A Discussion on the Prices in This Book

Uh... everyone knows that pricing in novels is a very hard thing to pin down. After all, authors aren't economics majors, so it's difficult to establish a standard price system.

Having read so many novels, I feel that a novel's pricing mainly needs to be judged from two aspects: first, the incomes of the protagonist and ordinary cultivators; second, the prices of precious pills. As for everything else, it only needs to fluctuate within a certain range.

After thinking it over again and again, rather than randomly inventing a price system myself and having it collapse later on, I felt it would be better to use reality as a benchmark.

In this book, the highest combat power in the mortal world is Spirit Transformation. Its rarity is comparable to the ten richest people in the Reality World. The world's richest people earn tens of billions a year, so Spirit Transformation will correspond to that, then the levels will be matched downward one by one.

Spirit Transformation—ten billion Low-grade Spirit Stones

Nascent Soul—over one hundred million Low-grade Spirit Stones

Golden Core—one million Low-grade Spirit Stones

Foundation Establishment—over ten thousand Low-grade Spirit Stones

Qi Refining—three hundred Low-grade Spirit Stones

Note: 1. This is annual income, not total assets.

2. This is the income of the most ordinary cultivators at that realm. It does not include cultivators proficient in the Hundred Arts of Cultivation.

The second aspect is the pricing of precious pills. For instance, precious pills such as Foundation Establishment Pills and Golden Core Pills, or extremely precious Spirit Artifacts, magical artifacts, Dharma treasures, and the like.

Setting these prices is difficult. If they are too high, even the protagonist cannot afford them, let alone ordinary cultivators. If they are too low, they seem too cheap and fail to highlight their preciousness.

So I thought about it for a long time, then suddenly realized that there seemed to be something in reality that could correspond to them: houses.

As far as I know, in most places where the average monthly salary is 3,000, a house costs roughly one million per unit. In other words, with an annual income of a little over 30,000, one would have to work for thirty years without eating or drinking to afford one.

Applied to things like Foundation Establishment Pills in novels, that means working for thirty years with an annual income of 300 Spirit Stones—roughly 10,000 Spirit Stones. That just happens to match the price of precious pills, and it is also precisely the price of Foundation Establishment Pills in most cultivation novels. Pills in the later stages will receive appropriate markups, but all changes will be based on this foundation.

At such prices, only sects, families pooling their resources, or cultivators who possess cultivation crafts would be qualified to save up and buy them. This also reasonably gives the supporting characters in this book a chance to purchase spiritual items for advancement.

Oh, I should also talk about the classification of Spirit Stone grades.

I believe that the divisions in cultivation novels—Qi Refining, Foundation Establishment, Golden Core, and so on—cannot merely refer to the state of spiritual energy within the body changing from gaseous to liquid, then to solid. They must certainly involve divisions of levels; otherwise, the term "realm" would not exist. Therefore, I introduced the two words "energy level."

As for Spirit Stone grades, they are divided according to Mortal Flow conventions into supreme, high, middle, and low, with an exchange rate of 1 to 100, making them easier for everyone to distinguish. After all, everyone reads for enjoyment. If things are made too complicated, it really affects the reading experience.

That is the pricing system I have established for this book. If anyone has any opinions, feel free to point them out.

Wait, I almost forgot something. Some readers responded to the earlier chapters by saying that the protagonist's creation of various cultivation methods from nothing happened too quickly and did not conform to science. I have a few things to say about that.

Everyone knows that scientific experiments first require determining a research direction, then defining a topic, and finally producing results through day-after-day experimentation.

This process is extremely cumbersome. I can only select stages that are close to success and then describe them in detail.

You want me to write out the entire research process, while also making it detailed and interesting... I'm sorry, but the author is only a newcomer writing books for the first time. I truly don't have that ability, sob~.

And I've read many novels and found that if I wrote it that way, it would easily be called filler. So after thinking it over, I still felt it would be enough to discuss part of it, then summarize the overall picture.

This book will still mainly focus on the protagonist, Lin Chen, exploring and discovering this world composed of spiritual energy, as well as the Righteous-Demonic Great War that swept across the Lingnan Cultivation Land and even the entire mortal realm. I have only briefly written the detailed research process, so if there are any shortcomings, please forgive me.

Lastly, if anyone has any opinions, feel free to point them out.