Unfortunately, time is running out for the new disciples to achieve this goal.
It is already their fourth year since they got admitted to the sect. They only have a few months left to achieve this goal. So everyone is rushing to make progress.
At this point, the major obstacle to most people is the barrier between the third transformation and the fourth. It is a barrier that has made many people frustrated.
This isn't a barrier that can be broken by cultivation and effort. The best that anyone can do at this stage is to polish their internal energy again and again.
This barrier requires time to break. The time it will take depends heavily on talent. The better the talent, the easier it will be to overcome this barrier.
As the least talented person in her generation, talent is the least that Princess is confident about. That's why she was the one picked to come here.
Her confidence in her lack of talent has only been eroded the longer she spends at the third transformation. To hear that someone broke that barrier and surpassed her doesn't help in the slightest.
She hasn't reached that barrier yet. But she she knows that the stagnation can take six months or more before ending. She can either wait or use a barrier-breaking pill to solve the problem.
She doesn't want to wait. But she also doesn't want to have the money to buy the barrier-breaking pill. She has spent everything she had on pushing her cultivation speed to its limit.
This made her tempted to accept the request for communication from her brother. If she accepted the request, she might be able to receive more support if she begged her brother.
But this temptation didn't last long because she knew that brother would never listen to her. He might have listened if she hadn't refused his attempts to speak with her for three years.
If anything, her brother would find a way to punish her instead of rewarding her wayward behavior. She certainly won't get a reward for allowing a human to kiss her.
She could only soldier on and recycle her internal energy. She would dump her internal energy out and refine it again and again all day.
Months passed this way. Arthur spent those months studying formations.
Arthur was bent over a workbench with the large body of a wolf laid bare over it. He was fiddling with something within the wolf
The internal organs of the lightning Wolf has been removed. Even its bones had been removed. Only its skin and muscles were left.
The bones had been removed, so the muscles were attached to special materials capable of stretching. This leftover was then treated so that it wouldn't decay.
It was also treated with materials that made it more receptive to runes. Then runes and array formations were drawn on every section of it.
This is what Arthur is doing. He is inscribing runes all over the base of the armament.
He is using copper to inscribe his runes because it is highly conductive. He needs that conductivity to channel lightning efficiently.
It is especially important to use copper so that the circuits won't be easily overloaded. This has happened several times. The armament had exploded in his face those times.
Inscribing an armament is a tedious work. It is something that can take hours or days. It all depends on the goal of the armament maker.
The goal being the intended quality of the armament. The smaller and closer the runes, the less energy will be lost during energy transmission and transformation. But inscribing tiny runes will take a lot of time.
There also isn't a limit to the total number of runes that can be used to build the armament. The more runes are used, the more parallel threads of energy transformation can occur, and the less the resistance of energy transformation.
One rune might be enough in a certain section, but ten runes will be better. A hundred runes will be even better. However, a thousand runes will perform better than all of them. Even so, then thousand runes…
And so forth and so on. All of these differences work together to create the difference in performance between a top-grade armament and a high-grade one.
The thing about armaments is that their level doesn't determine their quality. A level 10 armament can be top grade or low grade.
This is not the case for weapons and spells. Top-grade weapons and spells are usually level 10. But for armaments, the level is determined only by the power of the carcass used to build the armament.
So regardless of quality, a level 10 low-grade armament will be able to provide the same power as a level 10 top-grade armament. And a level 8 top-grade armament can never match a level 9 low-grade armament in terms of power.
Even so, the quality of an armament is very important as it determines energy efficiency. The difference between a low-grade and top-grade armament can be as high as ten times.
A ten-times difference is equal to a top-grade armament using 10% of the energy that a low-grade artifact uses. This is a highly significant difference because armaments are energy guzzlers.
Armaments drink internal energy, life energy, and mental energy like black holes. So it is very important to make them efficient.
The need to make armament efficient is common sense. But very few can achieve this because it requires a certain level of skill.
It is easier to make errors when pursuing efficiency, and it also requires a lot of time to achieve. All of this time and effort can go to waste once a mistake is made. So most forgers settle for high-grade armaments.
Arthur isn't like most forgers. He is trying to achieve top-grade quality not only because of efficiency but also because it is the required skill level he needs to be able to forge the carcass of a third mortal coil beast into an armament suitable for him.