Beyond his strategic preparations, Li Chen had recently been pursuing the same innovations for ordinary people in everyday tools for the people, mechanism puppets, and weapons and equipment.
In matters of livelihood, he chiefly focused on adapting the hundred crafts of the Puppet Dao in The Hundred Crafts, Part One for ordinary use. Li Chen strove to let mortals master agriculture and light and heavy industry themselves, comprehensively improving relatively backward techniques ranging from brick firing, tile making, porcelain production, mining, papermaking, brewing, and weaving to dyeing, salt production, and oil pressing.
These techniques had existed since ancient times and all concerned everyday tools for the people, but they offered little benefit to cultivators' advancement. Puppet Masters seldom studied them and valued them even less.
But Li Chen understood that these were the foundations of social development.
For one person to transcend, he need not concern himself with society. He only needed to withdraw from the world and rise above the mundane.
For an entire civilization, an entire society to transcend, however, one had to focus on society itself-not seek to transcend the mortal world, but instead transform and develop that entire world.
If everyday tools for the people were not developed first, productivity would remain low, and the vast majority of labor and intelligence would be consumed by repetitive production, day after day.
The Eastern Victory Continent of the past, with its focus on cultivators, might well have fallen into this vicious circle.
He said to Mei Xuan, "Do you know what the mire of poverty is? A lack of goods for everyday use and insufficient material supplies constitute poverty. To cultivators like us, ordinary supplies mean nothing, but to ordinary people's livelihoods, supplies are wealth."
"When people are poor, every aspect of their daily lives is consumed by