On a plain.
Yang Weite was praying beneath a giant tree with a group of farmers.
This was the World Tree Yang Weite had planted, rooted in the farmers' minds and planted within everyone's thoughts.
As long as the farmers tilled the land, produced food, and multiplied the population, the World Tree would keep growing stronger.
Unfortunately, once farming reached a certain stage, it could no longer be sustained.
Natural disasters, man-made calamities, wars and conflicts, plagues and diseases—eventually, the population would be wiped out, and the cycle would begin again.
They had finally staggered into the modern age, where they no longer needed to fear natural disasters, epidemics, famine, or drought.
Yet because of industrialization, farmers now made up only one-tenth of the population, or even just three to five percent.
People living under industrialization were unwilling to reproduce.
After all, unlike farmers, they did not have an urgent need for family labor.
On the contrary, raising a child to meet industrialized standards was far more difficult—more than ten times harder than it had been for farmers in the past.
A farmer only needed to raise a child until the age of six, or even five, before the child could run all over the yard helping the family with work.
Cutting grass, gathering vegetables, herding sheep, watching chickens...
At six, there was another laborer earning money for the household. Naturally, they had as many children as they could.
That did not work in an industrialized society. At the very least, one had to raise a child until sixteen before they could enter a factory.
The difference between six and sixteen was simply enormous.
A couple could marry at twenty and keep having children until thirty, one every two years, for a total of five. They only had to struggle