Not Allowed to Practice Immortality

In this world, the path to immortality is not determined by spiritual roots, but by the surname Zhao. The nine great families and five major sects hold a total monopoly over all spiritual energy resources, reducing ordinary mortals to mere "reservoirs" of spiritual potential where testing stones serve not to discover talent, but to brand prey. For five thousand years, mortals have crawled beneath the feet of cultivators, conditioned to believe this subjugation is a matter of divine fate. Everything changes when a humble schoolteacher named Chen Taiping spends forty years investigating the true essence of spiritual energy, leaving behind a single incantation upon his deathbed: "Heaven and earth possess spirit, and I hold it too. With my death as proof, I return you to the void." This phrase empowers ordinary mortals to use their own deaths to detonate local spiritual energy, permanently draining the land. One year after his passing, the continent's spiritual density plummets by twenty percent. When the leaders of the nine families and five sects gather to devise countermeasures, they realize they are being systematically driven into a fatal checkmate: military suppression only accelerates their doom, inaction spells inevitable death, and any strategy of using mortals to control mortals has already been anticipated by the teacher's three parting prophecies. The first: "Since mortals are forbidden from cultivating, and only the elite families and sects may ascend, then no one shall cultivate at all." The second: "When mortals notice that demonic beasts no longer descend from the mountains to devour people, and cultivators dare no longer slaughter mortals at will, it is not a sudden awakening of conscience—it is their desperate attempt at self-preservation." The third: ......