Inside the UNI-Residence unit, Adrian entered a private room.
He sealed the door with a touch and retrieved the formation token from his spatial ring. The dark green surface gleamed under the ambient light.
He planned to start his research.
First, he wanted to see how a portable formation even worked and how it deployed.
Normally, a formation was always bound to a fixed location or a defined region of space. If someone attempted to move it or unbind it, the mana ink flow would destabilize, causing the entire formation to collapse. This was basic inscription theory. In the past, Adrian had only managed to bypass this limitation by relying on his Source and literally moving the bound void itself along with the formation.
Yet as he examined the token, Adrian sensed nothing resembling the movement of the void. This alone confirmed that the universe employed an entirely different method.
He turned the token over in his palm and activated it by sending mana into it, a simple action that immediately triggered its deployment.
The moment activation occurred, the rule symbols etched into the token detached from its surface and expanded outward, floating above him as they spread across a fifty-meter radius. The symbols hovered freely in the air, perfectly stable, and Adrian immediately sensed that he could control them.
His eyes narrowed.
The sensation felt familiar. It was strikingly similar to the tattoo method he had used before.
When using the tattoo method, Adrian could take the symbols out like this and then press it against living flesh and imprint them as a tattoo, allowing the rune to integrate with the body.
But it only worked on flesh. He had tested that method extensively, and every time he attempted to imprint those symbols onto something other than living flesh, the symbols collapsed and broke apart.
So the universe seemed to have either surpassed this limitation or was doing something entirely different.
To understand what was truly happening, Adrian activated his Source Eyes.
White-grey light flared across his vision. He ignored the divine concept symbols themselves, their functional instructions, and every external layer of the formation. Instead, he focused solely on the structure at its core.
It did not take long before he noticed something unusual.
At the center, he found the primary symbol, which was 'Formation', and beside it floated another symbol.
The moment he read it, understanding flooded him instantly.
"Bind."
Adrian exhaled slowly.
Its purpose became clear almost immediately. Much like the tattoo symbol allowed runes to be imprinted onto flesh, this symbol served a similar function, but at a far more advanced level. It was not restricted to living beings. It could bind itself to nearly anything, provided the user guided it correctly. In theory, it could even be used as a tattoo.
However, Adrian didn't see other beings in the UNI-Hub having tattoos. He quickly understood why this was not commonly done in the universe. Portable formations required divine essence to function, and without Origin Ink to bypass that requirement, using them as tattoos would be pointless. Anyone who already possessed the necessary divine essence could simply cultivate the concept directly.
Or maybe there were beings using it as tattoos. It was just from what he had seen and from his knowledge of what he'd read in forums, he hadn't seen much about this.
As he continued observing, Adrian noticed an important limitation in this. The formation's expansion radius was capped at fifty meters.
This appeared to be a hard limit. If Adrian wanted to deploy it over a larger area, this particular token would not suffice. He soon deduced the cause. The limitation seemed to come from the amount of mana ink used to embed the rune within the token. And the most it could stretch seemed to be only fifty meters.
If one wanted to cover a larger area, the only viable method would be for an inscriber to etch the formation directly into space or terrain using a lot of mana ink. The tokens seemed to be only capable of holding a small amount.
Portable formations, then, did not surpass traditional formations in every aspect. They merely offered convenience for specific use cases.
Adrian then guided the floating symbols downward and bound the formation to the floor.
The symbols settled instantly, anchoring themselves into the material without resistance. He felt the formation lock into place, stable and complete. The green glow pulsed faintly, and the scent of corrosion began to seep into the air, faint but unmistakable.
As he studied it further, he realized something unsettling. The Bind symbol itself was not unfamiliar. He had seen it before. More than that, he knew that if he had ever consciously considered it, the Source would have guided him and given him the symbol instantly.
Yet despite all his knowledge, it had never once occurred to him to try adding the Bind symbol into the core of a formation alongside the primary formation symbol.
This was not simple ignorance. It was a failure of creative insight.
Even with full access to the Language of Mana that Source gave him, making the possibilities infinite, Adrian himself was still limited by the boundaries of his own imagination and creative thought.
"I need to think differently."
The realization settled over him. His strength came from the Source, yes, but his growth depended on how he used it. If he continued relying only on what he already knew, he would stagnate.
Setting that realization aside, he turned his focus to the divine formation. Now that he understood the mechanics of portability, it was time to analyze the divine concept.
He did not activate the formation. Instead, he read it first.
As expected, there was nothing fundamentally new about its structure. The divine concept was composed of some aspects of rules drawn from Corrosion, Poison, Metal, and Decay. Divine concepts were never raw combinations. They were purified blends, retaining only specific essential aspects while discarding the rest.
Because Adrian had fully comprehended each of these arcane concepts, he could immediately see which parts had been removed and which had been preserved. If he followed the same process, he should be able to form the divine concept himself.
He sat cross-legged on the floor and closed his eyes.
Turning inward, Adrian let his consciousness sink beneath flesh and bone, past the mana channels threading through his body, and into the white-grey crystalline Source Seed that defined his existence.
