Transmigrated into a Grandpa, Embracing the Laid-Back Life

Chapter 185: Another Path

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.

arrays should be precise clocks, and Su Ming proposed stuffing

"It's sacrilege against array-craft!"

snatched up his rune and stomped

Formation Peak, however, Luo Feng could not calm his

the image of the water-filled teacup had taken root in his head and would

pool... redundant energy...

circled in

refute the idea and prove it wrong. But after running the simulations again and again, he found with mounting alarm that this crude, blunt

had plagued him for half

muttered, the spiritual light at his fingertips flickering

Three days later.

some impulse, returned to Bing Character Seven Courtyard,

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;

him, spend a huge amount of time sorting the tangled

he saw was entirely

attempt

three slots for low-grade spirit stones at three key nodes of the formation plate that looked

direct circuits, switch to overflow-style power supply," Su

into place, the once-quivering, near-collapsing formation plate miraculously settled. The spiritual energy flow no longer moved like

it ran

in the shadow of the wall, staring dumbfounded at the "Data Wall" mounted

Spirit Gathering Array Repair, Time

[Status: Stable operation.]

low-grade spirit

plate would have taken at least three days, with uncountable expenditure

versus