Quality Over Quantity

Shortly after Rén Xuě and Liang Wei were condemned, Mei Xilan took over the army and began making sweeping changes to its infrastructure. The first thing she did was focus on training their cultivators. Out of the several thousand strong army, there were roughly five hundred cultivators. That was a small number to be sure. The average nation would have an army of at least ten thousand cultivators, and the Undying Sun Sect was estimated to have around eleven thousand.

Cultivators sadly did not grow on trees. If someone wanted to become a cultivator, they had to train when they were young, become strong enough physically to break through the Body Forging Realm and into the Hunger Realm. It was not something people could just do on a whim.