Chương 90: On Formations

June 2028, Phillips Exeter Daoist Academy Spiritual ink flowed from Leo's micro-bristle brush as it glided across the formation plate. An intricate pattern emerged under his steady hand: detection arrays blooming into trigger mechanisms, stabilization runes linking component to component, the whole design spreading across the palm-sized plate. Then his brush reached the first formation pivot. His hand hesitated. The pattern flickered, destabilized, and collapsed into scattered motes of wasted qi.

Leo set down the brush. He rubbed his eyes until he saw colors. His divine sense felt like someone had taken sandpaper to the inside of his skull. The plate in front of him was supposed to be a complex array. Instead it was just a set of broken lines glowing faintly with residual spiritual energy from his latest failed attempt. The first few weeks of training had gone pretty well. His massive divine sense made basic formations easy enough.

He could hold the entire design in his divine sense at once where most students would need to decode section by section. His tutors had been impressed. The government had invested heavily in his training for the Grand Formations Summit. Three personal tutors working in shifts. Unlimited tier one and tier two spiritual qi for practice. Food delivered to his workshop. A remodeled dorm room next door so he could sleep between sessions. Then they moved to complex arrays.

The Proximity Fuse Complex Array he was working on today was supposed to be his introduction to intermediate formations. Professor Vogt picked it because it was one of the two major arrays of the T2 flak cannon shell Leo was very familiar with. However this was where things became difficult. Unlike basic formations, which follow a single system from start to finish, a complex array consists of one or more formation systems. Leo picked up a reference plate and examined the completed formation with his divine sense.

Forward derivation, the way Vogt had taught him. Start from the visible runes, follow the qi, understand the essence beneath the form. The Proximity Fuse Complex Array linked two basic formations into one system. Each component was simple enough on its own. A Four Symbols detection array handled spatial sensing, splitting qi into cardinal aspects: Azure Dragon, White Tiger, Vermillion Bird, Black Tortoise.

A Six Harmonies trigger mechanism handled directional activation along six axes: East, West, South, North, Above, Below. Separately, he could draw either one in his sleep. The problem was the pivot between them. The Four Symbols split spiritual qi into four different aspects. Each output bore the character of its celestial beast, shaped by the nature of the heavenly quadrant it represented. The Six Harmonies input required something fundamentally different. Directional tension.

Qi pulled taut between opposing poles, defined by where it pointed rather than what it was. The pivot had to transform the aspect encoding and re-tension the qi along six axes in real time. That was where his attempts kept dying. Every time his brush reached that pivot, his divine sense fumbled the conversion and the whole array unraveled. And this was just The Proximity Fuse Complex Array. The simpler of the two complex arrays that made up the famous T2 flak cannon shell.

He didn't dare glance at the other set of blueprints on his desk: an Annihilation Array that incorporated three different formation systems. Leo had asked Shen Tianyi for help. Tianyi took one look at the blueprints and disappeared. Leo stared at the ceiling for a long moment. Then he glanced at the VR pod in the corner. Vivian's death cooldown should be finished by now. She had done well in the Azure Profound Continent.

She faced the press and Luo Mingxia's Heart without complaint, keeping whatever terror she felt locked behind that focused expression Leo knew from their time in the Catacombs together. She had even insisted on facing Monarch Scatterstraw alongside them. When she stood upright in his domain and kept her knees from buckling, even Arthur nodded in grudging approval. Leo felt a twinge of guilt, slightly disturbed by the fact that he seemed to be measuring accomplishments in how many different ways a person could die.

But it didn't bother him that much. After all, this was how to maximize a cheat. He pushed away from the workbench and climbed into the pod.

Azure Profound Continent Leo materialized outside the excavation camp and found Shen Tianyi and Vivian seated at a weathered wooden table beneath a canvas awning. Tianyi was pointing at sections in the English Common dictionary while Vivian repeated them back, her pronunciation earning occasional nods of approval. They waved Leo over when they spotted him. Tianyi pushed a bamboo steamer across the table.

