Recent chapters featured the five major powers, including the Universe Mercenary Alliance and the Virtual Universe Company, competing to recruit Hu Yanbo and offering him a "King Rank seed contract."
Some readers raised questions, pointing out that in the original work, core geniuses, such as Primal Secret Region Members, mainly relied on themselves after the World Lord stage, and there seemed to be no explicit training plan after they became Immortals. This appeared to differ from my setup.
Here, I would like to share the thinking behind this setup, to explain why it did not depart from the original work's logic, but instead offered a reasonable expansion and supplement:
1. Core logic: investing in potential.
Think of the five top powers as the equivalent of elite universities or research institutions in the real world, such as Tsinghua and Peking University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, or the C9 League.
The World Lord stage: the equivalent of investing in doctoral students.
Pouring resources into them-study in Chaos City, training in secret regions, and instruction in secret techniques-was meant to build the strongest possible foundation, betting that they could successfully graduate: ordinary candidates would break through to Immortal, outstanding ones would reach Marquis, and the very best would attain King Rank directly.
After becoming Immortals: the equivalent of the postdoctoral or early-career faculty stage.
An institution would never stop developing its talent simply because they had earned their doctorates.
For early-career faculty who showed potential for further growth, the institution would continue providing resources-research funding, laboratories, and paths to academic promotion-through young talent programs, such as the Excellent Young Scientists Fund and the Distinguished Young Scholars Fund, hoping they would become future leaders in their fields: King-level Immortals and Venerables.
The King Rank seed contract was this universe's support program for top talent.
It was an institutionalized commitment: invest more in promising "early-career faculty" in the hope that they would publish more and better papers, while those without that potential would strike out on their own, relying on themselves to publish papers with limited resources.
It specified how many resources the power would direct toward that member, what privileges it would grant them, and what goals it expected them to achieve within a given period.
2. Compatibility with the original setting
In the original work, even the arrangements concerning Earth were handled through contracts, so I felt that formalizing a training plan like this in a contract
was a clearer way to structure the training system.
The original work primarily followed Luo Feng. He grew far faster than ordinary people and had almost no need to follow this kind of institutional advancement process step by step, so relatively little was written about it.
But that did not mean the system did not exist.
Before you continue