As he stepped outside, Red was hit with the full might of the storm. Leaves and branches from the trees were flying everywhere, while a deluge of strong winds and almost sideways rain struck against him even under the cover of trees. The charged clouds darkened the sky above even though it was the middle of the day, and the brightness of the lightning followed by rumbling thunder could be heard overhead every second.

It was a grim sight, rare in the region, but it happened a few times a year. This plan of the youth to use the storm to power the formation was something he considered in the past, except he never thought about doing it considering how risky it would be and how high the chance of failure was. To him, it would be better to wait for an opportunity to acquire the Aspected Spirit Stones, no matter how hard it would be.

Yet, things changed. Not only regarding his circumstances but also mentally. It would be much harder to acquire these stones with an active pursuit from the Empire, and he thought it better to take his chances here at this moment than to hope another opportunity would present itself in the future.

He didn’t have the privilege of waiting any longer.

“Can you tell your directions?” Aurelia’s voice reached his ears.

Red looked up. It was impossible to see the Sun through the dark could, but the youth was always prepared for these types of situations.

“The den entrance was facing southeast.” He raised his voice to be heard over the storm. “It should be fine.”

“Good, then pay attention.” Aurelia said. “Searching for leylines is not as simple as you may think. Smaller Spiritual Leylines shift and disappear all the time, and we will need to follow one of them until we find a more stable stream.”

“Is that where we will find a place for my formation?”

“Not at all. These stable streams will only have the chance of leading us to a convergence, and most of them will just lead into nothing”

Red frowned. “That sounds more difficult than I thought.”

“Bah, you have no idea! It could take days to find a convergence if we are unlucky, but thankfully for you, this forest of yours is located between a Forbidden Canyon and a Spirit River, so you should have more of a chance.”

Red nodded, shielding his eyes from the rain as he looked around. “Which direction?”

“To your northeast.” Aurelia said.

The youth started to follow that direction without hesitation. Barely a minute later, though, Aurelia interrupted him.

“It’s gone.” she said.

“What?” Red was confused.

“The leyline I felt is gone. It disappeared.”

The youth frowned. “Was I too slow?”

Aurelia scoffed. “You are a mortal, so of course you are slow. Still, I wouldn’t worry about it. You will never be able to outrun a shifting leyline, so just hope you get lucky.”

Red could only swallow his frustrations and continue to follow her instructions. Even though she told him he couldn’t outrun these leylines, he still tried to quicken his step.

It was to no avail, though.

“It’s gone.”

“It disappeared.”

“Bah! A false lead!”

“Behind you! There’s a stronger one!”

Aurelia continuously dashed Red’s hopes. By the time five minutes had gone by, the youth was forced to change directions dozens of times, and he was still within a few kilometers of where he spent the night.

Now he was soaking wet, looking like a madman running without purpose in the forest and wondering if his plan would fail at the very first step. Still, while the storm was still going strong, Red wasn’t going to give up.

When almost ten minutes went by, the youth finally found a promising lead.

“There, I can feel a stable leyline!” Aurelia said. “Keep going north!”

Red followed her lead, and this time she didn’t tell him to change directions. For the first time in a while, the woman told him to follow a direction in an almost straight line. This chase went on for almost three minutes, and the youth felt his hopes growing.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be.

“Damn, it led to nothing.” Aurelia said.

Red stopped running, a slight frown forming on his face to indicate his frustration.

“Don’t stand there moping around!” the woman said. “Do you want to find this leyline or not?”

The youth looked up at the storm; the rain hitting his face and obscuring his vision. This time of tempest didn’t last very long in this region, and he didn’t know for how long this one was going for already. Still, he knew he had no choice but to keep going.

…

Almost an hour had gone by with Red fearing that the storm would weaken. He found plenty of stable leylines with Aurelia’s help, but most of them lead to nothing but dissipation. The fact the youth couldn’t see what he was chasing only added to his frustrations, and yet he had undergone much more tedious tasks in the past.

Eventually, his dedication paid off.

“I can feel it!” Aurelia said. “There are multiple stable leylines around here!”

“Is it a convergence?” Red asked.

“There are plenty of those whenever leylines meet. Now we just need to find one strong enough for what you want to do.”

The youth nodded, but he started to examine his surroundings with some concern. This area of the forest wasn’t particularly hilly, and the tallest mount he could see in his surroundings was no more than a hundred meters tall.

He couldn’t concern himself with this right now, though, and kept following Aurelia’s instructions until they hit gold.

“There!” she said. “Near that pond!”

Red didn’t approach the place immediately, instead inspecting his surroundings with his crimson sense. He couldn’t detect any traces of a monster nearby, but just because it wasn’t immediately evident didn’t mean none made their nest nearby.

However, even if that was the case, no such creature was nearby at the moment, and that was the only thing the youth cared about. He approached the pond, almost hidden beneath the trees, yet now overflowing with the falling water from the storm.

“Right here?” Red asked.

Aurelia’s image manifested by his side. “It’s barely enough, but it will do for three Spirit Stones worth of energy.”

