Spirit City was an enormous city built around Martial Soul Mountain, divided into an inner and an outer city. The inner city was reserved for Soul Masters serving Spirit Hall to live in, and all its administrative departments were located there. It also boasted every kind of entertainment venue and merchant association from around the world. It was no exaggeration to say that anything circulating on the market could be bought in Spirit City, provided one had enough money.
Around three hundred thousand elite Soul Masters of Spirit Hall had made their homes here. Aside from Battle Soul Masters, an even greater number were Soul Masters whose abilities served everyday life. Many of them joined the Martial Soul Research Institute, developing specialized products based on their own martial souls, such as high-yield crops and various civilian tools. The rest had to rely on their own abilities. Spirit Hall ranked practitioners in every trade and profession and provided subsidies according to those rankings.
The best among them could either be recruited by great families or open clothing shops, taverns, restaurants, and other businesses with Spirit City's assistance. This ensured that everything enjoyed within the inner city was the very best.
As long as their craftsmanship was good enough, Soul Masters with any kind of everyday-life specialty could settle here and prosper. Those employed by Spirit Hall were assigned a small courtyard residence for themselves and their families.
Outsiders who wanted to settle in the inner city, however, had to pay exorbitant housing prices, and they could only rent, not buy. Once the contract expired, everything built on the property belonged to Spirit Hall. Whether they could renew their lease depended entirely on whether they had paid Spirit Hall enough tribute.
Even so, the tremendous benefits still drew the continent's foremost merchants in swarms. The inner city was, after all, a gathering place for the wealthiest people on the entire continent, as well as an opportunity to ascend to the heavens in a single step.
Spirit Hall collected steep trade taxes and offered its Soul Masters generous compensation. Its Soul Masters then spent that money enjoying the services these merchants brought from far and wide. Although Spirit Hall squeezed the merchants in every possible way until their profit margins became razor-thin, they still avoided losses and gained a channel through which to deal with influential figures. Everyone got what they wanted out of the arrangement.
Beyond the inner city, the vast outer city housed nearly a million ordinary people and less powerful Soul Masters. The earliest immigrants had long since died out over the course of a thousand years. As the population grew and the chaotic conditions in the empires gradually stabilized, Spirit City had stopped accepting ordinary people from outside less than fifty years after its founding.
The ordinary people who could live in the outer city now were all relatives of Soul Masters who had rendered meritorious service to Spirit Hall, lived in the inner city, and later died in the line of duty. They could live here permanently and receive a small courtyard residence, where they could plant the special high-yield, fast-maturing crop seeds or saplings distributed by Spirit Hall. Once the crops ripened, aside from what they kept to eat themselves, Spirit Hall sent people to collect the rest. The food these ordinary people produced was more than enough to make Spirit City self-sufficient.
On top of that, if they used their survivor benefits to open a small shop, their lives could already be considered excellent.
Rather than live in Spirit City, however, more people chose to accept a larger survivor benefit and return to their hometowns and the familiar surroundings they had once known. They also received preferential treatment from the local Spirit Hall. Though life in Spirit City was rich and colorful, they would still be at the bottom of society there. Back home, that money would be enough to make them landlords. Thus, Spirit City's population always remained at a comfortably manageable level.
Meanwhile, although military affairs were still limited to cavalry charges or the seven-person squad ambush tactics devised by Spirit Hall, with no progress whatsoever in armaments, civilian applications flourished. Rows of streetlights, large screens capable of live broadcasts, soul-powered systems for storing information and registering records, and all manner of recreational game boards capable of calculating data on the spot made people's lives rich and colorful.
These devices were not particularly complex in structure. They were probably just specialized applications of soul power, and only Soul Masters with specific martial souls could operate them. They did not yet meet the standards of Soul Tools. Perhaps these were the imitations Wang Yan had mentioned earlier.
The world's largest Great Soul Arena was also located here. At Great Soul Arenas elsewhere, many soul fighting teams topped out at gold rank, while the better ones only reached ruby or sapphire. Diamond-ranked teams, which could only be formed by Soul Saints, were out of the question.
Here, however, there were more than ten diamond-ranked teams. The finest members of the great families' younger generations all hoped to make a name for themselves here and add another achievement to their records.
The reclusive families who owned the Great Soul Arena behind the scenes were also willing to send their own younger members here to participate in soul fighting while posing as complete nobodies. These nobodies were generally extraordinarily talented, on par with the elite second-generation disciples of Spirit Hall. The matches were full of suspense, and there was no possibility of rigged fights or betting traps set up to fleece gamblers. Whether anyone made money depended entirely on their judgment.
But there were so many complete nobodies that the ordinary people who regularly frequented the arena all knew what was going on. It was hard to say whether the Great Soul Arena had originally existed to rake in money, or whether its founders had simply come together to create a platform that gathered the outstanding talents under heaven so their younger generations could hone themselves, only to discover along the way that the venture was quite good at making money too.
These "complete nobodies" had not appeared out of thin air. Anyone who searched carefully could naturally find traces of their origins. However, the reclusive families had existed even longer than the two great empires and had never harbored any ambitions toward the continent. Whether they had reached some agreement with the higher-ups was unknown. In any case, Spirit Hall had always treated them as though they did not exist.
Walking through Spirit City's streets, Leng Xiyue listened to Wang Yan's proud explanations while looking at the bustling crowds around her. Some gathered before a statue of an angel holding a greatsword, bowing devoutly and giving thanks for everything the Holy Emperor had brought them. Others gathered in nearby entertainment venues to play board games or cards, their laughter never ceasing. Many merchant caravans also hurried past. Leng Xiyue felt that no identification papers were needed to distinguish locals from outsiders; their bearing alone made it obvious.
She had assumed that even Spirit City would be no more than a traditional feudal city. In reality, with the extraordinarily high agricultural productivity provided by Soul Masters, ordinary people enjoyed rich and colorful lives. There was no divide between these ordinary people and Spirit Hall's Soul Masters, and marriages between them were far from uncommon. The children of Soul Masters and ordinary people were also almost always Soul Masters. With such intermingling, ordinary people could integrate into the Soul Master class without Spirit Hall needing to issue any policies to protect their status. There was no hierarchy of contempt.
Leaving doors unlocked at night and letting lost belongings lie untouched in the streets were everyday occurrences. Spirit Hall's guards, tasked with maintaining order, were practically ornamental. Outsiders came to Spirit City either to pay their respects to the holy city or to trade, and the length of their stay was strictly limited. What villain would dare cause trouble in a city like this?
Even with Leng Xiyue's knowledge, she could think of no political system on Earth, modern or historical, that could achieve such a state. The great harmony under heaven envisioned by the ancients could hardly have been more than this.
Such a system was just right for sustaining the development of Spirit City as a whole. If its territory grew any larger, it probably could not guarantee that everywhere would remain this way.
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