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The Soul Hunting Forests on the Douluo Continent are, at least officially, designated areas where the two Great Empires captive-breed soul beasts.
Their purpose is to help low-level Soul Masters obtain soul rings more conveniently; compared to venturing into wild soul beast habitats, these forests are significantly safer.
However, these artificial Soul Hunting Forests, which exist under human supervision, did not always function this way. In the current era of the Douluo Continent, the number of Soul Hunting Forests is immense.
They are found not only surrounding the great cities; nearly every medium and small city has at least one Soul Hunting Forest nearby. To put it simply, wherever a branch of Spirit Hall is established, a Soul Hunting Forest is guaranteed to be nearby.
This is because one of the most critical responsibilities of a Spirit Hall branch is to monitor the nearby forest and ensure that no soul beasts of excessive power appear within it. Consequently, the more remote and smaller the city, the smaller the area of its nearby Soul Hunting Forest.
For instance, any branch of Spirit Hall at the "Main Hall" level is presided over by a Hall Master who is at least a Rank 60 Soul Emperor.
While the forests they manage contain no one hundred thousand year or ten thousand year soul beasts, high-level thousand year soul beasts are certainly present.
On the other hand, for Spirit Hall Branches lower than the "Sub-Hall" level, the Hall Master's cultivation is generally only that of a high-level Soul Ancestor.
Such cultivation is insufficient to contend with a ten thousand year soul beast—even one that has only just broken through that threshold.
Therefore, in the forests managed by these branches, the highest cultivation of any soul beast will not exceed five thousand years. The existence of these Soul Hunting Forests has provided immense help to the development of the Soul Master world.
After all, in the early stages of cultivation, human Soul Masters suffer a significant disadvantage compared to soul beasts, who possess sturdy physical bodies and deep soul power reserves.
In the Soul Master world, those born with powerful martial souls and backing from great sects or elite Soul Master Clans are, in the end, a minority.
In the vast majority of cases, people possess relatively ordinary martial souls with just enough innate soul power to embark on the path of a Soul Master, but not much more.
Under such circumstances, if a family is wealthy enough to afford a Soul Master academy, the student's teachers will naturally assist in obtaining early soul rings. However, for those who cannot afford an academy, obtaining a soul ring depends entirely on themselves.
Compared to heading into the unpredictable dangers of wild soul beast habitats, a small-scale, supervised Soul Hunting Forest is naturally the better choice.
If one of them manages to cultivate to the Soul King realm, they would finally possess enough power to protect themselves, making a trip to a wild habitat far less suicidal than it would have been in their early years.
However, this is merely the current state of affairs—or rather, the state of the world for the past two thousand years.
In the "Pre-Sect Era"—roughly three thousand years ago—fusion-stream cultivation had not yet appeared, and the Soul Master world followed only the "Extreme Stream."
During that time, there were no sects on the continent.
Aside from Spirit Hall, the major powers of the Soul Master world were primarily active in the form of Soul Master Clans. Furthermore, the number of Soul Masters back then was far lower than it is today.
The most significant reason for this was that, in that era, martial soul awakening was extremely difficult for commoners to access. On the Douluo Continent, every human requires the assistance of Awakening Stones to awaken their martial soul at the age of six.
However, the quantity of Awakening Stones is quite limited.
Due to the scarcity of Awakening Stones and their unique utility, major Soul Master Clans and nobles with secular power naturally sought to hoard as many as possible.
Under these conditions, if commoners reached the appropriate age but had no Awakening Stones of their own, they had to prepare their own funds and seek out nearby nobles or Soul Master Clans to trade for a chance at awakening.
If the awakened martial soul possessed decent aptitude and the child could become a Soul Master with cultivation value, then the situation wasn't bad; at least the money spent on the awakening wasn't wasted.
However, if they awakened a trash martial soul or had aptitude too poor to walk the path of a Soul Master, the situation turned tragic. For their families, it was an absolute disaster that added to their existing hardships.
Consequently, many commoner families at the time were so poor they could not afford the gamble; even if their children reached the age of awakening, they would choose to forgo the process and remain honest, ordinary people.
One can imagine that, inevitably, some lucky individuals who should have awakened great martial souls were buried in obscurity. This indirectly caused the development of the Soul Master world to be quite sluggish.
Moreover, awakening a decent martial soul did not mean everything was suddenly fine. Setting aside the theoretical study required, the cultivation of a Soul Master has a very specific trait: the profession is highly dependent on stronger individuals in the early stages.
If one relies solely on oneself, it is difficult to progress. After all, the highest-level soul beast a person can typically absorb is usually one they cannot defeat on their own. Therefore, for the commoners of that time, there were only three paths available.
The first path was to join a Soul Master clan as an external Soul Master. However, to join such a clan, one generally needed to reach a certain level of cultivation first. The more powerful the clan, the higher the threshold for recruiting external members.
A Soul Master clan was not an academy; they would not cultivate someone from scratch. Of course, if your martial soul aptitude was exceptional, you could be an exception.
The second path was to sign a deed of sale and join a noble house as a slave in exchange for cultivation resources.
In this scenario, one's status was far lower than the first option. The master might be a noble who also belonged to a Soul Master clan, or a purely secular noble who was not a Soul Master at all.
Without exception, even if a noble lacked personal strength, they controlled many Soul Masters who did their bidding. Some might wonder why those Soul Masters didn't revolt once they grew powerful.
After all, no matter how much power a non-Soul Master noble held, they were still just ordinary people. Secular power is an external force; how could it compare to one's own reliable strength?
But one must understand that within the borders of the two Great Empires at that time, slavery was legal. Betraying or killing a noble one had pledged service to was essentially an act of defiance against the entire system of the two Great Empires.
You wouldn't just be offending one noble; you would be offending every noble in the empire. In such a predicament, after becoming a fugitive, no Soul Master clan would take you in. Though the world was vast, there would be no place left to hide.
Of course, under normal circumstances, most nobles would not treat a Soul Master as a true slave after they signed the deed. Compared to ordinary people, Soul Masters were far more precious. However, they were by no means on equal footing.
For example, if a lustful noble recruited a female Soul Master with good looks, as the master who held power—and happened not to be a Soul Master himself—he might demand certain "excessive" requests for the sake of a thrill. For those female Soul Masters, this was hardly a good thing.
The third path was to join a Soul Master academy.
Upon graduation, one would become a free Soul Master who could cultivate alone, travel with friends, join a Soul Master clan, or even find a way to become a noble themselves. Many options were available, but the difficulty lay in getting into an academy in the first place.
In that era, commoners had no right to attend Soul Master Academies.
At the time, almost all academies were established by the major nobles of the empires. To attend, not only was the tuition exorbitant, but more importantly, one needed a letter of recommendation from an official at the City Lord level or higher, or a guarantee from a noble.
To obtain such a "pass," there was no doubt: one needed money.
A lot of money—far more than the price of a martial soul awakening.
**
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I have 100+ advanced chapter now on Patreon. I will post 5 advanced chapter on Patreon everyday except Sunday