The youth couldn’t sense anything special about the place, but there was no reason for the woman to lie to him.

“How far can I from the pond?” he asked.

The surface around here was overflowing with water, not a proper place to set a formation.

“No more than fifty meters.” she said. “It’s a stable convergence, but the further you go away from it, the weaker the Spiritual Energy will be.”

Red frowned. The Parting Storm formation itself was pretty big, and while there should technically be enough space to set it up, the margin for error was significantly decreased with that.

The difficulty, however, was already high enough, so one more added caveat wouldn’t make much of a difference.

With this in mind, Red took out his dark short sword from his sheathe and started to chop at the trees surrounding the pond.

Aurelia looked at him in confusion. “What are you doing?”

“Making a clearing.” Red said, without even stopping to look at her.

“Do you mean to work under the rain?” she asked.

“I need the space to work. Besides, the rain and the wind need to hit the formation for the formation to absorb.”

“Won’t the paint on your formation plates be smeared?”

“It’s proper arcane ink. It doesn’t smear or mix with water.”

“How are you going to concentrate with this much noise and rain?”

“I will manage.”

Concentration was the thing that worried Red the least.

Aurelia didn’t say anything, instead watching him as he cleared the trees, even uprooting the trunks at some points. Eventually, a large clearing was made in the area, with a relative plane, though the entire soil was muddied through and through.

Aurelia scoffed as she saw this. “I really want to see how you manage.”

Red didn’t say anything, measuring the space he would need to set up the formation. Then, he took out the materials from his travel bag, setting them on the ground in front of him.

There were three sets of different materials - one for water, one for wind, and one for lightning. Each of them made up one third of a circular formation that converged upon a central plate that would unite their forms into the energy Red would use to open his Spiritual Sea.

Each third of this circular formation was, in turn, also commanded by a formation plate and dozens of smaller connecting runes. The wind plate was forged using clouded sky iron, the water plate using tempered lake silver, and the lightning plate using thunder-forged steel. The center plate itself was made up of a mixture of all three materials, something his master Goulth helped him forge some time ago. There were also plenty of bottled arcane inks, more than enough to draw the formation many times over, as well as some solvent to remove them in case Red made a mistake.

This gave him some margin of error in making his runes, but not enough to make him feel comfortable. These were all relatively rare materials that took years for Red to gather, and now he was about to try something that could make them completely useless.

Still, with no hesitation, he set the first formation plate aside - the water one - took out his brush and a bottle of ink, and sat down cross-legged in front of it, prepared to draw. He took a deep breath, and in a practiced motion, entered into a meditative state.

At that moment, it felt as if the entire world became muffled to him, like a distant after-thought. Red focused on his right hand holding the brush, his extended awareness flowing into it as he tried to check if he was in proper condition. Upon seeing everything was in order, he then reached into the core of his body, to the being resting in his abdomen.

“I need your help.” he said.

The crimson mist shook, as if urging him to go on.

“Help steady the movements of my muscles.” Red said. “I can’t make mistakes right now.”

The mist shook again. “I will help.”

This was all the youth needed to hear.

At first, he was somewhat hesitant to ask the being for help. After all, setting up this formation was something he would rather accomplish on his own, and yet every circumstance conspired against him to leave him at a disadvantage. Such being the case, why should he not rely on whatever help he could to draw these symbols?

The hard work would still be left up to him.

Feeling the muscles in his arm become steady like iron, Red left his meditation state and focused on the world around him again.

The noise of the storm didn’t bother him. In fact, the youth felt somewhat at ease where others might have felt bothered by the thunder. He wondered if this was a result of the technique he practiced, but now wasn’t the time to let his thoughts wonder.

With no further hesitation, he dipped his brush into a bottle of arcane ink and started to draw under the rain. As if by magic, the ink adhered to the surface of the wet bluish plate metal, ignoring the water droplets that covered the material.

This property of the ink was a requirement of most formations. After all, no cultivator wanted to rely on something that got ruined by the effect of the elements.

When the runes started to take shape on the plate, Red felt as if he entered an entirely different world. The symbols flowed with ease from his mind to the metal surface, practiced thousands of times over more than half a decade, so ingrained in his mind that they seemed like second nature to him.

Then came the time to connect a rune to the other. The youth always expected this to be the hardest part, but instead, the process seemed to click with him. The method in that book, something he knew by heart, made complete sense to him at that moment.

Parts that he thought would be difficult instead clicked in his mind like a natural reaction, and like a painting drawn one small spot at a time, the image of a complex network of runes started to form on the surface of that plate. The hardest part was for the youth to keep his hand steady at all times, but with the help of the crimson mist, he could ignore that problem.

Almost ten minutes later, he was done, and he looked down at the bluish metal plate now covered with a partial formation on its surface. The youth double-checked his inscriptions, but he couldn’t see anything wrong with them.

Red wasn’t entirely confident, though, so instead he decided to ask the opinion of someone with more experience.

He looked over at Aurelia. “How does it look?”

The woman was staring at him with wide-eyes.