Chapter 273: Life 75, Age 23, Martial Lord 1
After Lord Kang left, I pulled NiangBa into a side room for a private conversation.
“I have a task for you.” I took out a set of six formation plates and placed them on a table next to us. “You now understand how the Affinity Hall worked, right? How I was able to raise everyone's affinities?”
NiangBa looked at the formations in thought. “Essence. The formations in the Affinity Hall gathered essence and channeled it into us.”
“Yes. The reason I haven’t recreated the Affinities Halls here is that there is no environmental essence to gather.” I tapped on the formation plates. “These, however, are a bit different. They will gather essence from the environment and store it for later use. I want you to assemble several teams to spread these formations out around in as many different kingdoms and empires as possible. This will allow us to harvest essence from across the continent instead of just relying on what is available in the local environment.”
A hint of greed appeared in NiangBa’s eyes. “So… we will be able to use this to rapidly improve our affinities?”
I shook my head slowly and spoke very deliberately. “No, these formations are not very effective. That’s why we need to use so many of them across such a large area. Even then, gathering enough essence to raise a person’s affinities above seven-star is impractical. So, for our advancements, we will need to rely on the sect’s Trials. These are for something else. This essence will be used to create a new method for generating large amounts of karmic energy.”
While I was speaking at NiangBa, my real audience was whoever might be eavesdropping on us. I wanted to place clear limits on my activities so that no one would feel the need to interfere with them.
Also, importantly, nothing I said was a lie. The formations were only Rank 3, and the materials they used for essence storage were far from ideal. For example, in the metal essence formation, instead of using the extremely potent beryllium oxide, this formation used simple iron oxide.
NiangBa dropped his head, losing much of his interest in the project. “I will see to it, Lord Su.”