Everyone listened with rapt attention.
Zuo Xiaoduo was even more shaken inwardly.
He knew something of this history, but his knowledge was nowhere near as systematic as the little fatty's account.
"This was probably the greatest turning point in the ancient history of the entire Star Soul Continent!"
The little fatty sighed, then continued, "With the curtain falling on the age of immortals and gods, what followed was the so-called Dynasty Era, a period of low martial attainment for cultivators. The war between immortals and gods had plunged all living things into misery and left the people unable to survive. Countless powers and sects vanished like smoke and clouds, and the strong were all but wiped out. Once the eight great sects and their legacies departed, almost no systematic cultivation legacies remained in the mortal world."
"Without higher-level cultivation methods, martial artists turned toward training their bodies. Yet even if they took such training to its utmost limit, they could, at most, fight ten thousand men. Without cultivating the soul, however, longevity was difficult to attain; their lifespans amounted to no more than a few hundred years."
"During this time, people who possessed a scale or a claw of the immortals' and gods' legacies occasionally appeared. They often styled themselves as immortals and left many traces in history, but through modern eyes, they were nothing more than a laughing matter."
"During this period of feudal dynasties, cultivators' strength sank to an unprecedented low. Only the dynasties continued to rise and fall like fleeting illusions. Long division inevitably gave way to unity, and long unity inevitably gave way to division, providing countless heroes with a stage on which to display themselves."
The little fatty, Li Chenglong, had a distant look in his eyes as he said softly, "After the Dynasty Era came the Technology Era, which was relatively close to our own time. I imagine none of you are strangers to the notion of technology. The mobile phones, telephones, and computers we have today, along with airplanes, trains... all these things can be called distinctive products of the Technology Era."
"After several thousand years of development, humanity grew increasingly intelligent. With the extinction of Martial Dao legacies, more and more people began blazing other trails. Thus, methods of combat beyond cultivation emerged, along with all kinds of machines that could replace the strength of powerful martial artists. Moving mountains, filling seas, transmitting voices over a thousand miles-all became commonplace..."
"Yet this was an era that brought humanity itself nothing but harm! We call the Technology Era an abandoned era, a decadent era! Why? There are, of course, significant reasons for this."
"Looking across the countless ages of human civilization, the Technology Era could be called the era with the most lazy people. Countless gifted people never cultivated, squandering their talents for nothing, dimming their light amid the vulgar world and mingling with the dust beneath heaven, abandoning everything most fundamental!"
"Countless technological skills sprang up during the Technology Era, leading the vast majority of humanity to abandon the Martial Dao and study technological power instead. But this was abandoning the root to chase the branches, causing human bodies to grow weaker and weaker and lifespans to gradually shorten."
"And yet, as technology continued to develop, airplanes and cannons appeared, followed by even more powerful weapons. Ordinary martial artists could not withstand even a single shot from a firearm wielded by an ordinary person, much less evade its absolute speed. This caused martial artists to dwindle further. Even the occasional person who cultivated did so merely to strengthen their body and maintain their health. The Martial Dao withered by the day!"
"In the later Technology Era, this gradually developed into a situation in which the entire population eradicated martial arts, and the Martial Dao slowly became legend."
"Likewise, during the Technology Era, the earlier age of immortals and gods and the primordial age passed from legend into myth, becoming increasingly impossible to verify, impossible to believe, impossible to trace. No one believed that a person could soar through the sky by their own power. No one believed that a person could move mountains and fill seas. Still less did anyone believe that a human being could live forever without aging!"
"Everything concerning profound cultivators was overturned in its entirety!"
"Technological power allowed people to travel around the world without expending the slightest effort! They could also bring down a Martial Dao expert with a single shot, without fear of an enemy attack! What use was cultivation, then?"
"In that era, humanity had long since forgotten that its enemies had never been other humans, but heaven, earth, the vast cosmos, and the laws governing all things!"
"That is why we now call the Technology Era... the Martial Arts Extinction Period!"
At this point, the little fatty took a few breaths before saying dejectedly, "After that, the Technology Era continued to develop, consuming the continent's ecological resources bit by bit until they were finally exhausted. Countless technological waste products also damaged the environment, leaving this continent unable to bear the burden... until, at last, it entered the World-Destroying Period."
"At the height of technological development, towering buildings crowded the entire land, and cities covered it. By then, there was no longer any such thing as the outskirts of a city, while the spiritual qi of the Star Soul Continent grew ever thinner. Cultivation was nothing more than a tale from the Arabian Nights."
"But then, one day, meteors suddenly appeared in the sky, and countless celestial bodies in the universe exploded. Endless meteors rained down on the Star Soul Continent, day and night."
"A fist-sized meteor fragment falling from the boundless heights could destroy a village in an instant, to say nothing of meteors the size of small hills, plunging from the sky like entire mountains..."
"That meteor shower fell almost without interruption for three hundred years. Three full centuries."
"Had it been an ordinary meteor strike, the technological strength developed by then would have had no difficulty dealing with it. But against that kind of mighty power of heaven and earth, encompassing the entire continent, technology proved utterly helpless. The ordinary people throughout the continent had even less strength or physical resilience with which to resist. A single tremor was enough to wipe out millions in an instant!"
"In the end, of the continent's population of tens of billions, not even one in ten thousand survived. The continent withered, and signs of life were hard to find."
"This was the World-Destroying Era!"
"It was the bitter fruit brewed over hundreds of years during the Technology Era, tasted by everyone across the entire continent!"
Li Chenglong drew a long breath. "In the end, heaven took pity. Unable to bear seeing human civilization utterly extinguished, it left humanity a chance to rise again, and the Spiritual Qi Revival Era followed."
"After the World-Destroying Era, the population had already dwindled to an appalling degree. Stretches of ten thousand miles without a soul were found everywhere. Besides killing countless people across the continent, the meteor catastrophe dealt a devastating blow to the environment and economy, making even survival an arduous task for humanity."
"Fortunately, at this time, people discovered that the continent's environment was vastly different from before. The spiritual qi, once sparse to the extreme, had become abundant. It turned out that the meteors falling from the universe had all carried tremendous quantities of the spiritual qi of heaven and earth. Many even contained Star Spirit Stones, which constantly emitted spiritual qi and were marvelous aids to cultivators."