Alex sat around, giving the blacksmith some tips on how he could improve his craft. He tried to give tips that the man wouldn’t know about, and tried to teach him about Dao too, but the man simply wouldn’t understand that.
Dao as a concept was so foreign to these people that even starting to explain it was unreasonably difficult. In the end, the man simply had to take Alex at his word and go on.
The blacksmith walked over to the forge during that time and took apart a compartment on its side, before pulling out two Sunhearts with his bare hand. When they came out, the forge’s glow vanished, the heat lowering drastically by the second.
Their heat source had been stripped away.
Alex raised an eyebrow in surprise at the man casually handling the hot Sunhearts, especially when he was surprised himself when Alex handled the red-hot ingot.
“Are your hands not burning?” he asked, curiously as he walked over to the man.
“They’re not hot. They’re warm, but not hot. At least, for us blacksmiths,” the man said as he showed the Sunhearts to Alex.
These Sunhearts appeared brighter than regular Sunhearts, and Alex could almost see heat waves coming off of them.
“May I?”
He took the Sunhearts from the blacksmith and moved them around in his palm. He could feel the thick Yang energy escaping from the Sunheart at a constant rate. As the man had told him, it was in fact warm.
That confused Alex.
“How are they warm?” Alex asked. “Shouldn’t they be burning hot in order to heat up the forge?”
The man paused for a short few seconds before shaking his head. “They don’t heat up the forge though. They just power it.”
Alex narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, its job is to activate the forge so it can heat up on its own. It’s not supposed to be the heating source.”
“It’s not? Then what is?”
The man pointed to the side of the forge where the panel was still open. Alex walked over and looked inside the compartment to see what was there. He didn’t know what he was expecting, so when he saw a small metal plate at the bottom, he was taken aback.
“It’s called a formation plate,” the blacksmith said.
Alex hadn’t made the connection that these people could have been using formations at all. All this time, he had believed formations to be entirely unusable due to the lack of spirit stones and spirit veins.
‘I should have questioned how they were making storage bags,’ he thought, feeling stupid at that moment.
He let his spiritual sense flow into the forge, trying to look at how good the formation inside was. Surely it couldn’t be as good as the other worlds where it was far more common.
“Have you never seen a formation plate before?” the blacksmith asked him.
“No, I have. It’s just that I was—”
Alex paused, a frown appearing on his face. “This is not a formation,” he said. He looked deeper into the metal and it was clear that there were no straight lines carved in a geometric pattern.
Instead, what there was were squiggly lines, each drawn to be a different character of sorts, all randomly placed based on a basic understanding of the concept.
These were runes, forming a script. There was no formation.
Alex looked back at the man. “This is a script, not a formation.”
“What the hell is a script? That’s clearly a formation,” he said.
“No, this…” A thought came to him. He quickly drew on the floor, creating a simple formation shape. “Do you recognize what this is?”
The man looked at the shape and shook his head. “Never seen that before in my life.”
Alex raised his eyebrow. He pulled out a talisman next and showed it to the man. “These carvings inside that metal are the same as these ones, are they not? Do you have different names for them?”
“Of course. On paper, it’s a talisman. On metal, it’s a formation.”
“What about on stone?” Alex asked.
“Stone?” the man chuckled. “You can’t draw those on stones. Stones are too fragile, they wouldn’t even activate.”
Alex nodded slowly. “I see.”
The word formation had somehow been passed along through these people, but the meaning behind it had changed.
“Does Script mean nothing to you?” he asked.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I see…” A lot of thoughts passed through Alex as he tried to figure out how this could ever come to be. However, the answers didn’t show themselves so easily.
“Oh right, how do you use these… formations,” he asked. “How does this Sunheart activate the forge?”
Normally, activating a formation through a base plate meant connecting the grooves of the formation to the Qi from the spirit stones. He wondered if this was the same even when it was a script since those usually required creating a connection between them and their energy source.
The Sunhearts had no carvings, so Alex was curious.
The man took the Sunhearts from Alex’s hand and tossed them into the compartment before speaking.
“Just like that.”
Alex failed to see what he had done. “Did you use your Qi to activate it?”
“No,” the man said. “You just put the decaying Sunhearts into the formation, and it works on its own.”
As the man said so, the forge came alive, slowly heating up with a red glow.
“But you did nothing at all,” Alex said.
“I don’t have to. The Sunhearts do everything on their own.”
Alex failed to understand that. “How can that be? You need more than just energy to…”
He had been about to say that one needed an Intent to activate a formation to make use of it, but he knew that was not the case at all.
And the prime example for that was himself. His Qi was able to activate any formation, regardless of if he knew or didn’t know what they did.
In the end, a Sunheart was just a source of Yang energy too, just like him.
The only surprise here was that he had finally met Yang potent enough to do what he had always been able to do all by himself.
‘The Sunheart’s Yang is strong enough to help improve my body, so they must be potent enough to run any formation without needing the person to activate it.’
“Are there other such formations in the city?” Alex asked the man.
“Not many,” the man said. “There are a few to make storage bags, but only one or two are in use at every moment. It’s hard to find a surplus of decaying Sunhearts at the same time after all.”
“And you don’t have to activate those either, do you? You just place the Sunheart upon it, and it gets to work.”
“Obviously,” the man said. “How else would formations work?”
Alex slowly nodded. That was good information to be had, even though he wished he had it months ago.
“Thanks for explaining it all to me,” he said. “I’ll just finish adding the remaining stuff to my sword, and then I’ll be out of your hair.”