Unfortunately for martial artists, unlike cultivators, they did not recover their spiritual energy automatically over time by passively absorbing the ambient spirit energy to replenish what they had consumed.
Martial artists had to refine their own energy precisely because they didn't have spirit roots to perform such magical acts. If they had spirit roots, who would waste their precious and limited time with martial arts? They would directly cultivate!
This was also why martial arts could not ascend past the grandmaster realm, which was equivalent to core formation. After all, the Nascent Soul realm was no longer about refining energy, but refining the soul itself, and the amount of energy as well as facilities needed for that could not be supplied by the martial arts of today.
