On an afternoon in Bing Character Seven Courtyard, sunlight filtered through thin clouds and dappled the bluestone slabs.

Today Luo Feng did not stand in the corner;
for once he sat on the stone bench opposite Su Ming.

He toyed with a formation rune that shimmered with flowing light, brow furrowed. Beneath his proud expression there was, for the first time, a faintly noticeable weariness and irritation.

“I spent a full half-year improving the fire-earth junction of this Five Elements Rotation Array,” Luo Feng said, lightly tapping the rune with his fingertip. His tone still carried that ingrained reserve, yet it sounded like he was talking to himself. “I failed one hundred and thirty-seven times, detonated three test platforms, and only yesterday managed to raise the spiritual energy transfer efficiency by a mere sliver.”

He stretched out a long finger and indicated an almost invisible distance, his eyes showing an almost obsessive fervor. “Although it’s just that tiny fraction, it is a necessary step toward perfection. The beauty of array-craft lies in mastering the minutest precision.”

Su Ming put down the ledger in his hands, glanced at the exquisitely crafted formation rune in Luo Feng’s palm, then looked at the bluish-black shadow in the other’s eyes.

Inside the Xuantian ring, Lin Yu’s soul-mind gave an exaggerated sigh. The phantom he projected helplessly held his forehead. “Half a year? Improved by point-something percent? If this were in the Engineering Department back then, that project manager would already have been sacrificed to the heavens! Disciple, this is classic late-stage obsessive-compulsive—needs curing.”

Su Ming kept a calm face and did not echo praise for that “craftsmanship.” Instead, he picked up several broken spirit stone fragments from the nearby scrap pile and laid out a crude Five Elements orientation on the stone table.

“Senior Brother pursues the extreme, and I admire that,” Su Ming said gently, yet with a cool, rational tone. “But from my point of view, if perfect fire-earth coupling is impossible, why insist on fighting over that sliver of precision?”

Luo Feng raised a brow and snorted coldly. “Five Elements interact;
if they’re not tightly matched, spiritual energy will surge and be wasted. That’s common sense.”

“Then why not bypass it?” Su Ming picked up a water-filled teacup and placed it between the fragments representing Fire and Earth. “Rather than chasing perfect point-to-point transfer, why not build a Five Elements balance pool here? Guide the fire-aligned spiritual energy into the pool first, use the redundant energy as a buffer to forcibly maintain dynamic balance, then let it flow steadily into the Earth position.”

Luo Feng froze.

He looked at that incongruous teacup as if it were a beggar who had barged into the palace.

“Absurd!” Luo Feng shot to his feet. His sleeve knocked over the teacup and water splashed across the stone table. “This is a cheat! Opportunistic profiteering! Adding redundancy to an array only destroys the purity and aesthetics of the diagram! It’s a rogue shortcut that betrays orthodox array-craft!”

His chest heaved violently;
he was clearly angered by Su Ming’s “vulgar” idea.

To him, arrays should be precise clocks, and Su Ming proposed stuffing cotton into the gears to muffle the noise.

“It’s sacrilege against array-craft!”

Leaving that verdict behind, Luo Feng snatched up his rune and stomped away in fury.

Back at his aura-dense grotto on Formation Peak, however, Luo Feng could not calm his mind.

He sat cross-legged on a meditation mat, trying to continue deducing that perfect fire-earth junction, but the image of the water-filled teacup had taken root in his head and would not be shaken off.

“Balance pool… redundant energy… forced balance…”

These heretical phrases circled in his thoughts.

He tried to use his deep theoretical knowledge of arrays to refute the idea and prove it wrong. But after running the simulations again and again, he found with mounting alarm that this crude, blunt “brute-force” scheme—though ugly, bulky, and devoid of elegance—actually held up logically.

Worse, if done this way, the stability problem that had plagued him for half a year might be solved in three days.

