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Chapter 106 - Array Formations
🕑 Added 2025-07-01 08:35:38 +0000 UTC“And what do we sell?” Li Yao asked. “I’m guessing you don’t want to be like the rest. No endless grind in the Hidden Realm and selling the haul.”
“It’s not so bad,” Fang Zhao countered.
“It sounds plebeian,” Huang Niuniu said. “Once in a while is nice, but not forever.”
Yu Han flipped the notebook to a page with a few bullet points.
“Niu’er is our budding alchemist,” Yu Han said.
The girl raised her chin as if to pierce the heavens.
“We can sell Deep Sea’s Vitality and Strength Spites,” Yu Han said. “Fang Zhao, you said it’s at least an Earth Grade brew, right?”
Fang Zhao nodded, “It won’t sell.”
“Why?” Yu Han frowned. Huang Niuniu glared.
“The effects are unquestionable,” Fang Zhao said. “It’s the taste.”
“W-What’s wrong with the taste?” Huang Niuniu asked.
“Is it supposed to taste that bad?” Fang Zhao said. “The smell itself will drive people away.”
“I have to agree with Red-eyes here,” Li Yao said. “The ingredients cost a lot. We’ll have to price the spites quite high. They have to be drunk soon after cooling down too, or they’ll waste. So no selling as take-aways. It looks like half-alive purple mud, and smells worse than a Filth Eating Ghoul.”
Huang Niuniu was close to tears.
“Stinky tofu,” Yu Han said.
“What?” Li Yao stopped.
“Have you ever eaten it?” Yu Han asked. “Or fish paste noodles.”
All three of them shook their head.
“The smell and look doesn’t matter,” Yu Han said. “It’s about the marketing.”
“Marketing? What’s that?” Li Yao said. “Some kind of mind control psychic art?”
“Close enough,” Yu Han snapped his fingers. “We can sell the spites. The upfront investment will be high. With the correct marketing strategy, the profits can be huge.”
He’ll have to gather more data on existing marketing schemes.
“Next is Fang Zhao’s ring,” Yu Han pointed at the stone artefact.
“Are you referring to the tests we did in the Hidden Realm?” Fang Zhao asked.
Yu Han gave the boy a thumbs up, “it’s every alchemist’s wet dream.”
“Well, not mine,” Huang Niuniu crossed her arms. “What’s a wet dream?”
“Other than Niu’er,” Yu Han leaned forward. “We can make a list of market gaps. Many alchemical materials must be refined or extracted before they can be used in making pills, elixirs, potions, and even brews. Like the poison from the Bat-faced Centipede. If you can refine them, not only will it reduce our cost of making the Deep Sea’s Spites, we can sell them for only a bit lower than the current market price and make a killing.”
Fang Zhao rubbed his nose, “this might ruffle many feathers.”
“We need data,” Yu Han said. “Materials that are a pain in the ass to extract that your Trueforge Ring can refine easily, which aren’t being sold by any major faction in the sect. Can you do it?”
Fang Zhao’s shoulders relaxed, “leave it to me. If it can help Brother Yu out.”
<While you’re here,> Yu Han cracked a finger with his thumb. <Let me take advantage of you. You’ll probably outgrow us soon, like Mistress Miao said.>
“Once Niu’er gets the Qi Awareness trait and learns how to make the recipes we got from the Night Alchemists’ Yard, we can expand our selection. I have ideas with array formations too. But I’ll have to study up first. It might take months to show any result.”
Array formations were a complex field. Not only were there many subfields such as enchantments and traps, there were whole parallel fields like talismans. In addition, there were many ways to construct array formations too.
The most common way for beginners were the Imperial or Earthly scripts. The former, Yu Han was studying Imperial with Huang Niuniu. The latter, he couldn’t read at all.
Common script could also be used, but the resident formation experts of the Liang Clan disdained it. There were hardly any resources.
But putting that aside, the Dao of Characters book mentioned that there were more scripts for array formations than there were spoken. In theory, any language was suitable. Because all normal languages, engraved with intention and using essence as a fuel, could become part of the Dao.