"Steamed buns," Tianyi said.

"The camp cook prepared them. You should eat while they're warm." Leo grabbed one and bit into it. Pork and ginger. Delicious.

"How has formation training been going?" Vivian asked.

"I spent another day on The Proximity Fuse Complex Array." Leo chewed glumly.

"It's insane. I can't understand how you guys do things like that." Vivian laughed.

"I can't. I don't even have the divine sense to draw T2 basic formations, let alone complex arrays."

"But you can do Tier One complex arrays, right?" Vivian nodded.

"But don't beat yourself up. Your progress is outstanding. You went from not even knowing how to hold a formation brush to drawing T2 basic formations with ease in a few weeks." Leo grunted. He still felt stupid.

"Why are you starting with Tier Two complex arrays anyway?" Vivian tilted her head.

"Shouldn't you try your hand at Tier Ones first?" Leo sighed.

"Professor Vogt caught wind of Coach Mei's paper and wanted me to spend at least a week going straight for Tier Two. She said Tier Two was different enough from Tier One that she didn't want me picking up bad habits."

"Oh yeah, I saw that paper." Vivian giggled. Her eyes crinkled behind her glasses.

"'Positive Reinforcement and Accomplishing the Impossible: How to Gaslight a Child into Accomplishing the Impossible.'""She promised that I would get first author!" Vivian's giggling intensified.

"Oh, you definitely got first author on that. As well as first subject."

"Have you read any of the papers on conversion theory?" Vivian asked, composing herself.

"There are many different approaches. Zhang and Morrison's 2004 paper suggests visualizing the systems as linear transformations."

"Vogt assigned that paper as reading," Leo said.

"My eyes glazed over somewhere around 'basis vectors.'""Ah." Vivian nodded slowly.

"So she's trying to train you as an intuitive formation engraver rather than a systematic one."

"Something like that." Leo grabbed another steamed bun.

"But I think Vogt is just trying to humble me so I'll pay attention in class better."

"Is it working?"

"No." Leo turned to Tianyi.

"Do you have any suggestions about how to convert from the Four Symbols to the Six Harmonies?" Tianyi stroked his chin thoughtfully.

"Perhaps you should consult your desperado friends about this matter."

"Arthur and them?"

"Correct. Those people have self-detonated so many times, their understanding of conversion between systems must surpass even your professor's. When it comes to blowing oneself up, they have already reached the pinnacle." The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. Leo blinked.

"What does self-detonating have to do with understanding formation systems?"

"Self-detonating requires converting the attributed spiritual qi in your dantian into another system." Tianyi held up a finger like a lecturer.

"All you Americans cultivate a Five Elements spiritual technique. If you convert it into a Four Symbols system, the balance is destroyed, and then..." He made an explosion gesture with his hands.

"By now, they must be quite proficient at converting Five Elements into other systems. Practice makes perfect, as they say." Leo sat up straighter. His mind started racing through the implications. Tianyi's expression shifted to alarm.

"That was a joke. I was speaking in jest."

"Are you saying doing it inside your body is better than doing it outside?"

"What?" Tianyi looked horrified. Vivian pushed her glasses up.

"I never thought about it that way. The theory is sound, though. You have exceptional divine sense, Leo, but nothing can match the control you have over your own spiritual qi inside your body."

"Vivian, I implore you, do not encourage this idiot." She ignored Tianyi completely.

"Maybe if you entered omnidirectional perspective and then observed how you convert your spiritual qi..." Tianyi stood up abruptly, his chair scraping against the dirt.

"I refuse to sit here and listen to you two discuss the fastest method to seek death."

"It's not seeking death," Leo called after him.

"It's research."

"With you people, these two things are one and the same!" Tianyi disappeared around a supply tent. A moment later, his head poked back around the canvas.

"If you insist on acting recklessly, then at the very least, do it far from the camp." He pointed toward the distant hills.

