Blade Spirit One said helplessly, "Because many blade spirits pushed themselves too hard while making mechanical insects, they exhausted their divine souls and vanished like smoke."
Lin Ke raised an eyebrow at that. "Why would they do that?"
Blade Spirit One took the Spirit Stones from Lin Ke's hand, then said awkwardly, "Over the past decade or so, the Spirit Stones we had on hand began dwindling."
"So there weren't enough Spirit Stones to distribute to all the cultivators."
"That left me with no choice but to introduce rankings, using the number of mechanical insects produced as the standard."
"I allocated Spirit Stones to the blade spirits with high production efficiency, which meant that those with low production efficiency received fewer and fewer Spirit Stones."
"The fewer Spirit Stones they received, the less nourishment these blade spirits obtained, and so their divine souls grew weaker."
"That caused their production efficiency to drop further, until they finally dissipated."
Lin Ke's expression changed drastically. "In other words, those few were literally worked to death?"
Blade Spirit One nodded. "Precisely."
"There was also one blade spirit who slacked off all day, wallowing in the seven emotions and six desires within the illusory realm, doing nothing at all."
"He died in less than two years."
Lin Ke counted the blade spirits. There had originally been twenty of them, but now only fourteen remained.
Most of the blade spirits who had died were cultivators with one foot in the Nascent Soul Realm, whose divine souls had been relatively weak to begin with.
It was therefore inevitable that they would collapse under such a heavy production workload.
"No matter. In that case, I'll simply capture some more blade spirits."
"Human Race cultivators are too physically frail. This time, I'll capture more Demon Beast divine souls and