Hey, everyone. As mentioned previously, I wanted to dedicate some time to discuss what were the plans for the story of Unholy Arts, had it been continued. You will notice that, as the story progresses, beats and events become less specific, instead consisting of general guidelines and new characters are mentioned by position or role, rather than name. That's because, while I lay out the overaching themes early on, I prefer to leave some space open to further detail once the time to actually write it approaches. Today, however, I'll be writing about the second adventure, which plot structure was already fairly complete when the development was cancelled.

General structure

The adventure in the Shartrish Slopes would be structured by the tournament, with the forefront initially occupied by the growing concern of some characters about the idea of Pain winning the tournament, though this general theme would lose importance to a growing hostility between the Ashwalkers and the Gaanidans, generated fundamentally from the enmity between its leaders, eventually resulting in a conflict at the end. Through the adventure, there would be various side plotlines that would crash together in those final events. These would be:

- Nashillbyir: As you might have guessed from the last update, Nash is pretty short-sighted when it comes to anything relating to her passion, these being the martial arts. As a result, she eagerly participates in the early verbal confrontations started by Dirillsur, thinking that these are well justified within the margins of healthy competition, but not realizing when they slowly begin to stir a tribe to tribe confrontation. There would be several events where the player would have the chance to interact with Nash regarding her attitudes. The positions of *only* calling her out and *only* supporting her would eventually result in her not changing her position, either because she's started to see the player character as an opponent on the other side of the barricade, or because she hasn't been pushed to see any nuance. On the contrary, playing a more balanced hand would make her more attentive to stop and listen when things are approaching a more dangerous line.

- Salfis flowers illicit trading: Once again, salfis flowers are being used at this adventure's event of interest, the tournament. However, the player would notice Allyshiye and Sethra selling and buying some of these, which an intelligent+perceptive player character would figure out it's strange, since the salfis flowers from the Shapeshifters' Twisted Festival were (for the most part) given to the Passion Temple. If pressed on the issue, the priestess would claim that, thanks to the presence of the Gaanidans, more aether than usual is being collected, so it's fine; while Sethra would admit that getting into the charged salfis flowers would allow her to finally get something the Aiishen would want to trade (presumably), a particularly important feat given their usually insular behavior.

- Ritual for the player character's mom: Later on, Shrezdill finds out a reference in the Ashwalker temple's literature about a ritual used to treat afflictions, and although the information is fairly incomplete, she figures out there would be more to learn about it in the Passion Temple's library. She also informs the player that the ritual requires a wasteful amount of salfis flowers, so it would have to wait until after a new High Priestess has been elected, which naturally disturbs the Gaanidan Candidate. The player may ask why does the Passion Temple require the salfis flowers, to which the priestess replies that the rituals of the Candidates' training period require a large amount of aether. Mentioning that Allyshiye is selling salfis flowers to Sethra will result in the local priestess receiving a very long and angry reprimand, but the sale has already been done.

- The family matters of the tribes' leaders: After the second day of the tournament, the player character would have the chance to meet an unknown human woman with the physical features of Gaanidans in the tribe's gardens. She introduces herself as Larthia, wife to Dirillsur and mother of Eshir, as well as someone who left the Gaanidan tribe before the player character was born. Through a series of conversations with her, Eshir, and other characters, it would be possible to puzzle together the whole story behind them, which would go as follows:

