When Feiniang asked his price, Shi Feiyang did not answer immediately. Instead, he said he needed to go back and think it over.
He hesitated because this decision would eventually involve the lives of countless living beings.
Once he allowed souls to be traded in the Ming-Yu Immortal Market, it was all but certain that vast numbers of living beings would be killed, their Gods' souls extracted and captured, brought here for sale, then used to refine swords, treasures, and demons.
That was something he did not want to see.
Yet even if he refused, many things would remain unavoidable.
Originally, this world's cultivators were still living in a "hunter-gatherer society." Whenever they needed something, they went out to find it. If they needed herbs, they gathered them on famous mountains or overseas. If they needed Five Elements essence qi, even someone as formidable as Li Jingxu had to divine the locations of Five Elements Earth Veins and gather and refine it himself.
Moreover, all resources were naturally produced, and supplies were limited. Even an Emei Sect elder like the Drunken Taoist had only a single flying sword to uphold his reputation. Cultivation resources were scarce, and exchanges consisted solely of gifts and barter. Currency had yet to appear.
Money did not produce value in itself. Its greatest significance lay in bringing labor together to create value.
Shi Feiyang's Heaven Beyond Divine Mountain belonged to an "agrarian society," with large-scale planting, breeding, mining, and smelting, bringing a million citizens together for mass production.
Countless members of the lowest ranks of demonkind and other nonhuman beings were organized into a workforce. Each individual's abilities were limited, but small amounts accumulated into abundance, grains of sand piled into a tower. In the end, they produced precious pearls that made even the Drunken