The Programmer Cultivator

In the current era of Hongmeng, the age of resources had already begun. Moreover, the Spirit Nurturing Holy Land’s actions in the millennia before deploying Spirit Nurturing Masters were practically cast from the same mold as the Upper Sects’ current methods—in fact, they were even more ruthless.

So when the Spirit Nurturing Holy Land began distributing the Basic Spirit Nurturing Technique to the Upper Sects, heh, a blockade had long since formed around any high-tier resource that was even remotely precious.

As a result, the Upper Sects of today only control resources for stages below Duality.

For Three Talents Promotion resources, they cultivate some themselves, but for another portion, they have to turn to the Blessed Lands.

As for the Four Symbols Stage, all top-tier resources that should belong to the Upper Sects have been completely locked down by the Blessed Holy Lands. Many precious resources that can be cultivated are grown under their control, and for those that can’t be cultivated on a large scale, their natural nurturing grounds are controlled.

It was a clear posture of a resource blockade. Of course, the Holy Lands of Blessing didn’t completely sever the path for the Upper Sects’ Four Symbols cultivators.

Need resources for promotion? Sure, just send your geniuses over for ’advanced training’ to compete for a share of the resources.

As for whether these geniuses on ’advanced training’ are just visiting the Holy Land or will end up settling there permanently—well, sorry, but that depends on just how monstrous their talent is.

After all, for High-Tier Cultivators, once you reach a certain level, aptitude is still crucial. Even Spirit Nurturing Masters can’t mass-produce High-Tier Cultivators.

In other words, the more resources a genius wins for their Sect, the less likely they are to ever return.

Of course, it wasn’t all bad. After all, the Sect was their original home. If they truly stayed in the Holy Land of Blessing, the Sect would gain a bit more influence as well.

But for the Holy Lands of Blessing, the benefits were immense. Not only did they acquire talent, but they also used this network of relationships to firmly lock down their subordinate factions.

Under such a vast net, it was incredibly difficult for an Upper Sect to become a Blessed Land.

They needed resources, but resources were blockaded. They needed talent, but they were the ones sending their talent away...

In such a situation, getting ahead was many times more difficult than it had been in the past.

Of course, one didn’t have to rely on the Holy Lands of Blessing for the Four Symbols Promotion. Besides that, there were two other paths one could take.

First, a ’naked’ promotion. Relying on raw talent and luck to brute-force it. As for the results...

If you succeeded, you must have burned a lot of high incense in your past life!

Of course, some monstrously talented individuals or people who had a stroke of luck, like Xu Weihai in his current state, were another matter entirely.

Ancient Cultivators were able to succeed not only because of the environment but also because they had brute-forced their way up every step of the way. The foundation of their Rune Cores was simply different.

An analogy to medicine from my past life makes it easy to understand. In ancient times, if you got injured and just toughed it out, there was maybe a ten or twenty percent chance of survival.

But in modern times, with a sufficiently severe injury, you want to tough it out? You’d just be waiting for an infection to kill you!

Not even one in a hundred could survive by just toughing it out. Besides the different eras, many other complicated factors were at play.

And cultivation in Hongmeng was destined to be the same from the moment promotion resources, promotion elixirs, and Promotion Formulas appeared. This wasn’t a regression; it was an inevitable consequence of progress.

Would you really think that people being unable to tough out injuries in an age of advanced medicine is a sign of medical regression?

Besides, a brute-force breakthrough wasn’t necessarily better than a resource-assisted promotion; in fact, many cases were far worse.

In the Ancient Era, some who barely managed to promote found their Rune Cores incomplete and damaged, cutting off their path to further promotions.

It was like toughing out an injury: you survived, but were left with permanent damage.

In short, the advent of formula-based promotions wasn’t a step back, but rather an inevitable trend of a progressing era.

Relying on tools, external aid, and Wisdom is the absolute core foundation of the Human Race’s rise.

The second method was to venture into the mountains.

The Hengduan Mountain Range behind the Celestial Spirit Sect occupied at least a third of Hongmeng Star’s landmass.

In its depths, forget Four-Star Materials for promoting to the Four Symbols Stage; even Five-Star and Six-Star materials were abundant.

As long as you were hard to kill, strong, and brave, with a dash of luck, you could eventually gather everything you needed by taking a trip through the depths of the Hengduan Mountain Range.

Even if it wasn’t what you were looking for, as long as it was precious enough, you could trade for it in the various markets and Business Alliances.

Under normal circumstances, those were pretty much the options.

As for cultivating the resources themselves, Spirit Nurturing Masters had only been deployed for a millennium. Although the era of formulas had begun earlier, due to the overt and covert manipulations of the Spirit Nurturing Holy Land, very few Upper Sects had complete Spirit Fields growing Four-Star formula resources.

Besides, any Upper Sect that could cultivate a full set of these things wouldn’t be an Upper Sect anymore.

For the Upper Sects of today, including the top-ranking ones, gathering a single set of Four-Star promotion materials required centuries of struggle, scraping and patching things together from various sources.

Then, after several failures and so on, they might have one or two successes, who would then become the Sect’s Supreme Elders and maintain the Sect’s stability for a few thousand years.

During this time, the process would repeat itself.

Therefore, to procure two sets of Four-Star resources, even if the Sect had been preparing for it and two of the great families from the four core departments had stockpiles...

...to get two sets in a short amount of time, heh, they would truly have to sell everything they owned!

And this was for a deeply-rooted Upper Sect, one that had the support of the Dharma Transmission Hall’s Dang Family and the Miscellaneous Affairs Department’s Fanx Family, and possibly even the united support of the Law Enforcement Team’s Zhou Family and the Resources Department’s Yang Family.

If it were some minor faction, a newly risen Independent Practitioner Influence?

Heh, wanting to gather two sets of Four-Star promotion resources in a short time?

You’ve got to be delusional!

Even for a place like Huayue City, a Three Talents Influence that had been rising for several hundred years, it still took centuries of effort to acquire a single set of Three-Star promotion resources.

Without developing and accumulating resources through cultivation, relying entirely on scouring the markets, even One-Star promotion resources for the Tai Chi Stage were now incredibly hard to come by in Hongmeng.

In the age of resources, resources were king.