Chapter 20: Forming the Array

Following Instructor Yan's advice, Mo Hua practiced drawing array patterns several times, and indeed, he felt a sudden moment of enlightenment.

When he practiced on the stone tablet before falling asleep at night, his comprehension improved significantly faster.

Whenever there was something he didn't understand, he would draw it a few more times, and gradually, he would grasp the key intricacies.

As long as the foundation of the array patterns was firmly mastered, learning the variations would not be too difficult. The difficulty lay in the lack of guidance; without someone to point him in the right direction, Mo Hua would not know how to think about them, naturally finding himself at a dead end in his contemplations.

After another day of familiarization, at the end of class on the third evening, Mo Hua began to officially set about drawing the Earth-Stabilizing Arrays.

The initial strokes were not smooth, but after some stumbling, he finally managed to complete one, though it took quite a long time.

A four-pattern Earth-Stabilizing Array took Mo Hua an hour and a half to complete. After finishing, due to the excessive consumption of his divine sense, he had to rest for another hour.

By the time Mo Hua finished drawing the Earth-Stabilizing Array, it was already the Hour of the Rat.

Mo Hua checked it once and discovered that, as expected, he had drawn it incorrectly.

Mo Hua sighed.

He had only drawn one in an entire night, and it was wrong.

Trying to finish ten arrays within five days would make the schedule very tight.

"What should I do?"

Mo Hua thought it over, and in the end, having no other choice, he decided to find ways to skip some of his cultivation classes.

Courses like the history and common knowledge of cultivation, of course, could not be skipped, as these could broaden his horizons and cultivation experience.

Alchemy and Talisman Making, however, involved spending spirit stones on herbs and talisman jade, as well as renting the sect's alchemy furnaces, making the learning costs quite high. Therefore, Mo Hua selectively skipped some of these classes.

In any case, he was unlikely to have much of a future in these cultivation branches that required massive expenditures of spirit stones.

After that, he could skip all the body-tempering classes entirely.

Cultivators cultivate spiritual power through cultivation techniques and use Daoist arts to drive that spiritual power for attacks.

Daoist arts are divided into two major categories: spell-based Daoist arts and martial-based Daoist arts.

Spells use the divine sense to control spiritual power, condensing it into spells for attack, whereas martial arts use spiritual power to stimulate the potential of the physical body to fight.

Those who practice spells are called spiritual cultivators, while those who practice martial arts are called body cultivators.

In the Qi Refining stage, there are fewer spiritual cultivators and more body cultivators. Especially among the cultivators of Tongxian City, most make a living by hunting demons. Since spiritual cultivators are physically weak and unsuitable for hunting, most rogue cultivators follow the path of body cultivation.

To this end, the Tongxian Sect specifically opened a body-tempering course to allow its disciples to train their physical bodies in advance.

But Mo Hua was destined not to be able to temper his body.

He had not inherited his father Mo Shan's talent for body tempering; instead, like his mother Liu Ruhua, he had been somewhat frail since childhood, even weaker in constitution than her.

According to Old Mr. Feng, the alchemist from Xinglin Hall, cultivators are born in accordance with the Heavenly Dao, and their divine sense and physical body are relatively balanced.

When Mo Hua was born, he possessed memories of two lifetimes, making his divine sense innately too strong. This caused an imbalance between his divine sense and his physical body; as one grew, the other diminished, leaving Mo Hua weak and prone to illness from birth.

A hundred-kilogram stone tripod that others could lift easily could not be budged even when Mo Hua used all his strength. Cultivators of his age were generally a head taller and a circle sturdier than him.

Although Mo Hua's frame was thin and weak, fortunately, his features were beautiful, his temperament gentle, and his complexion fair. At ten years old, he looked like a porcelain doll.

This appearance was quite good, but Mo Hua still felt that a real man should be more majestic and robust.

For example, his father: tall, heroic in appearance, and commanding respect just by looking at him.

In Mo Hua's dreams, he should be dressed in white robes, practicing peerless techniques, his spear striking like a dragon, standing alone against ten thousand men.

Unfortunately, such a scene could only be seen in his dreams.

"Oh, right."

Mo Hua remembered that after he fell asleep, his divine sense would automatically enter his sea of consciousness, meaning he couldn't even dream...

The instructor teaching body tempering had originally intended to be strict with Mo Hua, but after seeing Mo Hua push a stone tripod several times without it moving an inch, only to twist his own arm in the process, he became much more lenient toward him.

That was how cultivation worked; sometimes, hard work simply couldn't solve the problem.

The instructor was also very understanding of Mo Hua.

If the Heavenly Dao closes a window for you, it might be because it wants you to walk through a different door, rather than wanting you to bang your head against the wall.

Thus, Mo Hua selectively skipped those classes, and with the extra time, he locked himself in his room to focus on drawing Earth-Stabilizing Arrays.

During the periodic break five days later, Mo Hua finally used up all ten sets of materials, successfully completing six of them.

Not only did he not lose money, but he also made a profit of four spirit stones, which Mo Hua found quite satisfactory.

Taking advantage of his one-day holiday, Mo Hua went to the Youyuan Studio on North Street to hand the completed Earth-Stabilizing Arrays to the fat manager.

The fat manager looked them over and said to Mo Hua, "Your brother's foundation in arrays is indeed a bit poor, but he learns quite quickly. These arrays are visibly better one after another. It's just..."

The manager then took the first array to criticize it: "This one is drawn like a complete beginner; even some basic patterns are drawn quite clumsily..."

Mo Hua was already used to the manager's grumbling; it went in one ear and out the other.

Besides, the manager was talking about his brother; what did it have to do with him?

He didn't even have a brother.

Mo Hua went straight to the point: "Can I exchange these for spirit stones?"

The manager rolled his eyes at Mo Hua but still counted out four spirit stones for him. "Tell your brother to draw them better next time."

"Mm-hmm," Mo Hua nodded repeatedly upon receiving the spirit stones.

Mo Hua used all four spirit stones to buy pastries. He ate two himself, kept two, and gave the rest to Da Hu and the others.

Seeing so many pastries, the three of them were deeply moved and asked Mo Hua if he wanted to eat meat again, noting that they had seen an Elder raising a very fat, multicolored duck.

Mo Hua felt a bit of a headache and told them to stop stealing, otherwise, if the sect notified their parents, they would surely be beaten half to death when they got home.

Only then did Da Hu and the others reluctantly give up their idea.

Afterward, Mo Hua continued drawing Earth-Stabilizing Arrays for over two months.

With more practice, his mastery gradually became thorough.

Previously, drawing one Earth-Stabilizing Array—including the time needed to rest and recover his divine sense—took nearly three hours; now, it only took an hour and a half.

This was partly because practice made perfect, and as his mastery and understanding of the patterns deepened, the time required to draw them decreased. Secondly, his day-and-night practice, the continuous consumption, recovery, and application of his divine sense, had invisibly trained the strength of his divine sense, making it much more profound than before.

A powerful divine sense provided obvious benefits for drawing arrays.

The success rate of the Earth-Stabilizing Array reached eighty or ninety percent, and occasionally, he could succeed with all ten. Each array could earn him two spirit stones. Over these two months, after deducting his daily expenses for food and clothing, Mo Hua had earned a full hundred spirit stones.

Mo Hua planned to save up two hundred spirit stones before going to the sect to select a mid-grade, low-tier cultivation technique.

Once he had chosen one, he would tell his parents; otherwise, they would surely insist on paying for it themselves, telling him to keep his spirit stones for his own cultivation or to use them in the future to marry a Dao companion or buy a cave residence.