Chapter 698: Saint or Death
"I don't know, at the end of the Immortal Path, perhaps it's a Saint, or perhaps it's death."
Bai Mo only gave an ambiguous reply.
"Is this path truly without error...?" After hearing this, Xu Xuanling muttered to herself.
It wasn't just her; everyone else had also pondered this crucial matter: was the path Bai Mo had found truly without issue?
Some, after deduction, chose to believe, and then staked everything, crossing the boundary between immortal and mortal.
Of course, many more staked everything and remain missing to this day.
The path to ascension through the Reincarnation Tribulation had never been a smooth road; once failed, most would silently vanish into another world.
This also brought a significant problem to the Federation—no one could confirm whether those who vanished during their tribulation had truly died.
Too many people would be interested in what a Six-stage great cultivator with countless assets, whose fate remained uncertain, left behind.
Just like Yun Jie, who vanished alone without a word back then, he caused the Yun family, once a pillar of the Federation, to instantly devolve into several second-rate aristocratic families, squabbling over their inheritance and refusing to submit to one another.
But if Yun Jie could return to the Federation after becoming an Immortal, reunite those who once served under his banner, and settle accounts with the outsiders who had once plundered his family's wealth, then he would swiftly become another pole of power within the Federation.
...
Aside from those who believed Bai Mo, there were naturally many who remained skeptical. They stayed put, attempting to find their own path.
Six-stage cultivators had a full lifespan of two to three thousand years. Spending an extra three to five hundred years searching for a more suitable path for themselves was not entirely unacceptable.
Provided they could tolerate latecomers who successfully ascended to immortality, wresting away the authority that originally belonged to them.
The Federation had always been a society where the strong were revered.
The power of Immortals was real and undeniable.
A newly advanced Seven-stage Immortal could easily contend with ten peak Six-stage cultivators.
The second metamorphosis of their life form made the gap between them as vast as clouds and mud.
Voting rights in the Federation Council already said it all.
Fifth-tier individuals received one vote each, Six-tier individuals received twenty votes each, and Seven-tier individuals received five hundred votes each.
Nevertheless, in such a fast-paced modern society, choosing to disappear for decades to undergo the Reincarnation Tribulation remained an extremely risky decision.
Returning decades later, everything in the world could very well have changed. After all, this wasn't some xuanhuan world where one could enter seclusion for decades or centuries and emerge to find everything as it was, with dances still danced and horses still running.
Decades of human technological development were enough to bring about earth-shattering changes to the entire society.
Just like Yun Jie, before his tribulation, the Human Federation was still just a nomadic race confined to a corner of the Moon.
Decades later, the Federation's footprint had spread across most of the solar system, and its population had expanded from several billion to over a hundred billion.
This rapid population explosion relied on two factors.
First, the assimilation of aliens through the Shapeshifting Path and cultural re-education.
Martians, Mercurians, Venusians, and others, sent to various aristocratic hereditary battleships for assimilation education... After decades of effort, their original cultures and their former non-human bodies had been completely erased, transforming them into human form, both inside and out.
Although some old-fashioned humans, clinging to notions of pure bloodlines, still looked down on naturalized individuals, and there was still a subtle, almost imperceptible discrimination in society, they had, without a doubt, become a part of the Human Federation.
The first generation of naturalized individuals might still retain some primal memories, as mother tongue memories are always difficult to completely erase. But by the second generation, they were educated from birth to be human.
To them, their "ancestors" from two generations prior were no different from how humans today view monkeys.
Second, the birth of artificial womb technology.
This was an epoch-making invention, both for the Federation and for the Land of White.
It allowed humanity to escape the limitations imposed on birth rates by ten-month pregnancies. Of course, more importantly, reproduction no longer required consent.
As long as they possessed ample reproductive cell samples, any faction capable of using artificial womb technology could mass-produce populations, then subject them to loyalty education from a young age, turning them into their own direct lineage backbone upon reaching adulthood.
However, this was clearly a violation of human rights, and the Federation government had explicitly prohibited such practices. But the immense profits still led many factions to secretly proceed as usual.
In any case, as long as the population production bases were located on aristocratic hereditary battleships, outsiders generally wouldn't know.
Having a large number of sufficiently loyal subordinates was the dream of every organizational leader.
As for reproductive cells, they were the easiest to acquire. Countless black markets, scattered across various 'Great Thousand' flagships, awaited the poor, who were willing to sell anything they could.
Compared to selling non-renewable organs, selling reproductive cells was undoubtedly a more sustainable business.
...
The Sun was the source of life in the solar system. The sunlight and heat released every second through nuclear fusion brought life, and brought civilization.
Coal and oil, symbols of pre-industrial civilization's food and blood, were essentially stored solar energy from hundreds of millions of years ago.
And now, the Federation, in addition to activating sinister technologies like artificial wombs, had also largely shed its reliance on fossil fuel deposits.
They had developed dark technology that allowed for the reverse industrial production of coal and oil from plastic waste, and had simultaneously entered a new era of mixed atomic and Spirit Energy usage.
Only then did they gain the qualification to venture into the stars and seas.
After all, in the known universe, there wasn't a single planet that still had coal and oil.
And without these most crucial industrial raw materials, humanity's original industrial technology tree would be as good as snapped in half. Attempting to bypass them to develop industry... the difficulty would be no less than forging a nuclear bomb by hand.
Of course, within the Federation, there weren't any lack of formidable individuals who could forge nuclear bombs by hand. If a Seven-stage Immortal was willing to unleash their full power, they could indeed forge a nuclear bomb with their bare hands.
...
Without the constraints of the Solar Star Spirits, Bai Mo's rate of devouring the Sun became even more terrifying. The surrounding gravitational pull also underwent changes significant enough to draw the attention of ordinary people.
The first to perceive all of this was naturally Xu Xuanling, who had left a projection within the Sun, followed by the Federation's observation posts.
In contrast, ordinary people living within the Great Thousand Flagships felt no sensation whatsoever from the changes in the Sun's gravity.
This was because within the Great Thousand Flagships they resided in, there were computer-controlled artificial gravity sources, constantly re-balancing gravity to ensure that gravitational changes wouldn't cause discomfort to humans.
Federation scientists had discovered decades ago that the magnitude of gravity in a living environment had a profound impact on human health.
For instance, if gravity was less than Earth's normal value, the human balance system would develop abnormalities, leading to symptoms like nausea and vomiting. If one lived in a zero-gravity environment for a long time, their body muscles would even gradually atrophy.
Mid-to-high-tier superhumans protected by a Life Field would be fine, but ordinary people had no way to escape the side effects of weightlessness. They could only live in environments with artificially simulated gravity sources.
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