Well now, after going for a walk, cooking dinner for myself and my sister and having a small anxiety induced youtube binge, I come back to find myself actually being on topic. Neat.
Edit: And of course it took me so long to write this up that I'm no longer on topic. Sigh.
So the sales pitch for my idea basically is: "Universal literacy but for cultivation!"
The basic idea for starting out is:
- Gather up all the kids that reached 14 that year and teach them the basics of cultivation, both spiritual and physical.
- We will supply each with 1 RSS each week for 4 weeks and make cultivating their main daily activity for those 4 weeks. No helping with the family business or stuff like that.
- Additionally we also open a public library with absolutely basic Red realm techniques in as many fields as we can get access to; combat arts, medical arts, formation primers, pill making, etc.
- Later on we can expand this as resources allow.
Why would we do this?
- My most pertinent reason is that even Early Red cultivators learn at multiple times the speed of mortals which will be a massive boost to the economy. My expected Return on Investment of the first batch is 10 to 20 years, when the children not only take over their parents' businesses but significantly improve them.
- Another reason is that we can find all the extraordinary and, more importantly, extreme talents. We'll contract the extraordinary talents directly to ourselves and send the extreme talents off to the sect with the goal to reach Green/Bronze and make it to the Inner Sect within a year.
- But wouldn't that make them Barons just like us and take them away from us? Well yes, but that's why we'll have them sign a contract to become a Branch Clan of the Ling Clan upon reaching Green/Bronze.
- Later on we'll also be rich enough to send the extraordinary talents to the sect with a similar contract though a 2 year instead of 1 year deadline.
- More of a neat side effect than a reason really, is that with our entire population being less squishy we'll also be able to spend less money on low level city defences because we won't have to worry about first realm spirits and beasts just massacring everybody until the guards arrive. After all, they might not have any combat training but they'll be able to take a hit without becoming immediately crippled so they can run away until the guards arrive. 2nd realm and up defences will of course still need to be maintained. (At least until we can expand so far that everybody gets to Yellow/Silver which is something we might be able to do as a county.)
Caveats:
- We will have to run a strict closed or half-closed borders policy to avoid all our young people from leaving for other provinces with less competition once this gets rolling.
- This might initially be too expensive, in which case I'd downgrade it to 2 weeks of double intensity spiritual cultivation and no physical cultivation.
Though we should be able to afford this; how many children reaching 14 does a barony have each year? A couple hundred, a few thousand? Multiply that by 4 and we come out to a couple thousand RSSs
per year. As a reminder 1000 RSS = 2 GSS. We should be making more in taxes, just to justify maintenance costs, our baronial income and further upstream income.
Ok, now that I've put that down, time to setup a workspace for that diceroller :Ü™
