The Twelve Supreme Goodnesses each had their own strengths.
And each was different.
For a field like Embers, with a murderous barrier to entry and cutthroat competition within its ranks, nothing mattered more than experience, theory, and accumulated knowledge.
Or, in a word, inheritance.
Master-to-apprentice teaching had its merits, but it could never escape its most critical flaw: teach your apprentice everything, and you starve yourself! Vital secret teachings, records accumulated over generations by a school, countless details and key points—generations of artisans had spent their entire lives grinding those out. Why should they teach you just because you knocked your head on the floor? What made you worthy?
Whether limited by an apprentice's dullness, born of a teacher's selfishness, or caused by any number of tangled reasons, the result was inevitably the phenomenon Ye Xian found most sickening.
Everyone had started keeping something up their sleeve.
Teach half, hold back half. Some even clutched at the most insignificant tricks and secrets to exploit their apprentices without end. Feeding off them for one lifetime was not enough; their children and students had to keep feeding too!
It was a disgrace.
Even the Ye Clan's Nine Types Inheritance was no exception.
By the time the Ye Family that Ye Xian despised had been destroyed by its own desires and ambitions, it had long since swollen into a corpse reeking of rot from head to toe. There was nothing redeeming left to see.
Even the core Nine Forms inheritance was divided into inner and outer teachings.
Members with other surnames and children of collateral branches could study their whole lives and still circle outside the true teachings, stumbling along without ever amounting to much. Like the Zhanlu in Ji Jue's hands right now.
Was it Zhanlu? Yes. But it had none of