Noticing the traces of yearning and pursuit deep in the eyes of the young cultivators present, Ye Xiu smiled faintly, then with a click, shut off the light screen behind him.
"It seems your desire for academic credits is even greater than I imagined?"
When facing outsiders, Ye Xiu, as Heyang City's pioneer and the guide who had laid the groundwork for everything, needed to maintain a certain public image.
A persona was generally an artificial falsehood deliberately designed to satisfy the public's fantasies.
Yet it had to be said that even when people knew full well it was false, most would still willingly choose to wear that mask for the benefits it brought.
Ye Xiu was no exception.
What sustained Heyang City was the Alliance, and what allowed the Alliance to keep the city functioning normally was the order it established.
For people to abide by that order, beyond their fear of the punishment brought by violating it, the most important thing was that they sincerely believed maintaining order would bring them benefits.
And once it rose to that level, what it relied upon was no longer something so practical.
From Ye Xiu's perspective, the existence of Heyang City was, at its core, a vast dream.
A beautiful dream conjured from the longing for good things in the hearts of all independent cultivators after they had suffered injustice.
That dream might differ from person to person, but there would inevitably be a certain shared similarity within it.
Ye Xiu had seized upon that point, precisely extracting the demands shared by everyone and adding to them stroke by stroke, ultimately constructing such a beautiful dream that independent cultivators were unwilling to wake from.
A world where they believed independent cultivators could live like this.
And once he had gained enough