It was already ten in the morning when he returned to Chen Family Village.
Chen Lin did not go to the Resort or look for anyone. He went straight upstairs, locked his bedroom door, and drew the curtains.
With a flick of his Storage Ring, the bronze chest landed on the floor with a dull thud.
He lifted the lid, spreading animal hides, bamboo slips, and silk manuscripts across the floor.
He picked up Introduction to Basic Formations and began reading from the first page.
He did not skim. He worked through it word by word.
The formation system of the Cultivation World was completely different from what he had imagined. Strictly speaking, the so-called "Spirit-Gathering Formation" he had arranged with twelve spirit stones in the backyard of the Farmhouse Courtyard had not even crossed the threshold of a real formation.
At best, it was a "pile of spirit stones."
There were no formation flags to establish positions, no Array Pattern to guide the flow, and no formation core to anchor it. The gathering of spiritual energy depended entirely on the spirit stones' own emissions. A five-meter radius was already its limit.
Even the lowest-tier real formation had an effective radius of at least fifty meters.
On the third page of the "Introduction," that unnamed formation grandmaster had written a sentence that Chen Lin stared at for a long time-
"A formation uses human strength to seize the workings of heaven and earth. Formation flags are its bones, the Array Pattern its sinews, and the formation core its heart. Without any one of these three, it is mere child's play."
Beside it was an annotation in smaller writing: "The mistake beginners most often make is thinking that arranging spirit stones in a circle constitutes a formation. In my youth, I