Ultimate Slacker's Tool

At the very beginning, there was but a catalyst, a spiritual stone the earliest of cultivators would either hold directly in their hand or attach to some sort of pedestal to make it look all fancy.

At its core, however, the idea of using the catalyst was simple—by using one's mana through a medium that could hold a certain amount of mana on its own, one could execute spells and structures they wouldn't otherwise be capable of.

In a way, using a catalyst could be said to be the very first development in mana manipulation that allowed its users to manipulate it outside of the limits of their body, a crucial step necessary for all those who wanted to go beyond the very initial levels of cultivation.

Of course, there was a plethora of other benefits to using an external catalyst, but when compared to the main perk of doing so, they only amounted to no more than a statistical error.