"Two li at minimum. I have no desire to be implicated in your foolishness." His head disappeared again. Vivian drummed her fingers on the table.

"You know that you'll only be able to convert it for a short period of time right? The self detonation process is very quick and won't give you much time to observe. And it won't help your current problem. You can only convert from Five Elements in your dantian outward. It won't teach you anything about Four Symbols to Six Harmonies."

"Are you going to teach me the conversion technique or do I need to find Arthur?" Vivian stared at him. Leo stared back.

"Fine." She stood up.

"Two li that way. And if you blow up before I finish explaining, I'm not repeating myself when you respawn." Shen Tianyi had finished organizing the supply crates and moved on to inventorying spiritual ink when he heard the distant whump roll across the hills. He paused. The sound had come from roughly two li away. Maybe a little more.

"At least he heeded my request about the distance," Tianyi muttered to himself, shaking his head.

"Though whether he possesses any other wisdom remains to be seen." And went back to counting vials.

Earth Leo died two more times practicing the spiritual qi transformation. It didn't really help with his formation work. However he now better understood how qi worked shifted and transformed. He could explain the conversion process in detail. He just didn't know how to direct it with a brush. But Leo ended up coming up with a different approach. He found Professor Vogt in her office the next morning. She was grading summer assignments with a red pen that moved like a weapon.

"I need you to draw the pivot transition while I watch." Vogt looked up.

"You've seen me demonstrate it twice already."

"I need to see it differently." Leo tapped the side of his head.

"I want to observe your divine sense and your brushwork with my Omnidirectional perspective. And I want to replicate what you're doing in real time. Mirror your movements exactly as you make them."

"Simultaneous observation and replication." She leaned back in her chair, considering.

"You want to bypass comprehension entirely and go straight to muscle memory."

"Something like that."

"You might be the first person in the world who mastered omnidirectional perspective before basic formations." Vogt stood and reached for her brush case.

"We might as well try it out." Leo positioned himself at the center of the room and expanded his divine sense. Vogt stood at the workstation, a fresh formation plate in front of her, brush wet with spiritual ink.

"Ready?" she asked.

"Go." Vogt's brush descended. Leo watched from every angle at once. He saw the precise tilt of her wrist, the micro-adjustments of her fingers, the flow of qi from her dantian through her meridians into the brush tip. He observed the spiritual ink responding to her intent, the formation lines crystallizing on the plate surface, the exact moment when Four Symbols qi met the pivot point and began transforming into Six Harmonies structure. His own hand moved without conscious thought.

His body already knew how to do this. He had already trained himself how to observe and follow in the same instant. He had developed this skill set while threading the needle through the lava chute of the Mountain Domain. Vogt's brush curved left. Leo's brush curved left. Vogt's qi pulsed through the pivot junction. Leo's qi pulsed in perfect synchronization. The conversion happened. Leo felt the qi shift at the pivot point, aspected energy flattening into directional tension.

He couldn't have explained what he'd just done. His hands had simply followed Vogt's hands, his divine intent flexed how Vogt's divine intent flexed, and the qi just changed. Leo's formation plate flickered twice, then faded. The lines held their shape for a full three seconds before dissolving. His best attempt yet. Vogt set down her brush and examined his work.

"Again," she said. They repeated the process seven times. By the fourth attempt, Leo began moving a half-second ahead of Vogt, his hands anticipating her movements before she made them. By the sixth, he was drawing independently. On the seventh attempt, he completed the pivot transition alone while Vogt watched with her arms crossed.

"Functional," she said.

"Clean lines. Stable conversion." She picked up his plate and turned it under the light.

"You've successfully drawn your first complex formation pivot." Leo waited for praise. It didn't come.

"I've been trying to train you through conventional methods," she said.

"Have you struggle with theory and trial and error until something clicked. That's how I learned. That's how I teach." She shook her head slowly.

"But you're not a conventional student."

"I feel like I'm cheating," Leo admitted.

