...
And just like that, one instant he is immersed into watching his past self get himself into serious trouble, and the next second he is back to reality.
'That did not look like a good situation. With enemy reinforcements arriving, and Siegbert laying chase to the last witness of our ambush, just how the hell did I make it out of there alive?'
Gaston thought to himself as his eyes gradually refocused.
Certain things he still hadn't remembered, such as what the hell happened afterwards for example.
Given that the abrupt recollection of his memories stopped there however, Gaston figured that they split up not long afterwards, and that whilst he was still dizzy from the blow he sustained from one of the Blue Apes, he had fallen into the body of water beneath him while escaping from the incoming reinforcements.
But then again, there were still a lot of things he couldn't help but feel that he was supposed to remember.
Why was his face no longer scratched up at all? Why hadn't he found a single Blue Ape so far? And most importantly, why was there smoke far off into the distance?
Knowing what he knew now, he heavily suspected that the smoke he initially saw was from the abandoned human village that he and his crew were headed towards!
The only problem was, if he was correct, then he was still missing quite a lot of days, if not weeks from when the last memory abruptly cut off.
Not to mention that he had no idea whether Hasso, Nicolaus and the other two were still even alive or if they had gotten captured and probably killed.
"Haah~..."
He let out a sigh to vent his emotions. Gaston heavily disliked this feeling of helplessness he was feeling.
On the bright side however, at the very least a lot of his questions had gotten their answers. Even the questions he didn't even know he had, had gotten their answers.
From that vast amount of images that flew past before ultimately stopping at his latest memory that he had just gotten back, there were a few important things he could now clearly remember.
One such important matter, was the topic of cultivation.
Whilst the Poisoned Continent that he was from had no cultivators above the early stage of Qi Refining, and only about a dozen or so known Qi Cultivators, that didn't mean that their cultivation knowledge was incomplete.
On the contrary, one of the only things that they had going for them, was that whilst their way forward after Qi Refining was lost, up until that point their inheritance was complete.
The thoughts that he had formed in the past on the topic of cultivation, was that it was similar to the theory of evolution from back on Earth.
On Earth, it's thought that we turned from monkeys into humans, over the course of millions of years of non-linear evolution.
The way Gaston saw cultivation, was as a type of energy that allows for changes to occur within oneself not to dissimilar in terms of drastic effect to those of evolution. On top of that, also shortening this evolutionary process from a timeline of millions of years, into just a few dozen in order to achieve a similar effect.
Of course, the barriers to entry into using such energy, widely referred to as "magical" energy, probably in part due to its seemingly magical effects, were also very harsh.
For example, if one didn't have what was called a spiritual root, of any kind, then they had no right to even attempt to set foot into the world of cultivation.
Whether the numbers were similar here in their new continent to that of those back in their own one, Gaston wasn't too sure.
But on the Poisoned Continent, only one out of every 100 humans had a spiritual root of some kind, and even then, it was most likely the worst type, almost crippling their future prospects right from the jump.
When it comes to spiritual roots, it's theorized that in the very distant past, the more spiritual roots you had the more talented you were, as in later stages of cultivation this would allow you to have more types of energy at your disposal, thereby giving you an advantage.
In the modern day however, this was far from the case.
What was once a rare, never-before seen genius, a five-attribute spiritual root cultivator, was now garbage.
Gaston had always found it suspicious, that five-attribute spiritual roots used to be the rarest type back then, but now they were by far the most common.
Spiritual roots are thought to be obtained based on luck after you are born.
Just what then, had their ancestors here done to their children for future generations to be born with what they saw as "the most talent" so consistently?
And was what they did part of the reason for the later evaporation of magical energy on the planet?
Nonetheless, these things were never mentioned anywhere, they were just purely Gaston's suspicions from the point of view of an outsider coming into this world.
Whatever they had done or not done, it was a fact that five-colored spiritual roots were now by far the most common type.
Which was a disaster for the cultivation world, because people born with five-colored spiritual roots were nearly all doomed to die as Qi Refining Stage Cultivators, with only a 1 in 10,000 chance at breaking through to the Foundation Building Stage.
Needless to say, this was practically impossible, because a human had a 1 in 100 chance of stepping foot into the cultivation world in the first place, and then from amongst those humans, there was a 1 in 10,000 chance to progress further past the Qi Refining Realm.
Aside from those helpless bunch, the four-colored spiritual roots were better off.
Given the right amount of resources, it wasn't too uncommon to see a Foundation Building Cultivator of this type of talent, although they too were rare and unlikely to progress past this point.
Three-colored spiritual roots were what was called "average" in the cultivation world, despite the fact that they constituted only about 10% of all cultivators.
Cultivators of this type typically had a vast need for resources, but with enough riches they could successfully overcome their issue of talent and progress without limits.
Although it was still an uphill battle that they were faced with.
Then, finally, were the cultivators with two-colored and one-colored spiritual roots, which were seen as geniuses and treated as either elite or core disciples within the Sects of the Cultivation World, which functioned similar to academies in principle.
From an organizational perspective, it was easiest to notice the difference between the "average" three-colored spiritual root cultivator and the two-colored one.
Given the same amount of resources, a Sect could train 10 two-colored spiritual root cultivators all the way to the Foundation Building Stage, while it could train just 1 three-colored spiritual root cultivator to that same stage.
This was why in the brutal cultivation world, whilst talent determined a lot, all paths were not cut off as long as one was wiling to risk their life.