Chasing is better than wishing

Earth fell into chaos due to a six feet meteorite hit at a high speed that appeared out of nowhere at 1000 kilometers away from Earth surface. However, no place on Earth showed any sign of damage caused by that but as days passed, humans, animals, insects and all other creatures on earth started to gain more strength than their physical limit.
Few years later, the larger creatures started to produce some kind of energy above their dead body when they died. Slowly that started to happen to lesser size creatures and at one point, even birds started to produce it.
It didn't take much long for humans to understand it was a kind of energy that could be cultivated by humans but eating that would cause death and only one in 10,000 people survived according to data.
So humans started to learn techniques to absorb that energy by meditation techniques and thus formed the essence cultivators, they called the energy as essence.
As modern world was well into martial arts, it only took 2 decades to prepare institutions with full guidance for essence cultivators but with humans, animals also grew into monsters and cornered to some places.
This led for governments to take advantage of citizens without any reservations. They started to impose restrictions on people who could become essence cultivators behind stacks of money.
Which meant a person could only become essence cultivator if he had lot of money.
Despite these circumstances, 5 boys changed their fate from being middle class mediocre boys to powerful men.