"The thousand-day method is expensive and hard to keep consistent," said Garret.
"And it only gives two sub-levels to whatever rank you already have. If you started wrong it doesn't pull you very far out of the hole." He looked at the new arrivals again.
"The ones who don't have their beasts blocked by cultivation errors have it so different from us that comparing ourselves to them barely makes sense."
"Then why do we compare."
"Because it's what we need to do when it comes to defending our city."
♢♢♢♢
What Ren kept watching with more attention than the mutant creatures was something else.
The wall as a system had an intelligence that wasn't in any document he had read, it existed in the people who had accumulated it by doing the same thing in the same place across enough generations that the place had taught them things. Not written things. Not transmittable through instruction.
The kind of knowledge that had no other vehicle except proximity, time and repetition.
