Civilizations like the human race, which had practically reinvented an entire symbolic system to describe their own cultivation methods, were actually few and far between.
The vast majority of civilizations used natural language, supplemented by the direct transmission of non-declarative memories—namely, True Meaning Transmission—to describe their own cultivation methods.
True Meaning Transmission was certainly convenient, but it also severely restricted the learner's understanding. Non-declarative memory could be very precise, but much of the time, learners could only know that something was so without knowing why. Even if they wanted to alter it, they would not know where to begin. They had to spend far longer repeatedly practicing, relying on insight and training to mesh the contents of the True Meaning Transmission with themselves.
The problems with natural language were even greater. Natural language itself had unclear boundaries between word meanings and imprecise transmission of meaning.
And if it involved the different coded jargon of various schools, slang unique to certain circles, or even something like the personal accent of a method's founder, then the degree of confusion only deepened.
Such things were not without benefits. At the very least, they did indeed encrypt cultivation methods to a certain extent.
But at the same time, they restricted the spread of cultivation methods and limited scholarly exchanges between cultivators.
Yet higher-level civilizations could instead make use of this point to study civilizations of lower levels, those whose Immortal Path was comparatively backward.
The Beauty God was among the best at this. From a certain civilization's descriptions of cultivation methods, they could reverse-engineer that civilization's worldview and culture, then use that culture to infer what physiological traits the civilization might possess.
Naturally, this research method could not let one understand every aspect of a civilization simply by reading a single cultivation method. But