No Cultivation Allowed

In this world, whether you can cultivate immortality has nothing to do with your spiritual roots. It depends on whether your surname is Zhao.

The Nine Great Families and Five Great Sects monopolize all spiritual energy resources. Mortals are nothing but a "reserve stock" of spiritual roots. The testing stones were never used to select geniuses, but to mark prey.

For five thousand years, mortals have grovelled at the feet of cultivators, believing this was the will of Heaven.

Until a teacher named Chen Taiping spent forty years studying the nature of spiritual energy and left behind a mantra on his deathbed.

"Heaven and earth hold spiritual energy, and so do I. Let my death bear witness: return it to the Great Void."

This mantra allows mortals to use their deaths to detonate the spiritual energy in an area, leaving it permanently depleted.

A year after he died, the continent's spiritual energy had fallen by twenty percent.

The Nine Great Families and Five Great Sects gathered to discuss a solution, only to discover that they were being driven step by step into a dead end: suppression would hasten their demise, while doing nothing would mean waiting to die. Even their strategy of controlling mortals with mortals had been anticipated in the three final words he left behind.

First: "Since mortals cannot cultivate immortality, and only the Nine Great Families and Five Great Sects can, then they shouldn't be able to cultivate immortality either."

Second: "When mortals discover that demonic beasts no longer come down from the mountains to eat people, and cultivators dare not kill mortals at will, it isn't because they've found their conscience. It's because they're saving themselves."

Third: …