He doesn't want to compete with the Patriarch in terms of mastery of formation. He has enough self awareness to know that he simply doesn't have the talent to do so.
But he is not willing to give up just yet. He has another method in mind that he can use to beat the Patriarch and other formation experts in the world.
Rather than try to compete, he plans to overturn the table completely by creating a single item that can break all formations.
His goal is lofty for sure. Some might even call him insane for thinking that something like that was possible. But he actually has a way to make his lofty ambitions a reality.
He plans to create the ultimate formation breaker by creating a formation treasure and embedding it with a computer that can analyze, decipher, and deconstruct the operations of any type of formation.
He got this idea when he thought of how the process of converting large immobile formations to mobile treasure formations was similar to how the size of large supercomputers was shrunk down into the size of mobile phones while retaining their power.
This analogy gave him the idea to fuse the existence of a treasure formation with that of a computer. So in a way, the formation breaker he had in mind would be similar to the existence of the sect ID card.
He became excited just thinking about it. Because of his excitement and anticipation, he didn't notice as time flew past him while working.
It wasn't entirely his fault that he didn't notice the passage of time. There was no nighttime in the secret realm of the inner sect, so it was very difficult to notice the ending of the day and the start of another day.
A month quickly passed by doing this mission. After he was done with it, he was given contribution points. Then he called Roar and went to kill more ants.
He spent another month killing ants. It took this much time because he was killing to earn enough to cover the minimum requirement of killing points for ten years.
He wanted to get the killing requirements out of the way so that he could focus on the things he had on his mind to do.
The things he wanted to do were to cultivate, forge an external life pill, and learn spells. This was just the first stage of his plan. After he is done with this, he will then begin mastering the Life and Death Lightning Art and then forge the formation breaker.
He planned the formation breaker for when he has reached the peak of the third mortal coil. At that point, his divine sense would have reached its peak, which will be very helpful in engraving formations.
So for two months since he entered the sect, he was very busy. He didn't sleep once during these two months.
He was so stressed during those two months that the people betting on his survival were sure that he wouldn't last much longer. More and more people joined in the bet because of this.
Many of the people who bet on him were sure that he wouldn't live past the third transformation of the third mortal coil. This was the general consensus, and it showed through the betting.
They were sure that he wouldn't live long and were willing to put their money where their mouth was. More than that, they were willing to put a lot of their money where their mouth was.
The investment of a lot of money into the betting made more people pay attention to what Arthur was doing every time.
They had invested a lot of money into his death, so it was reasonable that they would want to invest their attention to make sure that no one does anything to reduce their chances of winning.
Arthur would have loved to pretend that he was dying so as to bait more people into betting and losing their money.
He wasn't going to earn more money the more people joined the bet, but his goal for baiting people wasn't to earn more money. He just wanted to see a lot of people feel heartache.
He would be very satisfied if some people lost their life savings and cried because they lost their bet. But he would be contented with knowing that they lost money for counting on him dying.
Fortunately for everyone watching him, he couldn't pretend that his life seeds were about to explode. So many of them weren't baited into increasing their bets.
Arthur mostly ignored the people watching him. After working hard to complete his contribution mission, he went into his new house and began forging the external foundation.
His goal is to forge the external foundation into a weapon. In order to achieve this, he must make a life pill advance to rank 3.
Since he wants the life pill to store lightning energy for him and be a destructive weapon, the life pill he creates must advance to the third mortal coil with a natural wonder of the lightning element.
Creating the life seed and helping it advance to the third mortal coil was easy for him to do. This was even though the natural wonder of the lightning element was more destructive and difficult to assimilate than the natural wonder of the light element.
He had bought two natural wonders when he was preparing to help Roar advance. The first one was of the light element. He used that to help Roar advance to the third mortal coil.
The other natural wonder was of the lightning element. Knowing just how destructive lightning can be, Arthur besieged the natural wonder with 18 life pills at once.
He had used 9 life pills to subdue the natural wonder of the light element. But this time, he was using twice as many life pills.
Besides the overwhelming numerical advantage of the life pills, his flesh had now become attuned with the lightning element, so they had a much higher chance than Roar's life pills to assimilate the natural wonder of the lightning element.