"You mean you need to expand the Ji Sect's ranks?" Zhao Qingtan was not too surprised, but he still turned the question back on him.
A school could not simply expand because it wanted to. An academic school had to consist, at the very least, of people doing academic work before they could be called figures of a "school."
Of course, the vast majority of Modern Dharma Cultivators were engaged in academic work.
But in truth, the Modern Dharma system was somewhat like the "publish or perish" atmosphere in Earth's universities. Whether one held a teaching post or a research post, one was required to publish papers. To a great extent, this had caused an explosion in the number of papers on Earth.
On Earth, hundreds of thousands of theorems emerged every year. But the overwhelming majority of them were useless.
Behind every useless theorem might have stood a university teacher trying to keep their rice bowl—or a master's student who only wanted to graduate with a diploma.
Modern Dharma Cultivators were much the same. To obtain better resources [here, resources included not only spiritual energy and medicinal pills, but also more advanced methods, guidance from renowned teachers, and more], they needed to exchange papers for merit points. This rule was virtually meaningless to the Immortals at the heart of the Immortal Alliance, but countless cultivators on the periphery were blocked by it, forced to spend most of their lives building up their fortunes in exchange for a path toward a low-grade Primordial Spirit.
This inequality did exist.
Not every cultivator who published papers could be considered to be "doing academic work."
Fortunately, this was a world with spells. Almost every cultivator also held the profession of an "engineer." Even if their own research abilities were insufficient, they could accumulate