Out of their reverence for cultivators, the vast majority of humans saw nothing wrong with cultivators standing above ordinary people.
Of course, cultivators had little interest in wielding authority over ordinary humans, so political and economic power in human society remained largely in the hands of the Federal Parliament.
As for military power, the existence of powerful cultivators had long since led humanity to abolish its armed forces, retaining only a police force to maintain public order.
As time passed, even the Cultivation World gradually abandoned its insular attitude and forged closer ties with ordinary human society.
After all, the Cultivation World also needed to pass on its legacy. The more humans it could choose from, the more likely it was to find fine seedlings suited to cultivation. Besides, not every cultivator was accomplished enough to sever all worldly ties. Leaving mundane affairs to mortals made it easier for cultivators to save time for their cultivation.
Whether a human could cultivate depended entirely on whether they possessed an aptitude known as a Spiritual Root. Those with a Spiritual Root needed only a little cultivation to absorb spiritual energy and temper their bodies, thereby crossing the threshold into the Cultivation World. Those without one had no way to connect with spiritual energy, much less cultivate.
Why did some people possess a Spiritual Root while others did not? Just what sort of person would possess one?
Since ancient times, these questions had never had a clear answer. Only cultivators who had attained some measure of success could determine whether an ordinary human possessed a Spiritual Root by scanning them with their spiritual sense.
During the Earth Era, the Cultivation World had passed on its legacy through senior cultivators taking in people of suitable aptitude whom they discovered while traveling through the mortal world.
Since fewer than one in ten thousand people possessed a Spiritual Root, some unlucky cultivators spent their entire lives without finding a single disciple to their liking. This was also why Earth's Cultivation World had existed for thousands of years without ever truly flourishing.
In this great cosmic era, the integration of the Cultivation World with ordinary human society made selecting a new generation of disciples on a large scale exceedingly easy.
Whenever a cultivation sect threw open its gates to select disciples, the planet where it stood would become the liveliest place in the entire Milky Way Galaxy. Countless humans came to try their luck. If they managed to enter a cultivator's tutelage, it would truly be like ascending to heaven in a single step.
Gradually, cities of ordinary humans appeared even on planets rich in spiritual energy whose mountain peaks were occupied by cultivation sects. After all, everyone understood that the pavilion nearest the water caught the moonlight first.
Eventually, the cities that stood alongside cultivation sects became the most prosperous places in human society, and almost everyone considered it an honor to be able to immigrate to them.
As the pool of candidates grew rapidly, even though fewer than one in ten thousand possessed a Spiritual Root, the number of people entering the Cultivation World increased exponentially.
The Cultivation World entered a period of extraordinary prosperity, with the total number of cultivators in human society breaking past the ten-million mark. Even all the cultivators of the past combined could not have reached that figure.
As cultivators grew more numerous, all manner of cultivation-related resources became increasingly scarce. Spirit stones in particular, which cultivators used extensively, gradually fell short of the ever-growing demand.
By then, the Cultivation World had already exerted an enormous influence on human society, and many new industries began to emerge. Ordinary humans ventured into activities such as mining spirit stones and gathering rare spirit herbs, trading what they obtained to cultivators for spirit herbs or worldly wealth.
Gradually, beyond meeting the needs of ordinary humans, the Galactic Federation developed an enormous industrial chain that provided services to cultivators.
Seeking more resources, humanity began exploring the unknown reaches of the cosmos, discovering more and more planets. Some of these planets abounded in spiritual energy. Besides producing vast quantities of rare items imbued with spiritual energy, they could also serve as new homes for cultivation sects.
Other planets were naturally poor in spiritual energy and could only serve as undeveloped worlds awaiting settlement by ordinary humans. As for planets that even ordinary humans were unwilling to develop, humanity called them garbage planets, and they gradually faded from memory as time passed.
The sweeping development of the cosmos carried humanity's footprints across almost the entire Milky Way Galaxy. Humans discovered tens of thousands of planets harboring life, more than a thousand of which were worth developing.
Humanity had reason to believe that bringing the entire Milky Way Galaxy into the Galactic Federation's territory was merely a matter of time. Even advancing into other galaxies was not impossible.
Connors Star was naturally among the planets humanity had discovered, but it lay on the fringes of present-day human society. With naturally sparse spiritual energy and a harsh environment, it had no development value whatsoever-a garbage planet in the truest sense.
One could say that, apart from its location still being marked on humanity's star charts, Connors Star had been almost completely forgotten.
The old man was a cultivator, and a top-tier expert who had reached the Nascent Soul Realm at that. But for certain unusual reasons, he had suffered a catastrophic upheaval. His Nascent Soul had been severed, his Qi Sea Core shattered, and his earth-shaking cultivation forcibly destroyed.
Only after barely managing to escape to Connors Star had the old man shaken off his pursuers. Yet he was also trapped on this garbage planet with its meager spiritual energy, utterly stripped of any chance to leave.
With his cultivation completely destroyed, the old man could no longer absorb spiritual energy. He could only rely on his formerly profound foundation to preserve as much of his former abilities as possible. But as the spiritual energy within him was consumed, he would grow weaker and weaker, until he became inferior even to an ordinary person.
To put it more vividly, the old man's body was like a battery that could not be recharged. Once its energy ran out, it would become utterly useless.
That was why the old man had still had the strength to hunt when Liu Xing was little, but had become a decrepit shadow of himself by the time Liu Xing grew a little older.
PS: Haha, the new book had only been up for a day, and you brothers and sisters had already voted it onto the category's new-book rankings! Beyond how thrilled I am, there's not much else to say. I'm eagerly hoping you'll keep those recommendation votes coming-we can still climb the new-book rankings one step at a time!
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