"Has your race always been self-sufficient?"
"What does self-sufficient mean... I'm not playing dumb, I really don't know that word..."
"Does the output from your fields and Clockwork Cat Balls let you support yourselves?"
While the Giant Cats ransacked the entire tiny plane, Jiang Han carefully studied the Cat Dollfolk. From them, she could also glean knowledge related to the Anse Elves, enriching her learning—and more importantly, helping her understand Anse's habits.
The facts were exactly as she had expected.
The Cat Dollfolk were a race that could barely sustain themselves. They were fully capable of feeding themselves, and their rudimentary handicraft skills allowed them to make their own clothes and such. They had their own culture as well, along with the ability to supposedly [ride Clockwork Cats into battle]—the so-called "Clockwork Cat Knights." That aside for now.
By sheltering them, changing the wind and rain around them, and providing finished goods, the Anse Elves had turned them into something akin to a colony.
But they had not destroyed the Cat Dollfolk's ecosystem.
Though the Cat Dollfolk's overall physical abilities had declined considerably, they had gained an exceptionally valuable stability. The death rate of the entire Cat Dollfolk race had plummeted. As a long-lived race, the Cat Dollfolk had originally numbered only one or two thousand, but in recent years they had reached ten or twenty thousand. That was Anse's doing.
Though the goal had been exploitation.
Still, one had to admit that the Anse Elves had quite a knack for enslaving others—not much worse than witches.
"...You're saying you have a profession called Clockwork Cat Knight?"
Jiang Han turned the matter over with great interest, then asked again, somewhat disbelievingly:
"Are you sure you know what a profession is?"
A profession was a kind of application of rules,