"Just copying answers instead of understanding them."

"Formations are, at their core, about copying and interpreting the patterns of Heaven." Vogt smiled.

"The first formation masters observed the natural flow of qi through the world and learned to replicate what they saw. Every generation since has stood on the shoulders of giants." She handed the plate back to Leo.

"You're just being a little more literal about it than most." Leo stared at the completed formation plate in his hands. The lines held steady, the pivot transition stable. A functional complex array. His first. But something nagged at him.

"Professor Vogt." He set the plate down carefully.

"Am I doing myself a disservice? Learning this way, I mean." Vogt raised an eyebrow.

"It's just that Zhang and Morrison's paper, the linear transformation approach, I couldn't follow the math, but I understand the general idea." Leo rubbed the back of his neck.

"If I actually sat down and learned the systematic method properly, wouldn't that give me a foundation I could build on? Something I could use to figure out new conversions on my own, instead of just copying movements until my hands remember them?" Vogt was quiet for a moment. She walked to her desk and retrieved a worn copy of the paper in question, its margins filled with handwritten notes in at least three different ink colors.

"Zhang and Morrison's framework is ambitious," she said.

"Genuinely elegant mathematics. But in practice, it explains only a small subset of formations." She flipped to a page dense with equations and turned it toward Leo.

"Spiritual qi doesn't always fit neatly into rules. The framework assumes clean conversions between systems with predictable transformations. It assumes qi behaves like vectors in Euclidean space." She tapped a highlighted passage.

"Sometimes it does. Often it doesn't. Qi has moods. Qi has memory." Leo frowned.

"Then what's the point of the paper?"

"The framework shows its full ingenuity when you design entirely new formations from the ground up. If you build a formation specifically to take advantage of Zhang and Morrison's assumptions, you can achieve remarkable things." Vogt closed the paper.

"Several breakthrough formations in the past two decades were designed using their methodology."

"So it's useful for creation, not interpretation."

"Precisely." Vogt set the paper aside.

"And there's another consideration. The Cults we're competing against at the Summit are well aware of Zhang and Morrison. They know every easy trick Earth has developed over the past century. Whatever formation problems the Cults present, they will design them specifically to resist systematic decoding." She gave Leo a pointed look.

"They will throw formations at you that break the rules. Formations that use obscure system pairings, or deliberate inefficiencies meant to confuse pattern-matching approaches. If you walk in expecting everything to reduce to matrix multiplication, you will fail." Leo absorbed this. The Cults had been developing formations for hundreds of thousands of years. Earth's systematic approaches were barely a century old. Of course they would know how to counter them.

"So what's the plan?" he asked.

"Keep copying until I've memorized enough patterns?"

"We can work with this." Vogt moved to her desk and pulled out a calendar.

"Your omnidirectional perspective gives you an advantage no other student at your level possesses. We should exploit it fully." She began marking dates on the calendar with quick, decisive strokes.

"I will arrange for various formation experts to visit Exeter over the coming months. Each one will demonstrate specific pivot transformations while you observe and replicate. Different experts have different specialties. Different styles. You will absorb as many approaches as possible." Leo leaned forward to look at the calendar. The marked dates stretched from July through December with a few weeks left empty.

"How many transformations will I need to learn?" Vogt finished marking and turned the calendar so Leo could see the full spread.

"For introductory complex arrays, there are forty-two different transformations you need to be familiar with. Every pairing of numerical systems has its own conversion logic, its own tricks, its own failure modes." Forty-two. Leo's stomach dropped.

"Your goal," Vogt continued, "is to be familiar with all forty-two before your teammates are selected at the IMO conclude in December. That gives you roughly five months." Leo nodded. He had a direction, a clear goal, and something to grind. He knew he could do this. Then suddenly he thought of something.

"You said 'introductory' complex arrays." Leo caught the word she had emphasized.

"What do you mean by introductory?" She just smiled at Leo.

"We'll discuss it after you've proven you can handle the fundamentals."