Inside the Source Seed, the familiar landscape unfolded before him. A vast internal space, divided into isolated sections, each one holding a different comprehension.
He also saw the merged Plant and Wood section, which currently served him no purpose.
That fusion had been crude. He had simply broken down the walls between two chambers and let the contents mix. The result had been stable, but the two concepts had never truly become one. They coexisted, nothing more.
This time, he did not intend to repeat his previous method. Instead, Adrian focused his will and imagined a new space forming within the Source Seed.
His intent shaped reality within this internal realm.
The moment he willed it, an empty section appeared.
It manifested as a hollow chamber. The walls gleamed with faint white-grey light, untouched by any concept.
He then moved the rule symbols of Corrosion, Poison, Metal, and Decay into this new section, but only the specific symbols he had identified within the Ruin-Engraving Formation. The remaining symbols stayed in their original sections.
The process felt delicate. Each symbol detached carefully, drifting through the internal space. They floated into the new chamber one by one, settling into place.
Within the newly created chamber, the rules began to interlace.
Adrian watched closely, ready to intervene if the fusion destabilized. But no intervention was needed.
Unlike the Plant and Wood merge, where the concepts merely coexisted awkwardly, these symbols fused naturally. They intertwined smoothly, reinforcing one another until an entirely new concept emerged.
Ruination.
The concept carried weight. Decay given purpose, corrosion weaponized, poison refined, metal corrupted. All four arcane concepts distilled into a single destructive truth.
If Plant and Wood had been like oil and water, this was like combining compatible liquids into a single, cohesive substance.
The moment the divine concept stabilized, Adrian felt his Source Seed pulse violently.
The sensation hit him, and his eyes snapped open, though his consciousness remained anchored within the Seed. The chamber housing Ruination blazed with dark green light, and that light spread outward, flooding through his entire internal structure.
His mana reserves surged, expanding dramatically. The increase was massive, at least fifty percent.
Adrian was shocked. He had expected growth, but not this much.
Even with his already vast reserves, a single divine concept had produced such a drastic increase. If he later got more divine concepts or converted his mana into a Mana Sea, the amplification would become even more terrifying.
He steadied himself, letting the surge settle. The light dimmed, and the Ruination chamber stabilized, glowing faintly alongside the others.
Before moving on to the mana body art, Adrian paused to analyze the aftermath.
He turned his attention to the original sections that had housed Corrosion, Poison, Metal, and Decay. Each one remained intact, still glowing with their respective colours. The symbols he had left behind were undimmed, unchanged.
The unused symbols remained intact within their original sections, and he felt no loss of comprehension whatsoever.
Adrian frowned.
This contradicted everything he had learned about normal cultivators from the Guardian Spirit and the forums. In the universe, cultivators permanently sacrificed unused aspects when forming a divine concept. They basically had multiple essence seeds, so when they discarded the unused rules, they vanished, and with them, they lost comprehension of it.
At the end, only the needed parts of the seeds themselves stayed, then they were fused, and became the rule core, which marked a being ascending into the Rule Stage.
That was not happening here for Adrian. First, Adrian's structure was fundamentally different. He had only one Seed, divided into sections, and nothing was truly lost.
He tested it experimentally, reaching toward the Corrosion section and attempting to manipulate one of the remaining symbols. It responded instantly, bending to his will as easily as it had before the fusion.
And then he felt something else.
His focus shifted back to the Ruination chamber. Curiosity pulled at him, and he extended his will toward the newly formed divine concept.
That is when he sensed something new. If he willed it, he felt like he could split the Ruination concept apart and return the rules to their original sections.
Adrian hesitated.
This level of control was something new. When he had merged Plant and Wood, even though he felt like he could move it, separation had been impossible. Now, it felt effortless.
He did not attempt the separation. Not yet. But the possibility sat there, undeniable.
The realization sent a shiver through him. This change could be linked to the formation of his first divine concept, and the implications were enormous.
Adrian opened his eyes fully, returning his awareness to the physical world. The room around him came back into focus, the viewport overlooking the UNI-Hub, the faint hum of formations woven into the walls.
If he could split divine concepts freely like this, then even high-level arcane concepts like Time, Space, and Void were no longer untouchable. Before, he had feared experimenting with them, unwilling to risk irreversible consequences. Now, he could test combinations safely; if anything went wrong, he could dismantle them and try again.
His mind raced with possibilities. Time and Space together or Gravity and Void. Combinations that might fail catastrophically for anyone else could be tested, refined, and perfected by him without permanent loss.
Perhaps this ability did not benefit Adrian himself greatly, given his Source.
But for his people?
Adrian stood slowly, his gaze distant.
This was revolutionary. He could tailor divine concepts to their individual needs. He could create perfect and better paths instead of having all of them inherit the same concept from a sect.
Selena's gravity mastery could be enhanced with spatial manipulation. Thomas's fire could merge with light and metal. Kael's space mastery could fuse with void and boundary. Each one could receive a divine concept designed specifically for their strengths, their history, and their comprehension.
The possibilities unfolded endlessly before him. Adrian felt like he was beginning to carve a path that belonged to him alone.