The meaning of the characters would somehow resonate with the world and the Dao itself—this part, Liang Fuyu wasn’t clear on either—and show miraculous results.
There were languages specifically invented for array formations too. But even without using Scripts, a practitioner could use Shapes and Symbols.
These were the three major schools of formations.
The Concealment Talisman they had used in the Hidden Realm was written with Scripts. Scripts itself had three major subcategories and many more minor subcategories. The major ones were Characters, Runes, and Glyphs. Although Glyphs were more of a combination of the Script and Symbol schools.
A Character was the basic unit of a writing system. It didn’t have an inherent magical property, and needed Essence and intention, sometimes ambient spiritual energy, Qi, and Lifeforce too, to imbue meaning. Common and Imperial scripts were examples of this.
Runes were also units of languages, but they were inherently magical, laced with meaning ranging from simple concepts like ‘hide’ or ‘shadow,’ to complex ones like ‘hidden in the shade of a giant tree.’ For example, the Earthly and Heavenly scripts fell into this category.
Yu Han imagined that Characters and Runes were more like the syllabic, phonographic, and alphabetic elements of languages.
Glyphs were more logographic, ideographic, and pictographic. Each glyph represented entire words and morphemes, ideas and concepts, even stylized as pictures of objects if necessary. Like Egyptian hieroglyphics. In that sense, most Chinese characters and characters of the various Scripts were also, technically, Glyphs.
Everything was interconnected in a way that was hard to grok. Liang Fuyu didn’t know where one school ended and the next became. This were human distinctions, not ones set by the Dao.
Sigils were also offenders in that sense.
They weren’t part of a language system and fell into the Symbol category, but they could use Scripts as building blocks. They were more like self-contained Symbols of meaning, each Sigil a language of its own and disparate from other Sigils in most cases. They could manifest magical effects without the built-in intentionality of grammar and rhetoric. Thus, they were kind of pictographic too.
But unlike Glyphs, Sigils most often were custom designed. One practitioner might design a Sigil of concealment that, when drawn by another practitioner, would show no effects. Even if the same materials, mediums, and qi were used. Some Sigils were designed so that only people of specific bloodlines could even construct them.
Clans and sects specializing in formations most often take the path of Characters, Runes, Glyphs, and Sigils. With the various Scripts, they design Sigils and pass them down generation after generation, guarding their secrets with fanaticism. This is why sometimes, the older a sect or clan, the more powerful Sigils they wield. They had the time to research and refine their Sigils, which others couldn’t copy anyway without knowing the secret sauces.
And all these could be combined into arrays and formations, making the legacy of each clan and sect unique.
Shapes had many subcategories too, and, as usual, could be connected to other schools like Scripts and Symbols. Some called them the basic units of Characters, Runes, Glyphs, and Sigils.
In Characters, they were called strokes. In some Runes, there was no horizontal stroke. It was confusing.
To Yu Han, they were the geometric shapes. Point, line, angle, triangle, square, circle, cone, sphere, and so many more.
There were some other points of consideration too. According to Liang Fuyu, there was a concept called ‘Style’. Yu Han imagined it as typeface or fonts. The same script, written with different Styles, could manifest completely different meanings, even if the effect was similar. It was more pronounced than the difference between Comic Sans and Times New Roman. The ‘feel’ was somehow paramount.
Yet all this was a very visual way of looking at array formations.
There were array formations made of smells and sounds too. Natural array formations used geomancy, placement of rocks and furniture and water and specific leaves of different bushes hanging a certain way to create magical effects. Feng Shui was, after all, another respected form of array formations.
It was like a science that had no end. It was a crafting profession, but it could be so much more. Like forgers and alchemists, one could attain immortality with array formations too.
It’s the path Yu Han was most attracted to.
Forgers were fantasy smiths, alchemists were fantasy chemists. So would a formation master be a fantasy programmer? Or perhaps a fantasy mathematician? There were aspects of array formations that were similar to engineering, but then again, forgers were engineers too.
