- Location
- Elsewhere
So an unrelated idea I've been bouncing around might give some inspiration.
Every once in a while you'll come across some super high ranking sect throwing a banquet, showing off by serving High Quality Spiritual Rice That No One Can Ever Get.
Where does the sect get that rice?
After all, you could have some rando stumbling on some 5,000 year old ginseng, and if you have enough randos, then you have lots of ginseng.
But rice?
That takes planning.
And yet, it also seems weird to have the super high ranking sect that never touches the ground to have a bunch of farms.
The Great Cultivator Sect is not a standard sect.
Instead of choosing daring, talented disciples, they choose patient, attentive disciples.
Instead of a small, heavily fortified compound in the mountains with high spiritual energy, they occupy a vast farmland, with middling spiritual energy.
Instead of defending themselves from other cultivators, they routinely fight off spiritual beasts, since cultivators generally aren't looking for bulk dry goods.
The sect gets by with diplomacy, size, and the fact that most cultivators don't actually want what they have all that much.
After all, if someone robbed them, they'd have a lot of rice once, but then they'd have to grow their own!
However, all sects have a secret edge, and The Great Cultivator Sect is no exception.
For most cultivators, the density of spiritual energy is simply a constant.
They might find denser areas, they might build formations to shift it around, but why a given location has more or less naturally?
Perhaps there's a spiritual vein, but why it flows there?
No clue.
If the spiritual energy around their sect happened to shift, they'd be helpless to stop it.
The Great Cultivator Sect knows the secret.
By careful curation of the farms and surrounding land, they have managed to generally increase the spiritual energy of the entire region from low to mid.
They conceal this by having thousands of "irrigation tools" holding spiritual stones all over their farms.
Other sects consider this wasteful and inefficient, which they leverage when negotiating their rice sales.
The truth is the stones are purely decorative, the land is enriching itself naturally.
Only the elders of the sect know that the innermost parts of the sect has recently upgraded to high spiritual energy.
Every once in a while you'll come across some super high ranking sect throwing a banquet, showing off by serving High Quality Spiritual Rice That No One Can Ever Get.
Where does the sect get that rice?
After all, you could have some rando stumbling on some 5,000 year old ginseng, and if you have enough randos, then you have lots of ginseng.
But rice?
That takes planning.
And yet, it also seems weird to have the super high ranking sect that never touches the ground to have a bunch of farms.
The Great Cultivator Sect is not a standard sect.
Instead of choosing daring, talented disciples, they choose patient, attentive disciples.
Instead of a small, heavily fortified compound in the mountains with high spiritual energy, they occupy a vast farmland, with middling spiritual energy.
Instead of defending themselves from other cultivators, they routinely fight off spiritual beasts, since cultivators generally aren't looking for bulk dry goods.
The sect gets by with diplomacy, size, and the fact that most cultivators don't actually want what they have all that much.
After all, if someone robbed them, they'd have a lot of rice once, but then they'd have to grow their own!
However, all sects have a secret edge, and The Great Cultivator Sect is no exception.
For most cultivators, the density of spiritual energy is simply a constant.
They might find denser areas, they might build formations to shift it around, but why a given location has more or less naturally?
Perhaps there's a spiritual vein, but why it flows there?
No clue.
If the spiritual energy around their sect happened to shift, they'd be helpless to stop it.
The Great Cultivator Sect knows the secret.
By careful curation of the farms and surrounding land, they have managed to generally increase the spiritual energy of the entire region from low to mid.
They conceal this by having thousands of "irrigation tools" holding spiritual stones all over their farms.
Other sects consider this wasteful and inefficient, which they leverage when negotiating their rice sales.
The truth is the stones are purely decorative, the land is enriching itself naturally.
Only the elders of the sect know that the innermost parts of the sect has recently upgraded to high spiritual energy.