Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Chapter 1149 - Taming the Wall - Glorious General

Garret nodded slowly. He knew that Li and his grandfather Chen were commoners, born without a drop of noble blood, just like him.

And then Li casually added, almost like a passing joke, "Though, honestly, Ren's house was in even worse shape than mine. It was sitting on a tiny little hill, in the absolute outermost ring of the entire settlement. It was so far out that when they built this new Wall... his small hill actually got left on the outside."

Garret stopped rattling the dice. He blinked, staring at the young man.

"Outside the Wall?"

"Outside the Wall," Li chuckled, shaking his head. "You can actually still see it, if you walk a few minutes further south down the parapet. I'll show it to you if you want."

Garret immediately demanded to see it. Li led the way.

They walked in silence down the stone walkway toward the southern edge of the sector. Li stopped and pointed out toward the barren, mutant-infested plains side.

There, sitting completely alone in the desolate Red Plains, in territory that now belonged to the monsters, was a small, lonely hill.

"Right there," Li said softly, resting his forearms on the stone crenellations. "That's where the house was. It burned to the ground years ago. That fire actually ended up being the catalyst for the best change in my entire life."

Li shrugged, a fond smile touching his lips.

"By the time it burned down, Ren wasn't poor anymore. He bought a nice place closer to the center for his parents. And he didn't just save his own family; he literally dragged almost all of our neighbors inward to work with him. He bought us all better homes in the inner city. That hill ended up empty after the house went up in flames but I still remember it fondly."

Garret didn't say a word. He just stood there, gripping the cold stone of the parapet, staring at the barren hill for a very long time.

A General.

The absolute, supreme sovereign of the Southern territory. The terrifying prodigy who casually fired the incinerating light of dragons and read classified castle blueprints like a boring grocery list.

His childhood home had been so incredibly far out in the dirt, so impossibly, brutally poor, that the kingdom hadn't even bothered to include his old house land inside the defensive perimeter.

The boy had started in the mud. He had started significantly lower than every single soldier who now jokingly called him General. He had started vastly lower than Garret himself.

Staring out at the small hill of earth that humanity had abandoned, something profound and heavy locked permanently into place in the veteran's chest.

From that day forward, Garret simply could not keep his mouth shut.

He ran his mouth on the night shifts. He ran it in the mess hall. He ran it while holding court over the worn wooden dice tables. He relentlessly, proudly told the story of the lonely, scorched hill sitting outside the Great Wall. He told anyone who would listen about the General who had been born in the absolute last, poorest shack of the outermost slum, a place so utterly destitute that the kingdom hadn't even bothered to include it inside the defensive perimeter.

Garret told the story with the fierce, protective pride of a man bragging about his own blood. And every single time the veteran recounted the tale, the garrison's collective reverence for Ren skyrocketed to an entirely new level.

Because it was one thing to blindly admire a high-born prodigy. The grunts were used to aristocratic geniuses descending from the inner castle, armed with their polished vests, their impossibly expensive, cultivated beasts, and the crushing political weight of their ancient family names.

But it was an entirely different, world-shattering realization to discover that their supreme, untouchable General had actually started lower in the dirt than they had and just here in their same wall zone.

He wasn't a second or third-generation noble casually looking down at them from a towering balcony. He was one of their own.

He was a slum kid who had clawed his way up from the absolute, suffocating bottom of the world.

That raw, undeniable truth made his catastrophic power infinitely more impressive and, paradoxically, vastly more relatable. Perhaps that was exactly why the boy was so weird. And perhaps that was exactly why, despite being so impossibly weird, he fit in with the frontline grunts so easily.

The soldiers patrolling the Southwest parapets began to look out into the 'Ren Plains' with entirely different eyes. Staring at that distant little hill on the outside was no longer just looking at some dirt; they were looking at a monument.

♢♢♢♢

When Ren finally returned from his deep-ring patrol and realized what had happened, he immediately cornered Li.

"Why in the world would you tell them exactly where my old house was?" Ren scolded, his voice a harsh, exasperated whisper.

Because now, the frontline troops were treating the scorched patch of dirt like a sacred, mythological shrine.

Hardened veterans were literally pointing it out to the fresh rookies as they marched by. They were deliberately lowering their voices to hushed, reverent whispers whenever they discussed it. And worst of all, they were looking at Ren with a brand-new, suffocating brand of awe that was infinitely more uncomfortable than the whole "General" joke. It was as if being born in a pathetic shack outside the Wall magically transformed him into a living, breathing folk legend, rather than just a kid who had grown up very poor.

But Ren couldn't actually stay mad at Li. It was a biological impossibility; you couldn't hold genuine anger against a childhood friend who had starved in the same dirt you had.

So, Ren pragmatically decided that the vast majority of the blame rested squarely on Garret's broad shoulders. Garret was the megaphone who had cheerfully broadcasted the intelligence across the entire sector. Therefore, both Li and Garret desperately needed to be issued an appropriate, severe military punishment.

The "punishment", it turned out, was comprised of the one thing Ren personally considered the absolute worst torture in existence: boring, administrative management.

Just as the Vanguard had forcefully burdened Ren with an agonizing amount of paperwork and logistical headaches by making him "important", Ren decided to ruthlessly return the favor. As a newly minted General, he was now officially tasked with managing massive, sprawling fractions of the regional army. He desperately needed lieutenants. He needed seconds-in-command to handle the mind-numbing logistics so he could go back to building towers and fighting monsters.

So, he aggressively drafted the guilty parties.

He selected Garret, along with a handful of the most relentless, sycophantic soldiers on the Wall, the exact men who had bullied him the hardest with the exaggerated "Yes, my glorious General!" salutes. And he drafted Li, who 'accidentally' dragged Tao and Anuar down with him into the administrative hellfire, 'punishing' them for the simple, indirect crime of being his friends.

However, Ren's grand, terrible "punishment" violently backfired. To every single man drafted, it was an astronomical reward.

They were suddenly the official seconds-in-command to a General. They were handed massive tactical responsibility, heavy rank upgrades, and the profound, unquestionable trust to direct troops directly under a leader they genuinely believed in.

They accepted the "punishment" with massive, ear-to-ear grins that absolutely none of them even attempted to hide, despite the fact that the promotion inherently carried ten times the administrative workload they previously managed.

Garret, in particular, received his official command roster with a booming, echoing belly laugh.

"Well, well, well," Garret chuckled, slapping the heavy parchment against his thigh. "If the official military penalty for respectfully bullying the General is a massive field promotion, I highly intend to start committing treasonous offenses much, much more frequently."

Ren stared at him, his brow furrowing in genuine, deadpan confusion. "No, wait. That isn't how a punishment works."

"That," Garret declared brightly, already reaching for the worn leather cup to rattle the dice, "is exactly what a cheating, demigod General would say..."

The entire Southwest sector erupted into laughter. It was the gritty, loud, unrestrained laughter of the Wall, the exact sound that echoed across the stones every single time Garret decided it was time to break the tension.

And Ren, the weirdest, most impossibly humble General the Great Wall had ever seen, simply shook his head, walked over to the wooden crates, and sat down to deliberately lose the very first game of dice one last time.