heirs have outright capricious to somewhat cruel mothers(this one's mother also died at a young age) and grew up wanting nothing except perhaps Love. It's not a mistake to have sympathy for someone experiencing a human misery despite their inhuman cruelty, it's simply another expression of your humanity, it only becomes a mistake if you let your sympathy supersede reasonable judgement. In regards to the age thing, being 14 or 16 doesn't mean you're not shitty.... it does mean however that you've not really had time to grow, the regret might come later in life (or it might not) either way when you're that young: you don't think things through, you don't consider consequences, you make more emotional decisions and you're less likely to have accurate self-awareness (just think about how often you might look back on certain things you did when you were young and just cringe), this is further amplified by the fact that this is a setting where survival of the fittest is considered just and fair, they were just raised under the assumption and with the belief, that up until now was relatively accurate, that they were the fittest and always would be.

TLDR Basically the main character was raised with black and white morality a lot of these other people were kind of raised with orange and blue morality, so some might sympathize with the fact that these poor young souls don't really understand how many transgressions they've made because they were never taught that anything they've been doing are even transgressions, their clans basically made it their business to raise a bunch of high functioning sociopaths regardless of how they might affect the world or their own children.

He's like 14-16 and was raised by a shitty person in a cruel place while simultaneously growing up in an affluent household meaning he had little consequences for most actions he committed and was often rewarded for doing awful s***, there was never an outcome for this boy where he didn't grow up to be a piece of shit- he had nearly no choice but to. This is in regards to sympathy however, feeling sympathy and pity for someone is separate from feeling that they didn't do anything wrong, as factual guilt is separate from emotional weight.

I think on the reread, probably because so much time passes in the series, you start to appreciate that yeah a lot of these people are f****** awful, but they're also children. their family are often much worse than them and raise them to be f***** up like this ...so they never really had a chance to not be dog shit. And in that regard you do start to pity their horrid Fates, like that female heir early on got her fuckin arm cut off , she didn't even really do anything that bad she just kind of ....competed regularly and had an attitude. Or the heir from the main character's group whose backstory was that his mother outright despised him because she got abandoned by the Lord(who's kind of the cause of a lot of these problems, via being a shitty husband and father) and attempted to kill him on multiple occasions via strangulation while looking him in the eyes and deriding him, I can absolutely find the sympathy to pity a lot of these characters especially when you remember their age range is like 14 to 16 right now.

It did say it could grow him back from decapitation in an early chapter, just that it would take a while.

I think it's kind of like in naruto with the nine-tailed fox, where Naruto himself is absolutely skilled and learns things very fast and the fox is just sort of a fallback equalizer so he doesn't get blitzed after running into some s*** he can't fight right now, like Naruto mastered the shadow clones jutsu to a terrifying degree and it was supposed to be this super hard to learn high level move that even kakashi can only make max like five clones with, in a similar fashion the main character of this series got enlightenment after training and thinking about the movements of a technique just a bit - on his own,without nano's input. In this way the ultra powerful crutch that the main characters have is an equalizer in some regards but it more than anything is sort of a trump card of sorts that sees free use in lower levels of combat what must have more judicious use as combat gets more aggressive and complicated.

Yeah kind of, years are usually a unit of measurement for ki, I believe it's referencing the sexagenary cycles, which I believe are complete at 60 cycles occuring in one year, ergo one year is one cycle 2 years is two cycles so on and so forth, I'll be back with research....
Edit "The sexagenary cycle, also known as the stems-and-branches or ganzhi (Chinese: 干支), is a cycle of sixty terms, each corresponding to one year, thus a total of sixty years for one cycle, historically used for recording time in China and the rest of the East Asian cultural sphere and Southeast Asia""Each term in the sexagenary cycle consists of two Chinese characters, the first being one of the ten Heavenly Stems of the Shang-era week and the second being one of the twelve Earthly Branches representing the years of Jupiter's duodecennial orbital cycle. The first term jiǎzǐ (甲子) combines the first heavenly stem with the first earthly branch. The second term yǐchǒu (乙丑) combines the second stem with the second branch. This pattern continues until both cycles conclude simultaneously with guǐhài (癸亥), after which it begins again at jiǎzǐ. This termination at ten and twelve's least common multiple leaves half of the combinations—such as jiǎchǒu (甲丑)—unused; this is traditionally explained by reference to pairing the stems and branches according to their yin and yang properties." Combining these two bits of information with general knowledge I've retained from reading a f*** ton of Chinese and Korean martial arts series that use ki/chi/energy systems that reference this cycle it's usually something like 60 years worth of ki completely opens one pathway in the body (often the Earth ki gateway or some equivalent) and 120 opens another (either the heaven ki gateway or some equivalent) and occasionally you have a third one that opens at 180 that may also lead to rejuvenation or other some such effects they usually correlates to a third point referred to as the human/soul / whatever they're using gateway, and I'm not going to front these aren't even general rules this is more me half translating sort of repeating things that are translated or expressed a thousand different ways across several series.

It is strange going through rereading this and coming across old comments like that one guy that complains about every single chapter despite reading past 30 chapters of the series and continuing, or the guy that keeps posting that solo leveling gif, even the occasional intrusion from og true purple, that seemingly contrarion golden-bastard.

In conclusion why were you still reading if you hated this from the outset, Fuck Your Feelings, why were you still reading?

https://i.postimg.cc/CKrNs6Jg/i.jpg

So begins his arm collection

I believe being King in this case refers to the lich, who was severely damaged fighting the heavenly demon all the way down to the soul, and it seems like pili's father was helping the Gold Dragon while also working with the enemy so that even if the Gold Dragon failed he could protect his daughter- she found out he was double-dealing and killed him for it.

i don't think he's dead, just concussed.

he's gonna stack blessings against his will or something...

fuckin dark souls ass creature

https://i.postimg.cc/wByHynVj/i.jpg

They really do always get shoved right to the side, huh?

oops....so you accidently began a succesionary coup... roll with it...