The higher one's cultivation, the more deeply taboo the two words karma became.
It was much like cultivators' attitude toward ordinary mortals. The lower a cultivator's cultivation, the less they treated mortals as people, often regarding them as pigs and sheep to be slaughtered at will, driving them like livestock—or else feeling ill at ease unless they used a few human sacrifices in alchemy or artifact refining.
But the higher one's cultivation, especially after crossing the divide between immortal and mortal and reaching the Upper Three Realms, the more the immortals, buddhas, gods, and saints valued the mortal world. First, they required their disciples not to harm mortals wantonly; second, they let all things follow their natural course and develop on their own, avoiding too much entanglement with mortal karma.
Mortals might be like ants, but when the karma of billions upon billions of mortals tangled together, it could drag even immortals and gods into the water. And when the number of mortals reached that of a Great Thousand World, even Pure Yang beings who had leapt beyond the Three Realms and were no longer within the Five Elements, who were said to possess limitless lifespans and remain unworn through ten thousand tribulations, had to be wary.
The most crucial thing within it was precisely those two words: karma.
What immortal or god did not fear causes? What bodhisattva did not fear effects?
Especially when this involved karma from the previous cycle of kalpa, tied to a mighty Daoist sacred land that had once suppressed the heavens and a Pure Yang bearer of the Dao. Even a Pure Yang Dao Lord would feel his scalp prickle if he came across it—and yet Jiang Sheng had run right into it.
"You should have encountered quite a few people before, right? Among