I hid under the array and entered the darkness. A veil of darkness came over me, hiding all that defined me underneath it.

  Forn followed for some reason, immediately attacked by a mass of dark creatures. She swung her spear and most of them scattered off into the darkness after realizing they couldn’t take her.

  She was at the fifth step of the thirteenth rank, but even then, with her bloodline and techniques, she could easily compete with a creature of the ninth step from this area. Even fourteenth ranks knew better than to attack her.

  They could sense the barrier that held the darkness back, and if they were capable creatures, they would realize that Forn had a similar aura. No sensible beast would attack a cub when they could smell mama bear in the distance.

  She was still shoving her senses all over the place, making them grow temporarily and trying to find my whereabouts.

  I’d be annoyed but she was still young and eager to prove herself. She didn’t like that a random rogue cultivator had both saved her life and could hide from her. It was a bit of an insult to her, but she took it on the chin and just wanted to show me up before we parted.

  To be fair, it was my fault for teasing her like that. A scion of a celestial sect getting one-upped by some nobody four steps below her own would do that to most people.

  I shouldn’t have done that.

  Dane wouldn’t have done that. But then again, Dane wouldn’t have helped her either.

  I took a second to think about it. I didn’t know Forn and she had much more power than I did. She could probably gather enough force to kill me if she really wanted to.

  But she didn’t. She had no reason to kill, and from her actions thus far and her dao, she didn’t seem like the type of person to do that.

  I still shouldn’t have shown off like that. It was stupid and brought nothing but attention.

  I sighed inwardly and kept walking into the forest. Forn was still attracting creatures, but most of them would see the mountain of corpses around her and back away. Unless there was a dragon or some beast with an incredible bloodline of their own willing to put up a fight, most of them just wouldn’t match her.

  I still couldn’t see clearly. The ambient law of darkness was enough to suppress my senses and prevent me from noticing anything that was too far ahead of me.

  My hands weaved as I concentrated on creating something. One of the biggest problems with being an array master was the need for time. I couldn’t immediately execute the same caliber of power that those of my rank could.

  That meant that most of my power was prefabricated. I had versatility in ability but I was limited by what I had already done.

  If those beasts had just attacked me when I was still out in the light, then they would have an advantage. They wouldn’t have won, but I would have had to work harder to get this much.

  I had arrays. I had arrays I’d been working on for billions of years, but all that fiddling didn’t give me more mastery over a law. But the more time I had, the more capable I could make an array.

  Given more time, I could make this array capable of sending out attacks or sensing the area around it.

  But that would take a while due to the complexity of the laws I was working with.

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  Besides, this was a test.

  I was here for one reason and that was to measure myself.

  I hadn’t ever been in any real combat since I had killed that Jey clan fellow, and even then, he had been several full ranks below me. The hardest part about that battle had been dodging the natural protections bestowed upon him.

  I needed to fight, not for the results or for the victory, but to prove to myself that I could. I needed to stop cowering.

  I had escape plans, many of them. And those granted me some sense of security. But now, it was time to fight something at my own rank.

  I took out an array and threw it.

  The most important part of any fight was knowing your limits and knowing your opponent's limits. Laws and daos might sound complex, but they were just concepts and interpretations that told things how to behave.

  Ranks served to give you natural resistance to laws lower than your own rank, and rank also dictated your mind and ability. Someone of the tenth rank could glance at a universe and understand its most fundamental laws and be able to control them to a degree.

  Daos however, dictated how you would behave. If anything tried to chain Forn down, it would fail, because she was wild and her wildness dictated freedom.

  I had my own understanding of daos, but they were much fickle than laws and in turn much rarer. Laws were natural while daos came only from the living soul and then for them to exist separate from that or outside of that, that was another level of rarity.

  A thousand blades of light exploded into the world of darkness, starting directly from where my array had landed. The dao of the blade and the law of light shone at its center as the array managed to continuously send out blades of light and strength.

  It was one of my stronger arrays. The law of light there was at the thirteenth rank and I had harvested from the maws of a dead dragon of the fourteenth rank.

  And the dao of the blade came from a dao angel of blades born from a battlefield of twelfth-rank souls. Along with that, it had a living element which didn’t give it life but let it act like it was alive, sucking up all the life qi around it and refining it through many minor death laws until the qi was just unnatured chaos qi.

  Then that would feed into the light law and sword dao to create the process over and over again.

  A nature of arrays was that they always ate. They ate qi, laws, or daos, and since they weren’t living, they couldn’t be expected to produce their own. The higher the rank of the laws and daos, the longer they would last me.

  This array could last hundreds of thousands of years depending on the intensity. Eventually, it would run out of death laws. If I wanted it to, I could make it move around and kill creatures and harvest the death laws from their death, and elongate its lifespan. But that would require much more time and effort and even then it would probably run bare of one of its natures. This one could only ingest life qi as well, so as soon as it leaves this forest, it would crumble. I would also have to create a sensing mechanism and a basic attack formation. And arrays were rigid, as soon as someone invoked a stealth technique it would most likely not notice them and fall for an easy attack.

  More complexity meant more points of failure, but more complexity also meant overthinking a problem that might be solved with an easier solution.

  And that was what I wanted to implement.

  Trap arrays in particular were simple. If you avoided the initial surprise or saw them coming, you could easily dodge the trap or even break it.

  The sword array had injured a beast, but it quickly got up and backed away before it got seriously injured.

  But that wasn’t the reason I had thrown it out there.

  Forn was quickly attracted to the commotion and came to look at the array, her senses still blazing around the place.

  Okay, now she was getting in the way.

  I sent out a projection to talk to her. She instantly zeroed in on it and realized it for what it was.

  “Are you controlling it?” She asked. “I don’t sense any connection trailing off to it.”

  “Using your divine senses to control a projection would make it easy to be discovered,” the projection answered.

  “Then how?”

  “Various methods, all independent of me and my aura. It’s something only the array is designed to sense for.”

  Her senses kicked into overdrive, scanning every minute fluctuations of law over the area.

  “How come I can’t sense it? If you're sending out signals then I should be able to sense the pattern no matter how hidden they are.”

  “I’m not sending out signals. It’s not my intentions or senses that are controlling the illusion but rather manual subtle changes to the environment. Look at the changes in the life laws over there.”

  Forn focused on the ever slightly changing set of laws in the distance and quickly rushed towards it, grabbing at the area with her sense.

  I came out of hiding, with a hefty amount of annoyance.

  “Do you need something?” I asked.

  “No, I just wanted to see through your tricks.”

  I nodded, then turned around.

  Suddenly, she struck out with her spear and threw it into my back.

  is 29 chapters ahead.

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