"Was this what the beginning of humanity's extinction looked like?"
Jiang Ding watched the scenes unfolding in the Mountain-Quelling Sect, shaken despite himself.
He was no student who had spent his whole life in a school's ivory tower. He was an Immortal Sect cultivator who had lived through many wars and gained experience in many worlds.
He had thought of the bloodline lineages ruling the Northern Plains, enslaving hundreds of millions of humans to support a single family and killing for sport at the slightest whim; of the Black Tortoise Heavenly Palace's incense-based divine path, which shackled thought and soul, forcing people to toil all their lives, then denying them peace even in death as they were turned into fanatics driven by gods; of the mortal cultivators under the Shadow Demon Abyss, who were all hosts for shadow parasites...
He had thought those were already hells on earth, the very lowest depths.
After all, Celestial Lord Shuo Yang and generations of cultivators from the Shadow Demon Abyss and the Black Tortoise Heavenly Palace had spent countless lifetimes studying exploitation. They had poured untold wisdom and achievements of the immortal path into it and squeezed out everything they could. Surely there was no way to extract more.
Now Jiang Ding saw what lay beneath even that lowest point.
To be slaves or servants, to have their flesh and blood wrung dry—humans were no longer needed even for that!
In this world, at least, the human cultivators of the Demonstone Minor World were already heading toward widespread extinction.
In a few hundred years, apart from one or two kept as pets, the human race would no longer exist in this world. Many powerful races would occupy their place, leaving them no room to survive.
The survival of the race.
For the first