Tribulations

The heavens do not let you ascend quietly. A realm breakthrough calls down tribulation lightning on the cultivator sitting through it - and a cultivator whose soul has leaned too far into darkness or light faces something worse instead.

Tribulation is on by default (Tribulation-Enabled) and is lethal by default (Tribulation-Lethal). A breakthrough can kill you.

Tribulation Lightning

Bolts land on ritual progress, not wall-clock time - a ritual paused because the chunk's Spirit Vein ran below the minimum is never struck. A 24-second first breakthrough at the defaults draws four bolts; a longer, higher-realm one draws proportionally more.

The damage is queued through the ordinary damage pipeline, so everything you have defends against it: Life-Bound armor, the skill tree's Damage Reduction, Iron Body, a Qi Barrier, a Warden beast.

v0.9.1 Starting a breakthrough now tells you, up front, roughly how many strikes to expect and what share of your health they will cost — the same estimate is also in this page's own Codex entry, computed live for your current realm.

Surviving a bolt pays. Each strike you live through rolls for a cultivation manual (Manual-Tribulation-Drop-Chance, 4%) and for a Spirit Stone, and burns off some of your karma. Survival is judged on the following meditation tick, once the damage has fully resolved, so the survivor is simply the one still standing.

A bolt that actually connects — not one a Tribulation Ward Pill absorbed — also carries a chance, scaled by how much health it took, of leaving you with a Meridian Injury: a lingering, curable affliction, separate from Qi Deviation.

The Advancement Variant

Sub-stage advancements can call lightning too, but the feature is off by default:

The interval, realm scaling and lethality rule are shared with breakthroughs - only the damage percentage differs.

Karma Makes It Worse

A cultivator carrying karma faces deeper bolts and more of them, both scaled linearly by how heavy the ledger is. The extra bolts are packed into the same ritual duration by compressing the interval between them, so a karma-laden breakthrough is not longer, just far busier.

The Tribulation Ward Pill

A banked charge from a Tribulation Ward Pill fully negates one bolt's damage. The bolt still falls - the light and the thunder are unchanged - it simply does not touch you. Up to three charges can be held at once, and they persist until spent.

A tribulation brings its own weather

Since v0.8.0 a tribulation is not only heard, it is seen. Night falls over the ritual ground and a cloud deck rolls in, colored by how far the cultivator has climbed - and the lightning is colored to match.

The storm is a per-player sky override, not a change to the world. Witnesses within 96 blocks share it; the rest of the server keeps its own weather and its own time of day, so a breakthrough at noon does not drop night over a whole continent. An Ascension raises the same storm crimson at a much wider 160 blocks - it is meant to be read from across a valley.

Point any of the Tribulation-Storm-Weather-* keys at a Weather asset from any pack to change that band's sky. The Heart-Devil Trial darkens the sky the same way, without the lightning.

The Storm Omen

v0.10.0 An optional fifth tier, layered on top of the four bands above. Arm it with /cultivation tribulation arm, and if the natural sky already happens to be running storm weather the moment your breakthrough ritual begins, the whole ritual becomes a Storm Omen: a harder, better-rewarded trial at whatever band you would otherwise be in — a Foundation Establishment cultivator still draws White-band bolts, not Crimson ones. Only the sky changes, to a wrathful storm of its own.

The check happens once, at the start of the ritual — never re-checked mid-attempt, so a storm rolling in three bolts into a breakthrough does nothing, and one that clears partway through does not end an Omen already under way. A cultivator who never arms it gets exactly the ordinary ritual.

Storms are commoner in some biomes than others, and that is the point: the Omen is a pilgrimage, not something to widen away with more keywords. All of it lives in BreakthroughConfig.json.

Tribulation Variants — Every Element Answers

v0.10.1 Lightning was never the only voice Heaven had — it was just the only one anyone had heard. Every one of the ten Dao elements now strikes with its own bolt, keyed to whichever element the cultivator sitting through the ritual actually walks:

Nothing about the ritual itself changes — the same interval, the same damage curve, the same manual and Spirit Stone rolls on survival. Only what actually falls from the sky is different, so a cultivator walking Wood answers a breakthrough to a different sound than one walking Metal, and a demonstration server running ten cultivators through ten breakthroughs looks like ten different storms rather than one repeated one.

The Heart-Devil Trial (心魔劫)

A cultivator whose stronger Yin or Yang lean fraction reaches HeartDevil-Lean-Threshold (0.5) does not face lightning at all. The heavens send an inner demon instead. It is enabled by default (HeartDevil-Enabled), and applies to breakthroughs only unless HeartDevil-On-Advancement is turned on.

Instead of health, the trial attacks your composure (道心) - a pool armed fresh at the start of each attempt and shown on the HUD while the trial runs.

Pulses arrive on the same interval as lightning would. The drain scales with how far you have leaned, so a cultivator right at the threshold loses about 34 composure per pulse while one at a total lean loses about 51 - the deeper the soul is stained, the fewer pulses it can bear. The composure pool is per-attempt, so a failed ritual does not carry damage into the next one.

Breaking: Qi Deviation (走火入魔)

If composure reaches zero, the ritual fails and you suffer Qi Deviation, announced with an on-screen title.

Either way, the ritual ends. At the defaults a broken cultivator is demoted a stage, exactly as if they had walked away from the ritual.

The Clear-Mind Pill

A banked charge from a Clear-Mind Pill holds your composure through one pulse: the inner demon still manifests, but that pulse drains nothing. Up to three charges, persisting until used. It is the only ward that helps here - a Tribulation Ward Pill wards lightning, and a leaned cultivator never faces lightning.

The same pill also cures Qi Deviation outright, so it is worth carrying both before and after a trial.

Leaving a Tribulation Early

v0.11.0 The full rules are on Realms & Stages; what matters here:

• A bolt that kills you ends the ritual. You are not demoted on top of dying. The sky clears and the breakthrough is over.
• Withdrawing with /cultivation meditate abort (then abort confirm) costs half your banked Qi and no stage, but only before the ritual's halfway point. Under the Heart-Devil Trial it is refused once composure has fallen below half (Ritual-Abort-Min-Composure-Percent, 50), and refused earlier if your composure is on course to reach zero before the ritual ends - you cannot withdraw from a fall that is already written. A hardcore server can refuse withdrawals altogether.
• Logging out on your own mid-ritual is settled when you next log in, as if you had stood up: the ritual's usual demotion, resolved against you. A server stop, crash or staff kick costs nothing.
• A ritual whose Qi runs short is paused, not cancelled. Its bolts and composure wait where they were, and resume when your Qi is back. Bolts land on ritual progress, so none falls while it is paused.

Surviving One

The obvious answers are the right ones: bank a Clear-Mind Pill charge, shorten the ritual with a Clarity Pill or Ritual Speed nodes so fewer pulses land, stack incoming-damage reduction, and settle your karma before you sit down. Pulling your Yin-Yang balance back toward the middle takes you off the Heart-Devil track entirely - see The Dao.

Weapon refinement runs its own tribulation on the same interval, at a gentler 10% of max health, and it is still lethal if Tribulation-Lethal is on.

Every value on this page lives in the breakthrough config, alongside the ritual durations - see Config - and the related commands are on the Commands page.