Reincarnation Of The Strongest Spirit Master-Chapter 1416: The Bipolar Petal Formation

"To cancel any formation, there are only three ways to do so..." William muttered while moving around the base of the fortress, his hands occasionally brushing against the cold, vibrating stone to closely examine the protective and defensive formations.

"... Either I use brute force to overcome and overpower the masters controlling the formations, which is something even I can’t do," he slowly muttered, his voice barely audible over the cacophony of war.

His monsters acted as an unstoppable vanguard, their claws and fangs leaving behind a long trail of dead bodies and the rhythmic, gurgling screams of agony.

Despite the slaughter his summons performed, William remained grounded in reality.

The masters inside that fortress were no doubt channelling their collective spirit power into the foundations. To break through via brute force would require an ocean of energy he simply did not possess in this current life.

"... Or I need to find the key points of each formation, which are locked up at the centre of this fortress... and the third option is to understand the nature of each formation, and make a counter for it!"

William knew he only had the third option. Brute force was a fantasy, and reaching the physical centre of the fortress was a paradox—he couldn’t get to the centre until the formations were down, but the formations wouldn’t go down until he reached the centre.

That was why he took a grand tour around the fortress, moving with a deceptive speed while studying each formation and trying to identify each one of them.

To an outside observer, he looked like a man wandering aimlessly in a storm of blood, but his mind was cataloguing every ripple in the air and every vibration in the stone.

If it were another master from this era, it would be an impossible feat. All the formations used in the fortress came from the upper realm, possessing a complexity that would baffle even the most learned scholars of this lower world.

"Luckily, all the formations used are well known up there... which makes me wonder, how come all of them are recent formations, and there isn’t a single obsolete or lost formation in them?!"

William was puzzled. The architectural structure of this fortress—the stonework and the layout—clearly came from a lost kingdom in the ancient times of the upper realm. It was a relic of a bygone era.

Yet, the spiritual "software" running on this ancient hardware was modern. All the formations used were widely known and currently utilised in the upper realm.

He had expected to find unknown and mysterious formations, ones that he couldn’t handle or counter because their logic was forgotten. Instead, he found a familiar textbook.

This anomaly suggested that the ones who occupied this fortress weren’t just heirs to an ancient ruin; they were being supplied with current knowledge from above.

William didn’t need to cancel every single formation—that would take days. He just needed to open a path to enter the fortress.

Yet, as he expected many layers of defences, he tried to identify the locations with unknown formations and avoid them entirely.

If he hit a snag he didn’t recognise, he would be trapped in the open while the fortress’s guardians rallied.

"I’ll go from here then," William decided. He returned to the same point he started from, concluding that this was the most vulnerable entry point. It was the closest to where he sensed Becky and Lara, and strategically, it was the closest path to the portal.

"This is the Bipolar Petal Formation, a defensive formation that’s formed of two identical sub-formations, each with different elements at the core..." William studied the shimmering veil of energy before him.

The formation worked like a pair of lungs, expanding and contracting with elemental resistance. If he struck it with fire, the water core would engage. If he struck with ice, the fire core would flare. It was a perfect, self-correcting loop.

"So the best formation to break it is the Thunder Umbrella Formation..."

The Thunder Umbrella Formation was a weak offensive formation that many scholars and warriors in the upper realm considered more defensive than offensive.

It was generally dismissed as a "failed" design by many big sects.It worked by absorbing a massive amount of spirit power from the masters controlling it, then turning it all into the lightning element.

The formation would be powered up in pulses, unleashing bursts of lightning in the form of a wide umbrella, with thin, jagged pillars forming the concave shape of the canopy.

Its area of effect was wide, but it lacked depth. It worked primarily to affect the immediate area around the spirit masters, never expanding far into the frontline.

On top of that, while the lightning was excellent at negating dark elements used by dark masters, it held very little power to actually kill a high-level master. It was like a loud bark with a very small bite.

Because of this, the formation wasn’t preferred by anyone. It was seen as a waste of resources, time, and manpower to power up such an inefficient array. In terms of pure offence or pure defence, there were dozens of superior formations that could be deployed for half the cost.

But to William, the Thunder Umbrella was the perfect surgical tool. It didn’t matter that it couldn’t kill a master; what mattered was the nature of its lightning pillars.

The Bipolar Petal Formation relied on a delicate elemental balance between its two cores. The "ribs" of the Thunder Umbrella would act as lightning rods, siphoning the elemental energy from both cores simultaneously and grounding them into the earth.

William began to draw the array in the air with his fingers, his spirit power bleeding out in golden threads. He ignored the arrows and spells whistling past him, protected by the frantic defence of his fifty monsters.

"Activate," he whispered.

Sizzle! Sizzle! Crack! Boom!

Just in mere minutes, the first layer of defence was torn apart using that seemingly weak offensive formation.