Having lived a somewhat sheltered life in the Gaanidan tribe, Cneve took a liking to her, which she initially returned, partly because of the side of him that she initially showed her, and because he, as an aspiring trader, presented an opportunity to travel across the Valley, which she saw as a chance for her to grow out of her shyness. They start going out together, she gets to travel across the valley, and Cneve slowly reveals his more miserable, demeaning self. During a tournament at the Ashwalker tribe, she falls for Dirillsur, who has setting himself out to become Cneve's rival, so she ditches Cneve and chooses to stay with the Ashwalker. Cneve grows resentful and ends up forming a family with someone else, while Larthia and Dirillsur get married and have Eshir. However, as Eshir grows up, he turns out to be weak and clumsy, extremely clumsy, which easily places him at the bottom of the social ladder among Ashwalkers, and Dirillsur slowly becomes ashamed of his son, which provokes growing discord between the parents. At some point, a travelling Aiishen meets the young Eshir, who, in an act of compassion, not only teaches him magic, but gifts him a lucky charm which he must swear to keep in secret. After some time practicing magic on his own, Dirillsur turns out to have extremely good magical talent, which he uses to palliate his physical deficiencies as that it what is valued the most in his tribe. He then moves from a weak, pathetic child who can't defend himself to a promising warrior who ends up winning the Ashwalker tournament after just a couple of attempts, becoming an incredibly notable figure in the tribe which suddenly becomes a source of pride for his father, who leverages both his son's new image and his own past fame to become the new chieftain. However, the gigantic division between his past and his new life provokes a sense of dysphoria in Eshir, who feels as alien in his tribe as an adult as he did when he was a child, but this time, for different reasons. He travels to the Aiishen tribe under the pretense to ask them to learn more magic from them, and is initially rejected because the Aiishen find the idea of taking an outsider somewhat scandalous. Nonetheless, he stays within the surroundings of the entrace of the tribe for a few weeks until they relent and let him in. He spends increasing amounts of time with the Aiishen tribe, feeling comfortable as someone who everyone accepts to be an outsider, but eventually discovers that the 'lucky charm' he was gifted years ago is actually an artifact from the Goddess to harness and strengthen the surrounding aether and fortify a person's development in the Holy Arts, a much smaller version of the process used to train the Candidates in the Passion Temple. His image of himself begins to shatter, as he begins to see his past feats not so much as his own merit, but rather, a cheat that someone made him use without his knowledge, and feels undeserving to belong to either tribe.

Back in the present day, Eshir is trying to distance himself from his father's opportunistic pride for him, and sees Veel's defiance of his own father both an inspiration and a reason to bond over. Dirillsur, well aware of his tense relationship with his wife and son, returns to what he sees as the foundational stone of his adult life: his rivalry with Cneve, further creating more problems rather than growing his own short-comings.

- Minor plotlines: Nimeresh's festival and Claw's search for an armor, as well as a minor sidequest where the player character learns some marketing under Sethra. Mostly padding, with Nimeresh's festival needing to have a lot of it so that the adult game actually has adult content.

Everything gets torn apart

Across the various days of the tournament, there would be two separate plotlines where the player character is still in the competition, and another one where she isn't. You lose a battle, you get thrown into the other plotline, which has some changes but is still mostly the same. Sheze is suspected at some point of using magic to strengthen Pain during the fights, so she is blackmailed into leaving the arena during tournament fights (did you notice Pain's buffed status during her fight with Valtan? That was foreshadowing). In the combat before the semifinal, the Gaanidan Candidate would fight Veel. In the semifinal, either the Gaanidan Candidate or Veel would have to face Nash, which Dirillsur sees as a wasted opportunity since the crowning moment when *his* Ashwalker fighter triumphs over the Gaanidan one should be the finals, and Cneve sees it the exact same, that is, the finals should be the crowning moment when *his* Gaanidan fighter triumphs over the Ashwalker one, so they both nag the organizers and reach the compromise of turning the semifinals into a 2vs2, with both Nash and the Gaanidan fighter facing both Pain and Claw. The special mechanic of this combat would have been taunting Pain and reducing her hit chance through various means, since her OP attack has a chance to hit her own teammates if she misses it. Too bad that Valtan didn't have the plot armor to get into a teamfight, I guess. During the fight, it looks like a storm is going to break out, but it doesn't.

The final takes place the next day. If Pain and Claw win in the previous day, the final is between them, which is used to further show Pain's bullying of Claw. Otherwise, Nash faces either Veel or the Gaanidan Candidate, and the enmity between Gaanidans and Ashwalkers has almost grown into open hostility, with a particular incident almost turning violent. If things have been managed properly with her, the player may ask her to give a speech to remind everyone's of the original goals of the tournament, to find a shared value in the appreciation for martial arts, which will be given either by her and Veel or by her and the player, in both cases angering both Cneve and Dirillsur but tempering the enmity between the tribes.

