Chapter 439: Complex Formations
Sam hovered over as he crossed the nearby rocky terrain. After a few minutes, he still couldn't find a flat land in the near vicinity. He even reached the maximum altitude he can on the hoverboard, but he still didn't see anything within the next few kilometers.
But he didn't give up. He just traveled slowly. As he moved forward, he suddenly felt as if he passed through some energy barrier, because he felt a jolt of energy, and then suddenly a voice sounded in his head.
"Welcome to Meteorite Island.
This Island is created by some god who is bored out of his mind and threw it to this planet. For those who crossed the three stages, they can explore this island for the next three months. The island is full of meteorite sands hidden in various places and every place is covered with a formation.
The formation adjusts its level by your own strength and the main difficulty lies in its complexity rather than just the energy level.
If you can crack the formation, you can take all the meteorite sand within that formation.
There are hundreds of formations like that. In fact, the whole island is locked in here with some formations, if you can find them, you can take the whole island with you.
But by the end of three months, if you couldn't crack even a single formation, you will be allowed access to three meteorite sands, but only a limited amount for each person.
There are no threats from the island, except the other humans who might have entered with you. So, please be careful."
Sam frowned at the voice. It is extremely playful and carefree as if he couldn't care less about what is going on. As for god creating this, he knew that someone from the higher realms must have done it.
Otherwise, there is no way the Shesh would have come to this world. Even if it was here like the Raiju or some other beasts which are present in this world, there is no way one could refine the heart into a spiritual weapon. It is almost impossible to do so on this planet.
Sam waved his hand and the three of his friends came out. He wanted to see if the barrier will allow them to come. And when they came out, the first they did is glare at Sam, but before they could follow up with the next actions, they are appeared stunned for a second, which means the voice seemed to have said the same thing in their heads.
But after that initial shock, they looked at Sam once again and are ready to have a go, but suddenly Sam raised his aura. His recent breakthrough made them halt in their tracks.
"Don't come near me, or you guys will regret it. You wouldn't be able to handle it." Sam said with a proud look. The three of them gritted their teeth.
They looked at his face and noticed the green and purple shades all over.
"What happened?" Watt was the first one to ask.
"Well, it is a new poison which I used to breakthrough. But it is extremely potent, which left these side effects.
Okay, let's get down to business, find the meteorite sands as fast as possible. There are only three months, it might seem like a lot, but it is not considering we couldn't even estimate the whole area of the island.
By the way, try to find out the formations which are holding up the island. If possible, let's just take this away.
Try your luck."
With that, he didn't wait. If the three of them ganged up, Sam couldn't retaliate with full power, they would die if he couldn't control so he wouldn't obviously fight them.
Which means, he couldn't stay there until they realize. By the time they meet again, they would forget about it.
After all, they are no archenemies. They could understand why Sam did that.
Sam moved fast. The terrain didn't change much, but it is still a bit different.
He started moving all over the place and after half-an-hour, Sam found the first formation. This is the sand Sam is extremely familiar with.
The Black Meteorite Sand.
And it is not actually a single formation.
There are three formations in place but two of them are already empty. There are some traces of the Black meteorite sand there.
The people who came here before seemed to have done a great job.
The underground forces seemed to have some decent candidates who did a great job. But they didn't seem to have taken all of it.
He doesn't know how many meteorite sands are there on this island and how many formations are there, but at least he got one here.
He started examining the formation.
He noticed that the formation is not a fixed one. It is a variable formation. It changes with time. But it is not like how Sam designed previously; it doesn't change the nodes. Rather, it is a complex formation with five layers and the active layers change one by one.
The change of the layers is extremely random and with the variation, in the active layers, a complex formation will be formed.
This will quite confusing. Sam never thought about using formations like this.
It gave new possibilities. Because for a minute when formations one, three, and five are active, one kind of complex formation which is specialized in defensive attacks is activated and when formations two, four, and five are active it is a closed slaughter formation.
This is something he never thought of. All he cared about is complexity in activation and deactivation.
But now that he saw this, Sam is going to research in this area.
But before that, he has to find a way to deal with the formation. He started studying the energy flow which proved to be extremely difficult. Due to constant variation and the random activation of various formations, Sam is having trouble pinpointing the timing to crack.
As long as he could crack the activated formations at that instance, then it would be done.
To catch the timing is the hardest task. He couldn't even observe the energy patterns of the first one. Rather the energy fluctuations of the remaining formations are interfering and by the time he is close to cracking them, the first formation is going dormant and a new sequence is coming up.
All his analysis is going to waste.
In fact, there is another way, the most straight forward method, to break the formation with brute force.
But he doesn't want to do it because the combinations of the formations and variations include attack type formations. If he is not confident in dealing it with a single blow, then there is no use.
As for using disintegration and taking the nodes out, due to the cycles of variation, the backlash wouldn't be limited to him, the insides of formation will also be affected and the sand will be damaged.
As for energy cells, it is even more unusable. If the formations are affected by the energy blasts no matter how small it is, there is a chance that the energy of the formation would become chaotic and it will cause another energy explosion which would damage the meteorite sand.
He is not ready to sacrifice even a small bit of the meteorite sand in this place.
This will bring him to a deadlock. He doesn't want to battle and he doesn't want to destroy, then he can only crack it.
As for his friends, all they could do is battle and brute force through the formations.
Sam just wanted to avoid that, because it would take a long time. Even though it takes time to crack them, he is still okay with this approach because, once he gets past the first formation, he would get away to crack the rest of them easily.
If he could crack one formation, Sam could use the same method to crack the rest of them. Even if that means spending a lot of time on the first one.
After many trials, Sam sat down on the ground and decided to take a look at the nodes. He wants to see if the nodes are formation flags or any other methods that are used.
And when he noticed that they are not formation flags, he is not one bit surprised.
The formation flags are indeed the best nodes to be used. But the working method would be rigid and there are not many things one can do with that. The formation flags are only good until they want to make a standard and proper formation with a standard blueprint.
A formation like this with these many features is almost impossible to do, at least Sam couldn't do that at his level.
After continuously observing for more than three hours towards the nodes, Sam had a look of extreme shock.
He hasn't seen a formation of this complex in a while.
If Sam's guess is right, this formation can adjust itself according to the opponent's cultivation level without a need for a spirit. This is something he absolutely didn't expect.
That is only the tip of the iceberg. He noticed that this is a combination of not only five formations, but there is also an array of inscriptions that are laid down in between the five formations which are responsible for the activation and variation of the formations.
For the first time, Sam is actually feeling extremely numb from the amount of information he has to process.