Chapter 213: A Big Change
After Benton left the Alchemy Pavilion, he spent most of the rest of the day working on designs for his grand formation that would protect the sect from all enemies. Obviously, those plans couldn’t be implemented for another almost two weeks, when the wall was completed and installed, but he wanted to be ready for when he could start creating the sect’s main defense.
Inscribing an array that created a shield to protect against one threat, be it a beast or qi or a cultivator or whatever, was relatively simple for an expert with the knowledge the System had granted him. Protecting against two threats, however, didn’t mean simply creating two separate arrays. It was almost impossible to get two shields to overlap without interfering with each other.
Well, it was possible to separate the shields by enough physical distance to avoid such interference, but any visitors with any degree of expertise would think him a complete amateur if he solved the conflict between the shields in that manner. Real Formations Masters combined all the functions of a shield into a single array.
But it wasn’t a point of pride and a desire to maintain his reputation of being an unfathomable expert that made him want to do it the proper way.
Well, it wasn’t just a point of pride and desire to maintain his image.
The correct method provided distinct advantages in both efficiency and strength. A well-made formation that incorporated multiple shield types used qi more efficiently for a couple of reasons. One, each shield consumed a small amount of qi in order to check for a potential attack. Multiple shields meant multiple detection pulses.
Of course, eliminating that duplication resulted in only a minor increase in efficiency. The second reason was much more important—a single large conduit served all the shields at once. If he were creating formations the easy way, say he wanted one shield to protect against beasts and another to protect against qi, he’d need two conduits. To feed ten thousand qi per second into each shield, he’d need to be able to supply that rate to each conduit, meaning he’d need to supply a total of twenty thousand qi per second.
Obviously, in that case, only one of the shields would be attacked at a time as the other shield would let through the force it wasn’t protecting against, but both conduits still had to continuously circulate ten thousand qi per second. And no conduit was one hundred percent efficient. Each of them would lose a tiny amount every second, so having two conduits lost twice as much qi as having one. When you started layering four or five or ten or twenty different shields, that loss grew to be significant.
Consuming less qi was important, of course, but honestly, Benton could supply an awful lot of spirit coins that cost him no more than a bit of his time and the use of his qi pool. Much more important to him was the increase in strength using a single formation provided.
All materials, even a high-quality one like Orange Vigor Spirit Wood, had a maximum amount of qi that could flow through channels inscribed in them at once. If he were to create multiple shield arrays, the maximum qi flow for each, assuming he kept them all equal, was the maximum flow rate for the material divided by the number of arrays.