no matter what cultivation novel you read, there will always be massacres were thousands of thousands die, even if some planets, planes or whatever become desolate, refined, etc, they just don't become extinct and the numbers doesn't decrease, they are like a plague, sometimes some novels tell that some "emperor" has like hundreds of children, but not all cultivators are emperors, so you would think that normal cultivators won't have so many children, but then... they plague everything under heavens...
Hm... I think it's also because of the large worlds. There's a whole lot more area than on Earth, so it's also reasonable that there's a much higher population. More room to grow and resources to use, after all.
Usually the premise is that there is an immense number of mortals from which a tiny, tiny fraction can become cultivators. So the population is massive enough to recover from the mortals breeding like rabbits, which in the eyes of cultivators is exactly what they do. Also keep in mind they are generally pre-industrial societies with large families and no social welfare.
The trillions of "trillions" miles big and (apparently) habitable landmasses r the source of endless cultivators.
They are pretty much a plague. They kill anyone who is or isn't a cultivator based on if their moods are off or not.
First of all, I see cultivators as mutated humans, beings with gold (metal) skeletons and crystal organs, with unseen energy to use. As to whether they breed like rabbits... if you have a race that can live till very old, ultimately the population will boom.
As what the others said, there might be a large number of people living on each planet, and the cultivation worlds have thousands of planets filled with life. Earth itself has billions of people living, and if you take that about 1% of these people can cultivate, you get tens of millions of cultivators. Tone down these numbers a lot and you would still get a lot of cultivators for each planet. This would explain why thousands of deaths shouldn't matter much in the long run
Well, cultivator need resources the more the better and the less for commoners. The higher the cultivation, the more they needed. The worst of all, not easy to make them die, be it killed or die by natural age. Even when MIA, they can comeback with breakthrough. Even die is not the end of all, resurrection, possessing innocent people or take control the body of arrogant young master is possible
You forget that since cultivators can live vastly longer the more they progress in cultivation, so without these mass deaths the cultivation world would become greatly overpopulated and deplete all the cultivation resources. As such, you could say that the MCs are doing their society a favor, in a left-handed sort of way.
The writer wants to make you think that cultivators are rare and only 1 in a million can get to (insert generic cultivation real name here, let's use X1). But we don't get that feeling because every time the MC goes to a different place, the so called (real X1) isn't as rare anymore and even peasants have that power, now the ultimate and unreachable real is the X2 and then the X2 realm suddenly is the average realm and only the true talents get to X3 and it keeps repeating over and over again. My interpretation is that human life in Xianxia is infinite.
What they don't tell you is there's always some master in the laws of life whose aura spreads out gets all the mortal women for millions of kilometers mysteriously pregnant. So, a ton of massive talents come out of that generation and end up going on slaughters to keep overpopulation in check. The circle of novel life is vast and boundless as the oceans.
It's honestly on of the things that always confused me. I understood that kind of population on the super huge planets, but what about the flat worlds. Otoh there is also thos worlds where conception is suppose to be difficult... If you what my opinion, it's easier to apply logic to anime then doing so to cultivation novels, so there isnt much point in doing so... unless you're needing a distraction on the level of a migraine.
They're like Goblins Regular chicks get pregnant when they so much as look in their direction too long, and regardless of what the unwitting future mom was, the result will be a redshirt cultivator