"Reporting to the Celestial Venerable, the Research Institute has completed testing of Spiritual Energy Etching. It's ready for widespread adoption."
An elderly man in modern clothing stood beneath the Dao Seeking Stone, reporting the results to Lu Bai. He could barely contain his excitement.
"So Spiritual Energy Etching was the first to succeed?"
Lu Bai raised an eyebrow, slightly surprised.
Incidentally, while implementing the laws, he had also established a Research Institute and recruited cultivators who specialized in puppetry and mechanisms to research machines ordinary people could use.
The reason was simple: he knew full well that no matter how strict or lenient the laws he established were, the order he had built would inevitably crumble once he was gone.
So he had to do something else as well.
Improving productivity, for instance, was one viable path.
However, he hadn't made many demands. For the most part, he had simply given the Research Institute a few ideas, such as steam engines and internal combustion engines.
There was no helping it. Widespread scientific and technological progress required more than technology. What mattered was accumulation and the liberation of thought, so that the people could develop basic scientific literacy.
It was not as simple as one might imagine.
If he hadn't been powerful enough to suppress all of Xuanzhou, he would likely have been killed long ago for pushing through reforms from the top down.
After all, high-level cultivators could live for thousands, even tens of thousands, of years, and the history of the Cultivation World stretched back to ancient times.
The fact that society had barely changed over such a long span of time meant that cultivators had no desire to bring about change.
With a cultivator's methods, manufacturing machines was a simple matter.
Did they not understand that providing machines