One hundred and seventy years had passed.
A full one hundred and seventy years later, Dream City could be said to have been completely transformed.
It was still an industrial city. After all, so many people had to be fed, and farming could not sustain so many; productivity had to be maximized.
However, distribution efficiency had improved enormously. The demonic path had all but vanished here. Li Qi governed this region through the Shaman Path, beginning to cultivate the Heaven and Earth Great Source in ways suited to this land of scorching sands, balancing the cycles of nature and allowing everything to operate in perfect harmony.
The so-called "cycle" was, in truth, turning waste into treasure. Often, one person's waste was another's treasure. To tree demons and certain other living beings, a septic tank was an all-you-can-eat buffet.
What tree demons considered utterly meaningless—shed dead skin or products of menstruation—was delicious food, even precious cultivation treasures, to other creatures.
Mineral-type beings, such as mountain gods, sometimes secreted substances from their surfaces that were certain alloys or precious crystals, while many resources favored by humanoid beings might also be someone else's byproducts.
At the end of the day, everything in this world was merely "energy."
An ecosystem itself was a process through which various substances were obtained from environments such as the atmosphere, water, and soil; transformed through one link after another; brought into the ecosystem; repeatedly used by other organisms; and finally returned to the environment. This process included both living and nonliving things.
Put romantically... we were all stardust.
The raw materials of every cell in your body were billions of years old. The elements composing "our" bodies all came from stardust, so "our" existence was far older than we imagined. And cells from others, or microorganisms on their