A star veiled its light and traveled silently through the boundless expanse of space.
It traveled for decades.
No matter how far it flew, the world ahead never changed in the slightest. The moon and sun cycled year after year; the stars held their unchanging distances; the soul-devouring Nether Soul-Eroding Astral Wind blew without cease through the realm; and a meteorite containing a trace of spiritual energy occasionally passed by.
It was that simple, that tedious, that unchanging.
On the scale of the boundless universe, decades were less than an instant. Almost nothing had changed.
Any mortal who came here would surely go mad along such a route.
That was why the most important prerequisite for interstellar travel was a breakthrough in hibernation technology. Without it, mortals could never venture too far from their homeworld, even in a lifetime. They would die on the journey.
"The homeworld and the major middle-thousand worlds need a more convenient way to communicate."
"Otherwise, even if they share the same language and ancestry and graduate from the same high school system, citizens will inevitably drift apart after thousands or tens of thousands of years. Movements for local independence will emerge..."
The mere tedium of a decades-long journey had not affected Jiang Ding. While deducing sword techniques and cultivation methods, a thought surfaced in his mind.
It was a view that had gained currency among the Immortal Sect's humanities scholars over the past few decades, as the Immortal Sect expanded across more than twenty realms. A great many papers had been written on it.
Of course, given the vast gap in cultivation between researchers in the immortal sciences and the humanities, the view had stirred little response in the Immortal Sect.
Those who happened to hear of it usually scoffed and paid it no mind.