Molting the Mortal Coil

Taking advantage of your strong points and covering up for your weaknesses is a pretty basic concept when it comes to most forms of competition. The new Sage now found it ridiculous how lacking his combat abilities were. Before joining the Holy Flame Sect he’d been forced to fight for his life dozens if not hundreds of times. He had strove to purchase techniques, weapons, and anything else he could get his hands on to make himself stronger. After joining the Sect he grew complacent, no longer worried about fighting for his life and spending all his time learning and earning profession badges. During the time when he’d been training as a Hunter was the only time he faced any hardship. That was when he’d learned how to use the Rope Dart, training in a martial art called ‘Revolving Skimmer’ and practicing how to combine it with his Cultivation Art, Verdant Firebrand. Hunters trained to track, trap, and capture animals and beasts which inevitably led to combat. At the same time, battles only happened when the Hunter screwed up. The ideal hunt ended with the prey being caught in traps and being caged or finished off by the Hunter.

At the time, Sage had felt his blood pumping whenever he participated in a hunt. It was a feeling that he loved and hated at the same time. It drove him to become stronger, but as soon as he earned his 1 star ranking as a Hunter and moved on to the next Profession he seemed to repress the experience. Thinking about it would put him into that mindset again, living on the edge of a blade. It was more relaxing for him to focus on learning and savoring the peaceful life. More than a decade later, he realized how naive he had been, hiding from his problems rather than facing them head on. Not that he’d face them head on now… a cunning individual would never face a problem directly. Such a blunt approach was too revealing and failure left little room for recovery. Just like when he was a Hunter, the element of surprise was the most important thing. The more secret weapons you have, the more surprises you have.

Sage purchased a few supporting ores and materials, which when combined with the ones he already had stored up within his Storage Ring, he was able to construct quite a few Formation Plates. Formation Arrays were usually inscribed onto a permanent surface and used as defensive or utility installations. A formation plate on the other hand was a portable version of an array. The formation would be inscribed onto a metal disk and when energy was channeled into it, the formation would be activated. The downside was that the formation would be the most generic version given that the usual strengthening variables were unknown, additionally, the material that the plate was created out of was usually far weaker than the huge stone foundations that arrays were usually inlaid upon.

The energy that Array Formations had to control and harness was usually incorporeal yet at the same time had similar properties to a liquid. The people of this world merely accepted how things were and followed the teachings of the previous generations. Sage, on the other hand, was a newcomer versed in at least basic science from Earth. As he learned how to use Formation Arrays he also tried to study how they worked. The formations themselves acted sort of like a combination of electrical wiring and water pipes. The energy filled the inscribed symbols like small water channels, yet it also inundated and saturated the materials the symbols were inscribed on like electricity spreading over a metal surface. The base material the formation was inscribed upon would have to bear the load of the formation’s activity. A standard array formation took this into account as they planned the materials for its construction quite carefully to give them an unlimited life.

Formation Plates were small, usually only the size of a palm or dinner plate. The limitations of size, weight, and their portability made them into much weaker and inefficient versions of real formations. The best Formation Plates could usually reach about a tenth of the ability of a normally constructed formation, but even so they were the main method a Formation Master could use to do battle. Sage was also a Blacksmith so the construction of Formation Plates could be done without assistance. Normally, Formation Masters would merely purchase the plates of the highest quality material they could afford. Some Masters would go out of their way and have them custom formed from specific materials or of different sizes in an attempt to improve the efficiency of the plate.

A standard Formation Array was an assemblage of symbols that each performed a unique effect which when combined created something entirely new. It was like an assemblage of letters forming words. A completely array usually included more than one individual formation of symbols, each of the different formations would perform different functions. For example, a basic formation the Fire Trap Array. First, there was a formation to create flame. Second, a formation to lock onto a target and guide the flame to attack it. The third would designate what the targets were; certain levels of energy, people to exclude, etc. The fourth would act as a trigger, being set for what sorts of things would actually set the trap off. Finally, the last formation would tie them all together and turn the collection of formations into a complete array.

A Formation Plate usually left out some of the supporting Formations and relied on the activator of the Plate to control the energy. The simple Fire Trap Array, as a Formation Plate, would leave out the third and fourth formations which made it less a trap and more of a weapon. The person activating the Plate would choose when to activate it and what to target. Other times it would be used as the full version, but the conditions of activation and the target had to be simple. Usually something like the next creature to enter a certain range, excluding the activator, would be the target. There was advantages and disadvantages to both options, which was why most Formation Masters carried around many different Formation Plates for different situations. The manually controlled plates required control from a Cultivator, meaning most could only activate one or two plates at a time at most. On the other hand, a full trap type formation plate was usually much easier to avoid. If a Formation Master started energizing plates and placing them down, the enemy would just avoid the plate or attack it from a distance. It still took time to energize a Formation Plate, so trap plates were still best used as traps set up in advance.

Sage had an idea of his own on how to improve the ability of Formation Plates, and he was now ready to give it a try. His idea stemmed around creating larger Formation Plates that could interlock with smaller Formation Plates. As he was crafting them himself the plan was to forge a huge solid piece of ore and then shape that into large and small plates. Since it would be an identical material the hope was that with some testing he could find a way to create modular Formation Plates. He would create a smaller plate that had the main function of an array, and then fit it into a larger plate that would carry a formation for targeting and triggering. If he could figure out how to make it work then he could just carry around different trigger plates and effect plates and combine them to match the situation.

His idea stemmed from when he was reminded of his programming days. The larger modular triggering plates would become his ‘if’ checks. All of his comparative values would need to be predetermined, but by changing out the array placed in the larger ‘if’ plate he could pick what to check for and how to react to it.

I hope I can get the plates to combine… I wonder how many levels of combination I can create?

The sudden idea of creating a dozen levels of nested ‘if’ formation arrays brought a smile to his lips.