And besides, the quality of one's spiritual roots wasn't all that determined one's future path in cultivation.
It may be the most important aspect, and one that was out of one's own control, but not the only one.
According to one of the few crystal-clear memories Gaston had recovered, the foundation one sets for themselves prior to officially stepping into the path of cultivation by becoming a Qi Refining cultivator, was nearly as important as the quality of one's spiritual root.
If the human body was a bucket, and cultivation energy was the water that filled up that bucket, then the spiritual root could be seen as the hose that provides the water.
With a powerful hose, you could fill up this bucket immediately, whilst with a weaker hose, it could take you a while.
The foundations built prior to entering the Qi Refining stage, then, would be the determining factor behind the quality of the bucket.
No matter how powerful the hose was, if the bucket itself was leaky, then it would never be filled.
Back in the Poisoned Continent, there were ancient stories told as lessons, of a person with a four-colored spiritual root cultivating faster than a person with a two-colored spiritual root, meant to showcase the importance of building one's foundations, but also to provide hope to the less talented that hard work can indeed pay off.
Of course, what is not mentioned, but what one discovers immediately after officially becoming a cultivator, was that these two aspects were not equally important.
It was far easier to build a decent foundation for oneself, than to improve one's natural talent.
On top of that, there were quite a few treasures in the known cultivation world back then that could either fix or improve one's foundations. Although they were still very precious, they did exist.
Treasures that could improve one's spiritual roots however, were far, far more rare.
Even back then, one would be lucky to even hear of one such treasure appearing every 500 years, much less get their hands on one.
This type of treasure was almost never for sale, as even the old and powerful cultivators would want to get their hands on it, in the hopes that a tiny improvement in talent was all that they needed to break through in their own cultivation.
Whenever a treasure like this appeared, it was good news for only a handful of people, and horrific news for everyone else in the general vicinity of the treasure.
Despite this however, the benefits of a good foundation were still very noticeable.
If the average foundation that most people could build by themselves or have supplemented for them later on in their life to achieve via various treasures, was a solid, strong, wooden bucket, then a truly exceptional foundation would equate to a steel bucket.
The wooden bucket itself is not leaky, and therefore does not hamper the speed of one's cultivation, which for the majority of the talented cultivators, was all that they were looking for.
As long as they could cultivate without having to worry about their cultivation falling apart, then they were for the most part, satisfied.
Because of this narrow-minded view however, most of them miss the benefits that come with the steel bucket.
In the world of cultivation, aside from cultivating naturally to increase the amount of magical energy in one's body, another way to massively increase one's progress in cultivation was by taking various magical treasures, most commonly in the form of cultivation pills, or by consuming the meat of powerful creatures.
There were other ways to speed up one's cultivation, but these were the most common methods and the most readily accessible to the majority of cultivators.
This is where the steel bucket comes in handy.
Because the use of such means was not as pure as the natural absorption of magical energy by means of regular cultivation, the water that entered the proverbial bucket had some corrosive properties to it.
To a wooden bucket, almost any corrosion was life-threatening, as if a cultivator accidentally consumes a treasure too powerful, or too many ordinary treasures to increase their cultivation, then they ran the risk of permanently destroying their cultivation.
All it took was one mistake, and their cultivation would fall back down to the bottom, resulting in death if one was unlucky, and the "mere" rebuilding of one's entire cultivation from scratch if one was lucky.
Running such a tight balancing act for hundreds or even thousands of years, was quite difficult to say the least.
But that wasn't the only advantage of the steel bucket.
It was true that a wooden bucket wouldn't delay one's cultivation, but it was also true, that a wooden bucket was not as strong as a steel bucket.
This meant that the quality of magical energy that could be contained in both buckets was naturally very different.
If a steel bucket could contain magical energy with a degree of purity of at least 90%, then a wooden bucket, depending on it's strength, fluctuated between 60% and 80%.
Anything below 60% meant that there were not just imperfections, but flaws in one's foundation, whilst anything above 90%, meant that one's foundations were nearing perfection.
The benefits of having pure magical energy in one's cultivations were numerous, but the most significant of which were the advantages provided in combat and cultivation.
When cultivating, it is very common for a cultivator to come across a cultivation barrier that they need to break through in order to progress further on their path.
A cultivation barrier can be encountered at any time, but most typically, it's encountered when breaking through the minor cultivation divisions, or when facing a major breakthrough into another cultivation stage.
Each stage of cultivation was divided into three divisions, each consisting of three levels each.
The early division, consisted of the first three levels in a stage of cultivation, the middle division consisted of the following three levels, and the late division consisted of the last three levels.
Most cultivators faced cultivation barriers when attempting to break through from one division to another, for example when attempting to progress from being a Qi Refining Stage cultivator at the 3rd level of the early division, to one at the 4th level of the middle division, most people were faced with a cultivation barrier.