Chapter 133: Tempting Fate
After Benton debriefed his sect members on the operation of the defensive formation, he turned his mind toward what he should accomplish next.
A council meeting seemed superfluous. The team had set goals and tasks a week prior and nothing substantial had changed. As far as he could tell, everyone was on the right track.
He also felt a lot better about the village’s defense. As long as the formation was fed spirit coins and was protected from disruption from the inside, it would keep beasts outside of the wall and, therefore, the villagers and his sect members safe.
The only remaining task he had on that front was obviously creating more coins, but he’d make those during stolen moments. A handful here and there would add up.
No, he needed to figure out the biggest weakness he could address and tackle the job of correcting that need. What was the sect’s biggest vulnerability regarding the beast tide?
Well, if not defense, the answer obviously had to be offense, especially for attacks on beasts at rank four and above. Which made sense. Though the sect had over two hundred Qi Gathering cultivators to handle low ranked spirit beasts, they had a grand total of four people in the entire village who could even deal damage to higher ones, and Benton was the only cultivator who could fight a beast more advanced than rank six.
They needed more firepower.
His first thought was what he considered to be the obvious solution—a grand offensive formation to mirror the grand defensive one he just installed. Perhaps, he could construct a tower in the middle of the town that topped the walls by enough height to give a great view of the surroundings.
That might work.
The formations he’d learned in mastering his techniques were all much simpler than what a grand formation would require. It was possible, of course, for him to create such a thing from scratch, but doing so would take both time and experimentation. Considering that he didn’t know how long he had, it would be better to simply buy a custom design from the System that would be fed by spirit coins and automatically target any rank six or higher that came near.
Upon thinking about the issue for a few more minutes, though, he soured on it. The problem, again, was time. Inscribing a simple formation to provide a burst of qi was relatively easy, but having it accurately target beasts added much complexity. Complexity meant taking longer to carve the channels. His best guess was that such a grand formation would take a minimum of four to five days to complete.
He honestly didn’t know if he had a day, much less close to a week.