Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

Li Yao and Li Jialing walked under a "giant tree in the heavens”.

The tree is hundreds of meters tall and situated between dozens of tall and low stalagmites and milk, stretching out countless “branches” to the surrounding maid forks and roots like ridges, and spreading in a radial fashion to the surrounding area, spreading all the way to the ground.

Li Yao gently tore off several vines, wiped off a moss, and identified the interface of the row of crystal cards.

This seemingly giant tree is a very sophisticated and enormous central control system —— he has seen similar systems in the past only on the bridges of some supermassive starships.

But now, all the crystal brains and computational wafers embedded in the central control system are rusty, surfaces filled with moss, vines, and all sorts of ants like insects, and even a tumor-like spore of life, dotted between vines and moss, spraying away the mist.

Blurry, like breathing, makes it look like a monster of mechanical union of life and precision.

This is the biggest “playground" in town. A lot of greedy children climb into the branches of the "giant tree", the crystalline transmission pipeline, grab the bugs that grow from the crystalline brain, put them on the heads and spines of their companions, tease each other, and make silver bells laugh.

Li Yao noticed that the skin was clear and the children with slightly reddish eyes were also the few people in the whole town who would make a laugh.

Li Yao looked at the children and thought, “The underground town numbered after 10,000 is the limit of the Empire's statistics, so the inhabitants here are the oldest exiles? ”

“No.”

Li Jialing shook his head, “After all, the underground exiles of the ancient repair era 40,000 years ago, and the rise and fall of the demonic tribe, are too far away from now. The vast majority of people rot in the darkness of the underground under the erosion of time, or" merge "with the latter.

“Even if a very small number of people are still alive occasionally, they have long forgotten their identity, the significance of civilization and even the most elementary wisdom, and have become wildlings who drink blood from their hair and even degenerate into nightmares, ignorance and only human beasts with instincts.

“These wildlings and humanoid beasts were all deported deeper than the five digit towns, not to mention the dark dead areas without names or even numbers - Sister Long went down to these wildlings' tribes and mediated their disputes. ”

Li Yao frowned slightly, "When did the people here escape to the ground? ”

“Ten thousand years ago, when the Starsea Empire collapsed, it fled to the ground. ”

Li Jialing said, "This used to be an underground shelter in the era of the Star Sea Empire. The ancestors of the vast majority of the inhabitants should have fled at that time, thinking about temporary refuge. Who knows that hiding is 10,000 years, struggling here, breeding and breathing, and never having a chance to return to a world with sunshine. ”

Li Yao sighed, still somewhat confused: “Since it is an underground shelter built by the Star Sea Empire, all kinds of facilities and educational systems should be complete. Even if all the people who fled at first were civilians, they should all possess basic survival skills and civilized sparks, right? Why do I look at the stubborn, lifeless, degenerative appearance of all of us in the ancient world? ”

Li Jialing thought about it and seemed to be remembering the words of Longyang King. Finally: “Sister Long said that cultivating the way, such as the anti-water boat, if you do not enter, you will retreat, and so will the continuation and development of civilization. Only the constant impulse, evolving at a faster and faster pace, beyond the peaks of time after time, can sustain the existence of civilization.

“If you want to stop breathing, you are most likely to be crushed by your own weight, unquenchably trampled into recession and even extinction.

“However, the more advanced the civilization, the more sophisticated the social structure, the more complex the conditions are to maintain the constant social form, and the weaker the resistance to the environment. Sister Long said that you are a refiner, you must understand that ‘the fewer components, the lower the failure rate; and as the components that make up a pharmacopoeia become more and more, no matter how serious they are, however careful they are to be used, the longer the day will always fail’. ”

Li Yao nodded, in the circle made by Fabao, there was a saying that "adding one component will double the failure rate”, although some exaggeration was correct.

With the increase in Pharmacopoeia components, the difficulty of refining, assembling and repairing will increase in geometric order. A large Pharmacopoeia consisting of millions of components is a completely unpredictable chaotic system. No one can guarantee that it will not have strange problems during use, not even Li Yao can guarantee.

Perhaps, as the components and symbol arrays break through the limits, Pharaoh also has some sense of life, and life is the most uncontrollable and unpredictable being in the universe?

“Sister Long said that Fabao is like this, and so is civilization. A supermassive Fabao made up of tens of billions of components, however repaired and maintained, is destined to collapse one day; and a highly advanced civilization, too, is fragile to be replicated and can easily be destroyed by a few minor problems. ”

Li Yao snorted: “Fabao and civilization, how is it the same? ”

Li Jialing stalled: “Sister Long said that if a village in the ancient world was made up of the simplest logs and rocks, all the villagers would rise and fall, rely on hunting and farming for their livelihoods - this seemingly backward social form, on the contrary, easily resists the erosion of time and changes in the environment, even if they migrated from the ground to the ground, they could maintain their original form and survive for a long time.

