The Mech Touch

Qi cultivation came in many different forms. The Red Collective's Cultivation Method Department recovered many old texts and figured out a lot of different means of power expression.

When Melkor sought out a qi cultivation method that could expand his capabilities in a way that was helpful to a mech commander, he quickly became attracted by the mention of formations.

It turned out that formations were a big deal in qi cultivation. The way he understood it was that it was a purposeful way to leverage massive amounts of E energy radiation to produce powerful outcomes, often far beyond the actual cultivation level of the practitioner who set up the formations in the first place!

This immediately attracted his attention due to the promise of being able to produce significant results without needing to be strong himself.

However, when Melkor dove into this subject, he found that it was a lot more complicated than he expected.

There were at least two recognized categories of qi formations.

There were the highly familiar battle formations, which were usually practiced by groups of mech pilots in order to gain strength that exceeded the sum of their parts. Every Larkinson already had a good impression of battle formations!

However, there were still differences between the 'classic' battle formations taught by the Red Collective and the bastardized battle formations utilized by numerous Larkinson mech legions.

The former generally did not rely on borrowing power from a design spirit or other specific entity.

Originally, battle formations were supposed to be pure applications of qi. They relied on taking control over large amounts of E energy from the environment in order to form a powerful energy structure.

They could potentially allow a group of weaker practitioners to summon a large energy construct that could fight head-on against a powerful enemy such as a phase lord!

However, the demands on the mech pilots were hard. They needed to possess a certain combination of talent, comprehension, analytical ability, trust and teamwork in order to pull it off correctly.

The trump cards invented by the Larkinson Clan were like the contract cultivation version of battle formations.

T

Formation than a Larkinson battle formation!

The former did have its advantages, though.

They were not exclusive to specific mech legions or those who were in the good books of the design spirit they borrowed power from. Anyone could practice them so long as they met fairly reasonable requirements.

The practitioners of classic battle formations could also leverage them more flexibly and exert greater control over them as their cultivation and mastery increased. They were combination techniques that possessed very high ceilings.

There were other ways to play with qi formations.

The Red Collective defined spell arrays as employing specialized material formation anchors to temporarily or permanently direct the behavior of E energy in the environment to produce a powerful effect.

These formation anchors usually came in the form of flags, totem poles and stones, but could take other shapes as well.

What was important was that the formation anchors had to be carefully designed in order to work. They had to be made out of hyper materials and had to be integrated with runes, patterns or other mysterious markings that effectively played the role of a programming language.

Making the formation anchors was only half the job. The next challenge was to deploy them in a specific location, and that demanded deep insight into formations, the flow of E energy radiation and terrain knowledge. Depending on how they were designed, the formation anchors had to be placed at specific locations and at very specific distances and angles from each other.

There were so many different variables that the formation master had to calculate and take into account that it was impossible for general qi cultivators to set up most of these incredibly complicated spell arrays!

These spell arrays could produce nifty effects, many of which were difficult to replicate with technology.

The most straightforward spell arrays were those with offensive and defensive purposes.

The former could turn a region of space into a killing ground where half-material swords stabbed everyone inside an area.

The latter could channel lots of E energy to form an energy shield that could cover an entire space station like a Titan Shield.

A more exotic category of spell arrays were illusory ones. They could project all kinds of illusions to deceive the enemy and conceal what was truly located in a certain area.

Certain aspects of their strength, such as their access to E energy.

Then there was the utility category of spell arrays which contained everything else that could not be placed under the previous categories.

There were amazing spell arrays that could accelerate healing, perform remote scrying on a distant area and even protect against enemy scrying attempts.

In short, spell arrays alone possessed a lot of depth and variety. It was already amazing that the Red Collective managed to recover, decipher and modernize an entire set of them in a short amount of time.

This was the most classic form of formations. In theory, only one formation master was necessary to design, deploy and potentially control active spell arrays, though nothing stopped them from working together.

When Melkor learned about the sub-profession of formation master, he felt compelled to learn it, but he initially grew intimidated by the high intellectual requirements to make it far in this field.

Formation masters had more in common with mech designers than mech pilots!

They needed to be incredibly smart and possess deep knowledge on how the universe worked and how E energy worked in order to combine the two together to produce amazing battle formations and spell arrays.

Though Melkor did not believe his learning ability was bad, he was nowhere near comparable to a mech designer or an engineer!

Out of the Formation Master Series, there was no way he could attain great success in the General Formation Master, Battle Formation Master and Spell Formation Master of

Qi cultivation methods!

