A little tip: To improve everyone's reading experience, here's some additional background.
The author messed up. These were things that should have been explained clearly in Volume One, but I forgot about them while writing, thinking I had already laid the groundwork.
I want to emphasize this: Han and Luo's behavior was not the result of forcibly lowering their intelligence!
It was mentioned in the first three chapters that, during the early days of the Abyss's descent, even the capital had been destroyed, forcing the temporary relocation of the capital to Spirit Spring.
For the first ten or twenty years, the central government had almost completely lost control of the local regions. Think of it like the apocalypse.
At that time, the various martial artist organizations and powerful factions in Hua Nation carved up the territories and ruled them autonomously.
It was only after the emergence of the earliest Grandmasters—including Gu Xunzhang, Yun Heng, and Zeng Jianguo—that the various local factions were integrated, forming an autonomous alliance. This was the predecessor of the Martial Arts Alliance.
By the time the nation had recovered, the Martial Arts Alliance had already grown too powerful to control.
It controlled most martial arts resources and most rifts, established a martial arts education system, and its registered martial artists accounted for sixty to seventy percent of all martial artists in Hua Nation.
The early powerhouses had also branched out and established one great family after another.
The Martial Arts Alliance was, in reality, an alliance of great families, with the Yun Family serving as something like their common overlord.
Over the next nearly two hundred years, the government and the great families planted people in each other's ranks and kept one another in check.
On top of that, there were factions within the great families,