Yu Han was none of those. He had little confidence in his software engineering skills, mostly what he did was consulting. But he did know the basics of many programming languages. He knew modern tricks and tips of problem solving. He was well versed in Computer Science, from Quantum Computing to AI and Cybersecurity. His knowledge might not be deep, but it was definitely wide.
And he was an artist. In both lives.
Although Yu Han only had three books related to array formations, they were all related to scripts and symbols. There were none on shapes, but Yu Han felt his plethora of skills could apply to that the most.
No matter how one squinted, all Scripts and Symbols were made of shapes. Liang Fuyu acknowledged that if a practitioner wanted to create their own Script from absolute scratch, having a mastery of Shapes was necessary.
But despite that, Shapes were considered the most lesser form of array formations among the three schools.
One could combine various Scripts to make a new Script too, mastery of Shapes wasn’t necessary since the new Script wasn’t being built from scratch. In fact, a series of Sigils that were designed to relate with each other could also be turned into a new Runic Script.
Shapes weren’t a must.
They didn’t have the weight of history, unlike symbols and scripts.
No prestige or connection to tradition. No linguistic and conceptual depth.
In Liang Fuyu’s words, they were inelegant, simplistic, and primitive. Sometimes, it was just a pure game of numbers. Like mundane geometry rather than the prestigious geomancy of Feng Shui.
Shapes were the easiest to get started with. A mere merchant could do it if they had an pittance of Essence.
Apparently, it was easy to do easy things, but impossibly hard to do complex things with Shape-based array formations. Since one didn’t have to comprehend with one’s body, mind, and spirit the connotative meaning of a Character, Rune, Glyph, or Sigil.
Conversely, unlike with Scripts and Symbols, it was extremely hard to change a shape-based array formation’s meaning with Style choice.
An example mentioned by Liang Fuyu was calligraphy. It was one of the proper and gentle arts. Array formations were believed to carry the user’s intent, Qi, or spiritual energy more effectively if inked with the artistic poise of calligraphy. Writing with brush techniques, the weight of strokes, and the alignment of characters were considered vital in channeling the mysterious forces properly. There was a variation of calligraphy used with jade carving blades too, to etch array formations as if writing.
Shapes, being more rigid and geometric, lacked this fluidity.
They were crude. Made for simpletons.
If Yu Han had to guess, they were also disdained because with Shapes, it was hard to protect secrets. As mentioned before, sect-specific array formation were closely guarded secrets, the Sigils and Scripts passed down through initiations, family lineages, or specialized manuals. One generation after the other, they would refine and iterate. A Sigil wasn’t just a magical symbol, it was history itself.
Shapes, being universally recognizable and reproducible, couldn’t be monopolized as easily.
In a world with only basic geometry, the power of shapes was lagging behind. Did these people even know of trigonometry? How about symmetry and patterns? Topology might be able to substitute Style. And what about fractals and recursive structures? When he was Johan, he had to study up on graph theory for a bit. So many optimization problems were related to it. One of the reasons Nexus Assurance Auditing invested so heaving in Quantum Computing was because most thought it was the best way to solve NP-Hard problems.
A lot he had forgotten, bit much he remembered. If he wanted to re-invent programming languages on this side, he needed to study shapes. With enough resources, could he make a computer? Or, any autonomous computation device regardless?
“Is this it?” Li Yao said.
“What do you mean?” Yu Han squinted.
“It’s all so…” Li Yao paused as if to gather his thoughts. “Typical. It’s selling and buying, even if not with the sect, right? A restaurant-kinda thing. A shopfront, honest business. It’s still good, don’t get me wrong. You’re using our advantages fully. We’ll make a lot of cash in the months and years to come. But at the end of the day, it’s just what everyone else is doing with a few fancier steps.”
Comments
King Jerkera
If anything the question at the end is a good one but honestly I feel like Yu Han just doesn’t have all the pieces yet to really break the game so to speak. The easiest one to grasp however is that there is a major problem that the sect has resource extraction is simply not efficient or safe. That is the market to get into eventually to make the true money.
Ben Waschuk
Ty for chapter :D