“Impossible… absolutely impossible…” Luo Feng muttered, the spiritual light at his fingertips flickering with his agitation.

Three days later.

When Luo Feng, guided by some impulse, returned to Bing Character Seven Courtyard, the scene before him froze him solid.

In the center of the courtyard, Su Ming, Old Li, and Zhang Asheng were bustling around a huge, complex “composite array.” This was a malfunctioning formation plate sent from the Outer Gate training grounds. Because its spiritual energy circuits were overly complex and it had suffered long neglect, its internal Five Elements were chaotic;
Formation Peak had judged it “not worth repairing.”

Luo Feng had expected Su Ming to give up, or to, like him, spend a huge amount of time sorting the tangled spiritual energy threads.

What he saw was entirely different.

Su Ming did not attempt to untie that deadlock.

He directed Old Li to forcefully embed three slots for low-grade spirit stones at three key nodes of the formation plate that looked redundant.

“Install buffer valves, sever the original direct circuits, switch to overflow-style power supply,” Su Ming commanded clearly and decisively.

As the last spirit stone slid into place, the once-quivering, near-collapsing formation plate miraculously settled. The spiritual energy flow no longer moved like the original’s smooth currents and was somewhat sluggish, but it… stabilized.

And it ran with surprising robustness.

Luo Feng stood in the shadow of the wall, staring dumbfounded at the “Data Wall” mounted there.

[Training Ground Composite Spirit Gathering Array Repair, Time Used: Two shichen.]

[Status: Stable operation.]

[Cost: Three low-grade spirit stones.]

If it had been him, a perfect repair of this plate would have taken at least three days, with uncountable expenditure of spirit and materials.

Two shichen… versus three days.

More than an order of magnitude difference in efficiency.

Luo Feng felt the edifice of perfectionism he had defended for years get smashed by that ugly “buffer valve.” For the first time he wavered over whether “perfection” truly outweighed “efficiency.”

“Senior Brother?” Su Ming noticed Luo Feng in the corner and looked surprised. “You arrived a bit late today.”

Luo Feng inhaled deeply and stepped out from the shadows. His face still bore pride, but his eyes held an unprecedented complexity.

He approached the repaired formation plate and pointed at one rune. Instead of the usual scolding for “crudeness,” he was silent for a moment, then said:

“Here you used the ‘cut’ technique to forcefully sever the line. It does halt the damage, but the returning spiritual surge will harm the array foundation.”

He paused, turned his head away as if awkward with this mode of speech, and his voice sounded slightly stiff. “If you add a guiding ‘lead’ rune here to channel the returning force toward that… that ugly balance pool of yours, the effect will be better.”

Su Ming’s eyes brightened and he immediately took out a charcoal pencil to jot notes on a bamboo slip. “You mean to use the returning surge for a secondary cycle?”

“…Something like that.” Luo Feng watched Su Ming’s eager, questioning face and felt some of the internal resistance ease. He condensed a wisp of spiritual light at his fingertip and drew a graceful arc in the air. “This is called ‘Returning Wind Dancing Willow.’ It is a technique of using force to leverage force. Your so-called ‘balance pool’ is an inert object;
to make it act, you must understand ‘momentum.'”

He began to explain.

No longer speaking from a high pedestal of “this is how it must be,” he patiently explained “why” the approach worked. He instinctively translated his abstruse, opaque “ways” into reasons Su Ming’s pragmatic method could comprehend.

“Think of it like… carving a spillway from your pool to let off excess,” Luo Feng found a metaphor he could tolerate.

Su Ming nodded repeatedly, the charcoal flying across the bamboo slip.

Inside the Xuantian ring, Lin Yu watched this scene and let a meaning-laden smile tug at his lips.

“Tsk tsk, stubborn pride ruins a life. Disciple, see that? When an idealist begins to compromise with reality and then tries to use his theory to optimize reality, that’s when he’s most dangerous. This free senior technical consultant is completely hooked.”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep