"Just as you said before, humans who formed civilizations and societies had, to a large extent, gained the ability to resist natural selection. Soul Beasts were the same," Yi Tianzhi said. "Soul Beasts themselves possessed formidable strength. Their ability to adapt to natural environments far surpassed that of ordinary plants and animals, and the same was true of their intelligence. Weak Soul Beasts would band together like humans, while powerful Soul Beasts could even withstand natural disasters on their own. At the very least, they could run away.
"For beings like Soul Beasts, when choosing reproductive strategies, they valued quality over quantity. At least, most Soul Beasts did. This made them difficult to reproduce. Compared to their lifespans and average survival periods, Soul Beasts were quite scarce, and excessive reproduction was not particularly severe. Unlike ordinary animals, many Soul Beasts could survive simply by absorbing the essence of heaven and earth. Plant-type Soul Beasts at the bottom of the food chain could also accumulate considerable energy with high efficiency. Soul Beasts did not particularly lack resources for survival. As for living space, because Soul Beasts reproduced with difficulty, it had not actually been scarce in ancient times, before humans occupied the world. Ever since the era of the Great Cataclysm, the number of Soul Beasts had never recovered to the level of the primordial peak of exotic beasts.
"In other words, the natural selection formed through the interaction between organisms and the environment in Charles Robert Darwin's theory of evolution was not so applicable to Soul Beasts. In most cases, Soul Beasts had already overcome the shortcomings of their environment. What created natural selection and drove Soul Beast evolution was mainly competition among Soul Beasts themselves—the Red Queen Hypothesis of Leigh Van Valen. When one kind of Soul Beast evolved,