The shape of the yellow barrier made it so that a red layer of lightning formed a half bowl above the group of people. As if this wasn’t odd enough, the layer of red lightning also refused to disappear after the explosion. It clung to the yellow shield like a maggot and continued to strike it.
But the worst part was when five of the nine pillars around the pill cauldron were overloaded and cracked before crashing down. This was so bad that their systems were shrieking and sounding a loud alarm.
But the alarms weren’t needed to make the three leaders know that the situation was bad. The three of them could tell that the situation was bad when not one pillar cracked, but five of them cracked all at once.
The rank 5 talisman raised her voice as he said to the rank 5 array master, "What happened just now?"
The rank 5 array master shook his head as if to clear the confusion from his mind, as he said, "For some reason, the wavelength of the explosion had six peaks coming in after one another with no trough. The barrier could handle the maximum power of the explosion and each peak, but it couldn’t handle six peaks one after the other."
"The barrier was stressed beyond its breaking point and would have collapsed without the support of your pillars. It goes without saying that if we receive another one of those explosions, the barrier will fall."
When she heard this, the talisman master became solemn as he said, "I knew that the energy signature was weird, but I didn’t know that it was this weird. What do you suppose is the reason?"
At this point, the array master had turned away from her and was busy making corrections in the arrays, which he did by flinging his hand around in various directions. As he flung his hands around, tiny arrays left his hands and flew away from him to merge with whatever array he had pointed to at the last moment.
He was clearly busy, so he could only remain turned away from her as he replied to her question, saying, "If I had to take a guess, I would call him a killer. The Branch Metacs of the Killing Pathway are the most feasible suspects for creating attacks that behave like that. It would also explain why the attack has sustained damage and is refusing to disappear."
"With the attack clinging to our barrier and constantly wearing it down, the barrier will fall without a second explosion at this rate. The attacks of killing cultivators are the ones that tend to do this."
"But he is clearly a forger, not a killer. So my hypothesis is definitely wrong."
Seeing as things were bad, the rank 5 talisman master threw out five more talismans around the pill cauldron. This was to make up for the deficit that appeared now.
As she did this, she kept thinking about how these pillars had broken in the first place. It was a serious thing to think about because the pillars weren’t supposed to break at all.
The pillars were designed to channel the excess power of the attack from arrays down to the pill cauldron. If anything should have broken, it was supposed to be the pill cauldron, not the pillars connecting the pill cauldron to the arrays.
The fact that the pillars had broken could only mean that they were overloaded too quickly. As for why that occurred, the explanation of the array master came to mind.
In order to prevent this from happening again, she said to the array master, "Couple the pillars together so that they will now channel force together as one conduit, instead of as separate channels."
The array master nodded before he quickly copied some of the arrays around him by looking at them before sending them to the nine pillars to create a buttress of arrays in the shape of a ring around the pillars that connected all of them together.
Before, the pillars would only work if one of them was overloaded. But now, all of them would work together.
This is an inefficient design as all nine pillars would be working together even when they are not needed. But in this case, it is a good arrangement because it would make sure that all of them would have to be overloaded before one of them collapses.
The pill refiner saw this arrangement and nodded in satisfaction. But he wasn’t sure that all of these would be enough to curb the next few attacks, so he made a suggestion to the talisman master.
He said, "You should try to stop the attacks from hitting the shield in the first place. So next time it appears, you should..."
He didn’t get to finish what he was saying before the next ball of lightning flew over to them.
They could barely see this second attack because the red layer of lightning was still clinging to the yellow barrier and obscuring their vision. But as people who are masters of energy manipulation and refining, even if they were blind, they would be able to sense the incoming attack because of its dangerous nature.
The red ball of light makes their skin tighten as if they are about to be cut by something when they sense it. So as soon as the second ball of lightning appeared, the three of them stopped talking and immediately turned to look at it.
The rank 4 pill refiner didn’t get to finish his suggestion, but the rank 5 talisman master didn’t need to hear everything he had to say to know what he was talking about.
This is why, when the red ball of lightning reached 500 meters from their position, she pinched a talisman that created a white beam of energy and power that crashed into the red ball of lightning.
The white beam of energy caused the ball of lightning to explode in the sky. This caused a large cloud of red lightening to form in the sky.