Inner Demon Rival Duel

Where the Heart-Devil Trial rises unbidden, in the middle of a breakthrough, the Inner Demon Rival Duel (心魔宿敌之战) is one you choose to face: a deliberate confrontation with the darkest voice in your own mind. Hold your composure for sixty seconds and you win a reward in Qi. Break, and you pay a penalty set by your server.

Despite the name, nothing is spawned for you to fight. Like the Heart-Devil Trial, the duel is a test of composure - a pool that only ever drains - and the "rival" is who the demon wears. If a real Nemesis has ever beaten you, the demon wears their face and hits harder the more fearsome they have become. If not, it is an unnamed echo of your own doubt.

It is on by default (InnerDemon-Enabled).

Starting a Duel

Run /cultivation innerdemon. There is no site to find and nowhere you have to be: confronting your own weakness can happen anywhere.

You are refused if:

• you are meditating, or in a Dream Trial or a Marrow-Cleansing Rite already - which also rules out every seated ritual, since a breakthrough, advancement, Closed-Door Retreat and the like all keep you meditating;
• your realm is below Qi Condensation (InnerDemon-Min-Entry-Realm, 1) - low enough that anyone who has crossed paths with a rival cultivator can try;
• you are still cooling down from your last duel. The cooldown (InnerDemon-Cooldown-Seconds, 1200 - twenty minutes) follows every ending, whether you won, lost or walked out, because the duel is meant to be entered rarely.

Who Shows Up

The moment you begin, the game checks whether you have an active Nemesis and remembers the answer for the whole duel, so a rival encounter resolving elsewhere mid-duel cannot change it.

• No active Nemesis (you have never lost a spar, or you have retired your last one): your own shadow rises, at baseline strength.
• An active Nemesis: an echo of them rises by name, and its strength follows their tier, from baseline at tier 1 up to full at the top tier (Rival-Nemesis-Max-Tier, 5).

Those are the figures at the shipped defaults. The fiercer the grudge you carry into the duel, the harder it hits and the more it pays when you win.

The Duel

The duel runs for 60 seconds (InnerDemon-Duration-Seconds), with a pulse every 4 seconds (InnerDemon-Pulse-Interval-Seconds) - fifteen pulses in all. On each pulse the phantom manifests as a ring of dark apparitions around you, a line of torment fills your screen, you are stunned for 1.5 seconds, and your composure drains. The drain is InnerDemon-Composure-Drain-Per-Pulse (20) times (0.5 plus the phantom's strength, which runs from 0 to 1), from a pool of 100.

Composure never refills. It is armed once, at 100, and only goes down; if it reaches zero, you have broken. While the duel runs, the HUD's state chip reads Inner Demon Duel and the composure bar sits in the panel below it - see Reading Your HUD.

Your one defense is the Clear-Mind Pill. Each banked charge makes one pulse drain nothing - the demon still appears and you are still stunned, but the pool is untouched. It is the same charge the Heart-Devil Trial draws from; see Alchemy. You can store three charges at a time, and a pill banks one by default (two for a High or Perfect grade pill), so you will want a stack of them.

The arithmetic at the shipped defaults is unforgiving, and worth knowing before you enter:

Three stored charges cover at most three pulses at a time, so at these settings you will need to drink more pills as the charges are spent. The duel places no restriction on doing so, and a Clear-Mind Pill is exempt from Pill Toxicity by default. A server owner who finds this too harsh can lower the drain, raise the max composure, or shorten the duel.

Outcomes

You hold. At 60 seconds, with composure above zero, the title Your Mind Holds appears and you are paid InnerDemon-Success-Qi-Reward (500) times (1 plus the phantom's strength): 500 against your own shadow, up to 1000 against the strongest Nemesis. It goes through the usual Qi pipeline, so your multipliers apply.

You break. Composure hits zero - or you die, or you leave the game on your own - and exactly one penalty, chosen by InnerDemon-Failure-Mode, lands:

A loss to your own inner demon is a private defeat. It never touches your real Nemesis's win and loss record - it is not a rematch.

Either way, the cooldown starts. Dying in the duel fails it. Logging out on your own counts as walking away, settled at your next login with the same penalty and the same cooldown; a server stop, a crash or a staff kick costs you nothing. If the server owner switches the duel off mid-duel, it ends with no penalty.

For Server Owners

Every value on this page lives in mods/Siren_Cultivation/Cultivation/InnerDemonConfig.json; see also the Inner Demon Config section of the Cultivation config page.

Related: Tribulations, Wandering Rival Cultivators, Alchemy, Dream Trial, Commands.