Summer of New Calendar year 100175, in Ji Shan, Central Sea, in a market district beneath a spirit peak.
Morning sunlight shone over the prosperous city. Its market streets bustled with people coming and going.
This city had risen through resource development. As in other resource-producing regions across Central Sea, the Puppet Masters had invested tremendous effort and capital into production and infrastructure, providing ever more comprehensive amenities and estates of every kind. Even spiritual energy interference and restricted grain yields, once as persistent as chronic ailments, had been resolved, and the population grew by the day.
Almost without anyone noticing, it had begun to resemble a modern city.
Along with the common folk, the number of cultivators had increased. Some had begun devoting themselves to everyday tools for the people and invented a method for cultivating hybrid spirit rice. Supplying low-level cultivators with enough to sustain their qi refining was no longer a problem. By making use of the Imperial Road and controlling the concentration of spiritual energy within the spirit-gathering grand array, they could reliably secure their harvests.
But spirit rice was still only spirit rice. Cultivators at the bottom still faced shortages of cultivation provisions and struggled to advance. Only the outstanding few could, with luck, rise above the masses and set foot on the true path of seeking the Dao.
A vast number of early-stage qi-refining cultivators had accumulated between the common folk and the cultivators. As sky cities everywhere developed rapidly, they actively promoted systems of mechanical ascension akin to materialized heaven, continually drawing talent from the lower world into their citizenry.
Thus, cultivators at foundation establishment or above had not grown more numerous in the rough-and-tumble world of wandering cultivators. Instead, they had become scarcer. Even the powerful backers behind certain cities and market