“But what if it's a modern town?

“Think about what it takes to maintain a modern town. Even on the most surface, there must be a vertically staggered vacuum piping system and an ultra-high-speed crystal rail system with four tunnels and lifting platforms at the foot, as well as dense hemp sewers, ventilation pipelines, information and energy transmission pipelines that connect to each other, and sufficient space to accommodate vehicles such as shuttles, all of which require a constant supply of energy.

“Assuming an equal number of people, energy consumption in modern towns is 100 to 1,000 times higher than in second-hand towns - with little more than geothermal energy, how can modern towns not collapse?

“There are also human factors, Sister Long said that the citizens of the ancient world seem to be weak and small ants, but the survival of the ants is actually very strong, the ancient people are thick and fatigued, suffer hard labor, with just a few bowls of the crudest porridge every day, can continue to cultivate and hunt, there is also the concept of multiplicity of blessings, even if most of the children die, very few descendants can continue their veins.

“But modern society, while generating powerful communities like practitioners and strange treasures of all sorts, makes life convenient and impossible to add, also invisibly weakens the viability of humans themselves. Most people's guts are only suitable for the finest foods and require air conditioning arrays to provide cool comfort and environment, not to mention the absence of sewers and flushing toilets, which, even without spiritual nets, turn into walking corpses.

“Modern people have long forgotten to farm and hunt in harsh environments with the harshest tools and even bare fists, and they work as crystal brain engineers, crystal rail train drivers, builders of high-rise buildings and singing and dancing storytellers - survival skills that all require a rigorous, complex and error-prone platform to support them, and when this platform is completely non-existent, 99% of modern people are close to zero in survival.

“The more civilized and developed the race is, the more likely it is to be to have eugenic fertility and not even a single offspring, with no resilience to risk.

“This is what happened to the remnants of the Star Sea Empire who migrated to the depths of the earth. Perhaps when they first fled, the facilities in the shelter were advanced and the material reserves were adequate, with modern talents, such as doctors, scholars, teachers and engineers, among them, sufficient to perpetuate a small civilization.

“But this is just a self-deluding illusion that, in the face of the powerful pressures of the crustal movement, seemingly indestructible shelter exterior walls are no different from illusory soap bubbles. A ‘small' earthquake would be enough to destroy their entire modern civilization system, and in the unlikely event that engineers in some key positions fall, it would be difficult to develop a sufficiently good heir within a few years.

“Dozens of earthquakes and underground lava eruptions have occurred throughout 10,000 years, and it is perfectly normal that the remnants of these Star Sea empires have struggled to survive in such a harsh environment, without losing all humanity, and with the ability to speak, think and have basic social organization. It is already good!

“By the way, Sister Long also said that perhaps Pangu and Girl Civilizations are so destroyed, the more advanced the civilization, the more fragile the inner structure, so when Pangu and Girl Civilizations develop to the extreme, the inner social structure should be a hundred times more fragile than today's human civilization, which is typical of 'external strong middle class'. ”

In response to this assertion, Li Yao snorted, and he could totally cite a hundred counterexamples - isn't the ability of the celestial realm to cope with disasters better than the ancient holy realm? This is a joke!

But he didn't mean to die, but he looked at the blurry darkness: “Do the imperial authorities know what's going on here and don't care? ”

“Of course I do. Otherwise, how did you get the area number ‘10084’? ”

Li Jialing said, “But why? Who cares? What good is it? The fairy fixers are the most selfish things to do. It's no good, they... we're not doing it!

“If a rare mineral vein or a precious relic of ancient civilization is found deep beneath the ground, the immortals will naturally rush for fear, flock to it, fight hard, and even wipe out the entire underground town.

“But the 10084 area, poor villages that depend on the cultivation of rock insects for their livelihood, really don't have half the oil water to squeeze, to collect a cent of the tax here, you have to waste a hundred dollars of tax collection cost, it's not good value at all, how can a fairy fixer waste their precious cultivation time to manage these insignificant ants and ‘garbage’?

“Besides, the extreme heavens and the stars are theoretically the 'vacuum zone’ of the clash of forces of the family of the four main electorate emperors. This is the imperial capital of His Majesty the Emperor. Which electorate is not willing to help the Dalits and the wildlings deep beneath the emperor?

“So, apart from a census of the population more than 200 years ago, which numbered many areas beneath it, rare fairy cultivators will descend to the depths of the earth unless rare mineral veins and ancient relics are discovered, a world that has been ignored and deliberately forgotten has been completely abandoned by the rulers on the ground. ”