Four more years slipped by under the silent watch of the sealed peaks. Jian Feng was now fourteen, having spent nearly a decade in disciplined seclusion. The last vestiges of childhood had vanished, replaced by the sharp, handsome features of a young man on the cusp of adulthood. His silver hair was longer, tied back with a simple azure ribbon, and his twilight-jade eyes held a placid depth that seemed to see through the veil of the world.
His cultivation remained a point of cosmic irony. He was still, technically, in the 1st Layer of the Qi Gathering Realm. He had now accumulated over nine hundred strands of pristine Origin Qi—a veritable sea compared to his first strand, yet a pittance next to the reserves of his peers, who were likely knocking on the doors of the Core Formation realm. But raw Qi was no longer his sole focus.
His father had opened the clan's archives on Formations and Alchemy to him, and Jian Feng had devoured them. To him, these were not separate disciplines; they were merely different applications of the same universal laws he observed with his Star-Chart. Formations were the art of weaving the threads of Dao into a tapestry of intent. Alchemy was the art of unspooling the threads within ingredients and re-weaving them into a new creation.
One morning, Jian Tianlong led him deep into the mountain, to a vast, circular chamber sealed by a gate that radiated immense age.
"This is the Chamber of Echoes," the Patriarch said, pushing the heavy doors open. "It contains many of the clan's failed, broken, or incomplete experiments from eras long past. Your knowledge is deep, but it is theoretical. It is time to bridge theory with practice."
The chamber was a graveyard of formations. Faded runes covered the floor and walls, intersecting in chaotic patterns. Broken spirit stones and shattered jade components littered the ground. At the very center lay the primary challenge: a massive circular array, ten meters in diameter, now dark and fractured, its lines severed in dozens of places.
"This array was created by your great-grandfather," Jian Tianlong explained, his voice tinged with melancholy. "He was a formations genius. His ambition was to create an array that could purify ambient Qi, making it easier for disciples to cultivate. But the project was too complex. It failed catastrophically during its first activation, crippling him and becoming a sorrowful chapter in our clan's history. No one since has been able to decipher his full intent or repair the damage."
The Patriarch's test was clear. It was a challenge steeped in history, failure, and immense complexity.
While his father saw a tragic mess of broken lines, Jian Feng saw something else entirely. Through the lens of the Star-Chart, the past was not entirely gone. He could perceive the 'ghost' of the formation—the faint, residual imprints of where the Dao threads had once flowed with immense power. He could see the echoes of the energy pathways, the spectral signature of the catastrophic overload, and the fundamental flaws in the original design.
He walked the perimeter of the array for an hour in complete silence, his eyes closed in concentration. His father watched, expecting him to ask for diagrams or research notes. Instead, Jian Feng knelt and simply placed a hand on the cold, dead stone at the array's center.
"Great-grandfather was a genius," Jian Feng said, his voice soft with genuine respect. "He was trying to build a filter. His mistake was trying to separate the elemental streams from each other. But you cannot filter a river by trying to catch each individual fish. You must guide the entire river down a new path."
Jian Tianlong's eyes widened. His son had, in one hour, grasped the fundamental theoretical flaw that had eluded generations of formation masters.
For the next three days, Jian Feng did not leave the chamber. He didn't just repair the broken lines; he completely redesigned the array from the ground up. Using his hyper-dense Spiritual Sense as a carving tool, he etched new, impossibly fine runes over the old ones—runes that described a different philosophy. They did not command the Qi to separate; they persuaded it to reveal its original, purer state. He re-calibrated the broken jade components, using his own Origin Qi to purge their impurities and attune them to a new, higher purpose.
On the final day, he stood before the completed array. It looked similar to the old one, but it now pulsed with a profound, internal harmony.
"Father," he called.
Jian Tianlong entered the chamber and stopped dead, his gaze fixed on the renewed formation. It felt... perfect.
"It is done," Jian Feng stated. He stepped to the array's core and channeled a single strand of his own Origin Qi into it.
The effect was instantaneous and breathtaking. The array hummed to life, not with a violent surge of power, but with a gentle, all-encompassing thrum. The runes glowed with a soft, white light. A vortex of energy formed above the array, drawing in the ambient, spiritually-rich air of the sealed peak—a mixture of countless elemental types. The air was churned within the array's complex pathways, and from an emitter at the top, a slow, steady stream of something new emerged.
It was a mist of almost-pure Origin Qi.
It was not as perfect as the strands he filtered manually, but it was thousands of times purer than any energy produced by any other known method. The broken dream of his great-grandfather had not only been realized; it had been elevated to a level he could never have imagined.
Jian Tianlong stared at the gentle mist, his mind reeling. The implications were earth-shattering. This array... this machine... could accelerate his son's cultivation by a hundredfold. It solved the single greatest drawback of his path.
But more than that, his son had proven he was not just a peerless cultivator. He was a creator. A grandmaster of Formations at the age of fourteen, capable of innovating in ways that could change the world.
The Patriarch looked at his son, who was already sketching a new diagram in the dust, likely a modification to improve the array's efficiency by another ten percent. A deep, profound sense of awe filled him, quickly followed by a new, more pressing worry. The date the clan had set for Jian Feng to officially emerge from his seclusion was his sixteenth birthday, less than two years away.
Jian Tianlong had sealed the peak to protect his son from the world. He now harbored a new, secret fear: that he would soon have to unseal it to protect the unsuspecting world from his son.