He said to Arthur, "Currently, it is more efficient to take up the bulk of the resources of the region. So we don't need to fight the other four sects and let them gang up against us."
"But things will be different if a sect is the one to take action against us. The other sects won't join in because they don't want to fight us. Instead, they will let the mad sect get destroyed while working to raise another sect to replace them."
Arthur said, "So I was right. By the looks of things, the other Sects can't defeat us and the families can't defeat the Sects."
Jason nodded and said in agreement, "And that will remain the same as long as the Blood Skull sect keeps hoarding so much resources to themselves and as long as the sects keep working together to strangle the families by keeping resources away from them."
Arthur completed what he wanted to say by saying, "And that's a good thing."
Jason chuckled again. Then he said, "You get it."
Arthur nodded in understanding. Then he said, "It seems even though you're still the easygoing guy that I knew, you've changed over the past ten years."
Jason chuckled when he heard that. He didn't deny it.
He said, "I have indeed changed. I changed when I learned that power is a necessity to have for anything. I learned that it doesn't matter what your goal is in life; you must have power to achieve that goal and protect your achievement, or someone else will take it from you."
Arthur said, "Even if all you want to do is sleep all day long and do nothing. Without enough power, even that will be impossible to achieve."
Jason said, "Exactly. You understand."
Jason spoke as if it were some profound understanding, but Arthur didn't feel that it was a profound understanding. This was probably because he had a preliminary understanding of this back on Earth.
Back on earth, power was either in the hands of the individual or the government. Someone had to have the ultimate say.
An example was the kind of house someone could build in an area and the amenities someone could add to that house. An individual didn't have the right to build whatever they wanted. They had to be permitted by the government.
If someone didn't have the proper permit, whatever they wanted to build was against regulations and therefore illegal. To top it off, after building the house, one still has to pay property tax for the house.
He had always thought that the existence of governments was a restriction on individual liberty. But the specific moment he had this epiphany was when he wanted to employ people in his company that only looked like a certain celebrity.
He wanted everyone in his company to look like that male celebrity. But he was told that he couldn't do so because he couldn't employ only men, as that would be discriminating against women.
He had found it absurd back then. Unfortunately, there was nothing he could do to stop it.
It was then that he realized that if one day sleeping on wooden beds or cotton bedsheets became illegal, he wouldn't be able to sleep if he could only sleep on cotton bedsheets.
Of course this lesson was trivial compared to what he learned when he came to this world. The underlying truth is still the same, but power has shifted from the hands of the government to the hands of the individual.
This shift in the placement of power didn't make things better. Far from it, individuals getting to possess great power made things worse.
Things got so bad that a man's sister can be raped, and the man will be jailed for trying to seek justice for his sister. He learned this the day he had to kill that man.
Since every noble child had to go through bloodletting, he expected someone like Jason to have already understood the truth before entering a sect.
He thought to himself, "I guess he had to go out of his comfort zone to learn the lesson. Not that I know exactly how bad things are. Things have been very easy for me ever since I entered the sect."
He felt that he shouldn't feel mentally superior since he too has been comfortable these past few years and knows nothing of suffering.
He too has become carefree like Jason used to be. He doesn't know what the experience of other sects who don't have as many resources as the Blood Skull sect is like, and he certainly doesn't know what cultivation is like for loose cultivators.
He chuckled inwardly and said, "They probably don't gain 10,000 energy stones for being at the top of one ranking or another."
He can admit that things have been great for him. He got into the best sect and was admitted with the best grade.
In five years, he managed to acquire his current strength and reach the top 1,000. Then he used that qualification to enter the secret realm.
After entering the secret realm, he harvested resources that are not present outside. His life wasn't in much danger during the whole process, and he came out with rare resources worth around 100,000 low-grade energy stones.
That 100,000 low-grade energy stones is just a conservative estimate of what he earned from the secret realm. When converted to gold coins at a rate of 1 low-grade energy stone to 100 gold coins, what he earned becomes 10,000,000 gold coins.
He thinks that 10 million gold coins is a lot of money. It is certainly more than the amount he has earned from writing books these past four years.
Despite how large this amount is, it is just what he alone earned. Thor earned about the same, while Goldwyn and the other experienced disciples from the Blood Skull sect earned around 120,000 low-grade energy stones' worth of resources.