The Red Collective valued them a lot for this reason and specifically compiled the Formation Master Series of qi cultivation methods to help people get started in this

Esoteric field.

Sadly, it had yet to attract a lot of interested people.

Most people that had decided to become a serious qi cultivator were much more attracted to flashy and more straightforward options, such as cultivation methods that allowed them to fling fireballs or fly in the air without the use of technology. Studying qi formations was largely intellectual in nature, and that made many people feel as if they had to go back to school and endure the high pressure of memorizing and comprehending a lot of advanced book knowledge!

The threshold to becoming a successful formation master was high. It would also take a long time for those who started in this field from scratch to gain the knowledge and understanding to design his first successful spell array.

Fortunately the Red Collective did not leave mech pilots in the dust.

It turned out that the collies also took less intellectually gifted and inclined individuals into account and expanded the Formation Master Series with cultivation methods

Specially geared towards people like himself.

One of them was the Combat Spell Array Master Qi Cultivation Method.

It

All of the aspects ated designing and creating your own qi formations.

This allowed the cultivation method to focus more on deploying existing qi formations, mostly spell arrays, and controlling them in a more proficient manner on

The battlefield.

This sounded much more to his liking!

While Melkor still needed to learn a lot of theory about qi formations, he only needed

To understand a fraction of the knowledge this time.

In fact, much of the expertise was related to calculating and identifying the places where he needed to place the formation anchors.

Depending on how well he positioned the anchors, the resulting spell array could

Produce effects that were 20 percent, 50 percent or 100 percent as strong as its

Theoretical maximum!

There was a way to cheat this process.

Many of the tedious and complicated calculations were necessary in order to identify the right positions in a given terrain to place the anchors. However, a formation master with enhanced perception capabilities could not only collect more useful data to speed up the calculation work, but could even spot some if not all of the right locations to place the anchor by observation alone!

This meant that Melkor could borrow his companion spirit's excellent perception to immediately deploy the more basic spell arrays that he had procured in advance! This shortcut did not work for the more powerful and advanced spell arrays, but there was no need for Melkor to think about that in the short term.

"Is this really what I want for myself, though?"

If he had a choice, then he would definitely try to achieve a breakthrough and become

A glorious expert pilot.

He already ruled that out due to losing his patience and lacking the confidence to

Succeed in this trajectory.

He saw no point in becoming a pure combat-oriented qi cultivator.

All information related to the subject informed him that expert pilots, ace pilots and god pilots could wipe the floor with qi cultivators in direct combat!

The unreasonable willpower of high-ranking mech pilots defied the heavens and repelled all hostile sources of E energy!

Since this was the case, why would Melkor try to work so hard to become an inferior version of true heroes and gods?

The cultivation methods that were designed to partially imitate high-ranking mech

Pilots fell short because they never promised anything to compensate for what was missing. Melkor did not want to become an incomplete or inferior powerhouse. He would rather retain his pride and remain weak in a personal sense if that was the case.

Becoming a formation master or more specifically a combat spell array master pretty much guaranteed that.

Oh sure, practicing it would allow him to become smarter and become a lot more

Capable of performing the calculations to quickly figure out where to place the

Formation anchors.

While that intellect boost might also allow him to pilot his Fey Fianna more proficiently, that was not the point of this qi cultivation method.

"It's not flashy, but it can allow me to produce results far exceeding my own strength

Fairly quickly."

It also had a bright future. High-ranking mech pilots would always remain the premier champions of red humanity, but there were always too few of them to go around. Formation masters could assist mech forces in many different ways that not even ace pilots or god pilots could replicate, Melkor especially liked this sub-profession because it not only complimented his role as a mech commander very well, but also

Did not overlap with Casella's Command Field!

This was an important observation!

If his suspicions were right, then Melkor could potentially deploy his spell arrays

Alongside Casella's Commandeered and Enfcoffed mechs!

They could synergise with each other and achieve results that were far greater than

What they could accomplish on their own!

"The Saint Commander is strong without a doubt, but she will never be able to weave

Magic with spell arrays like I can do... so long as I practice the Combat Spell Array Master Cultivation Method..."

Melkor felt enormously attracted to commit to this choice, but he still found the alternatives to be compelling as well. This was a life changing decision. He did not want to make a choice that he would regret down the line.

Aside from the Design Spirit Contract Cultivation Method which was probably the

Easiest to progress, there was also a third qi cultivation method that he had been thinking about practicing as well...

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