"Truly unbelievable..."
"Aren't cultivators supposed to be intelligent, wise, and powerful? Why did those grandmaster artisans' disciples in Pian Province react so sluggishly to the uprising, and perform so poorly afterward?"
"Those slave workers and artisans were ruled by weaklings like these, even enslaved by them for more than ten years?"
Within the Materialized Heaven, Mei Xuan could not help being overcome with emotion.
The situation in Pian Province had deteriorated this far entirely through their own doing.
But how some people could be so foolish was genuinely baffling.
"There's nothing surprising about that. Rule relies on power, but maintaining it relies on inertia."
"Ruling through force and constant, intense pressure requires an enormous upkeep cost. So once they've conquered their realm in the initial stage, they have to change their approach. At its core, it's about controlling people's hearts..."
"Whoever wins the people's hearts wins the world. What truly rules people isn't their ruler, but the ruled themselves!"
Li Chen said this to Mei Xuan.
His words came from heartfelt reflection.
People often said there could be no revolution in the cultivation world, because the gulf in strength between the common folk and cultivators was too vast for resistance to be possible.
But in Li Chen's eyes, sects and cultivators were paper tigers.
If they squeezed people too hard, problems would arise sooner or later.
When the disparities in wealth and strength grew too great, and high-rank cultivators became oligarchs and titans, believing they could sleep without a care because the mighty power of their divine abilities belonged to them alone, that was when the crisis truly descended.
Because at that point, not only would the common folk rebel, but low-rank and high-rank cultivators would rebel as well.
Even more sophisticated methods of rule, relying on various means of