Whatever the case, an aether storm breaks out. Some people try to make the combat continue. It ends immediately if there was a speech by the combatants, or cut short after a couple of turns when someone shouts that there are monsters approaching the tribe, or it still lingers on if Pain is beauting up Claw. So everyone leaves the arena in a disorderly manner, and almost all the warriors charge forward to fight the monsters, but Eshir asks to form a group that protects those who can't defend themselves in the center of the tribe, while the rest of the fighters charge the monsters head on. A series of fights ensue, similar to the ending of the first adventure, though this time, winning faster will result in the tribe receiving lower damages. Upon approaching the entrance of the tribe, a several meters tall creature appears:

It is the final boss of this adventure. A creature with extremelly buffed up control, AoE attacks and actions that provoke mass bondage and branding. Whether the player makes it to the end or not, a victor emerges:

The monsters end up routed, and the Ashwalker tribe saved... Kind of. There aren't casualties among the tribespeople, but plenty of the buildings are either damaged or destroyed. The day ends.

Conclusion

The priestesses, Ashwalkers, Gaanidans, and the couple of Beastkin gather at the center of the tribe. Eshir has a proposition: return some of the salfis flowers collected during the tournament to the Ashwalker tribe, so that he can use it to clear up the rubble. It wouldn't immediately solve the destruction in the tribe, but it would speed up the process by months. During the speech, he also asks the same to the Gaanidans, as he has discovered that Sethra had been buying some of the salfis flowers. Shrezdill refuses the proposition immediately, arguing that the salfis flowers are needed to get a new High Priestess as soon as possible, which will eventually solve all the problems in the Valley, while Cneve jumps in to argue that the flowers that the Gaanidans (and he says Gaanidans, not Sethra) have gotten were legitimately sold, and asking them to depart of them is an insult, which triggers a verbal confrontation between him and Dirillsur. Sethra, in the meantime, takes the Gaanidan Candidate away with a proposition: argue in favor of the Gaanidans not parting with the salfis flowers, and she will put apart some of them for her mother's ritual.

It's beautiful, isn't it? All of these separate plot lines that seem completely irrelevant to each other but come together in the end to crush you with a painful choice. The worse everyone did in the fight against the monsters in the previous day, the more salfis flowers will be requested, so you're rewarded for winning in the tournament. If you want to get the Gaanidans to gift their salfis flowers back to the Ashwalkers, the player character needs some Gaanidan respect, mostly gained by winning combats in the tournament, for Nash not to be radically confrontational with the Gaanidans, which would otherwise derail the negotiation, and for Dirillsur to not to participate in the negotiations, which you can achieve by asking for compassion for the Ashwalkers, then calling him out in his opportunism regarding his son and mismanagement of the tournament and the tribes' defenses, which eventually results in him being replaced with Eshir during the negotiation, which prompts Veel to fight Cneve to not to be such a moron; having Nash give a speech on the previous day relaxes these conditions, - in the end, however, there's no ritual for the player character's mom. Having Shrezdill to return some of the salfis flowers requires getting Candidates other than Nash to support the notion, which won't be difficult *unless* you didn't try to get the Gaanidans to return salfis flowers themselves, and results in the training buffs of the Passion Temple after the second adventure to be less powerful, in proportion with how many flowers were given back. If the player character didn't try to get any extra salfis flowers for the Ashwalkers at any point, the relationship with Nash is strained; if the Ashwalker tribe receives nearly not enough support, Nash's relationship with everyone get a big hit and her values change drastically, and the Ashwalker tribe begins to stray away from the Passion Temple. If there's enough support, however, Nash begins to outgrow her obsession with fighting and begins considering the importance of the priestesses actually doing their role to arbiter the conflicts in the Valley, becoming a more serious contender for High Priestess.

All of this art was made by Chili Cherry around the first half of 2024, and had been kept hidden since then. Feels good to finally show it, at least.