Evan felt this way for good reason – he was required to wear an identifying uniform, marking him as a formations master under training, in service to the military of Starspire.

This might not be too much of a problem, as he could always simply toss the uniform if needed – he would know which way the wind was blowing well before he was found. Probably.

No; the issue was that Master Isaac was far too notable in the military, and his master was quick to introduce him and the others to several higher-ranking officers, giving them all ample time to remember his face and potentially drag him down with them should the worst happen.

This wasn’t malicious, and he couldn’t say anything to discourage it, as his master was helping him build valuable connections that would serve him well during his service, and perhaps even beyond it. It was all certainly good things to know for the future, but he didn’t like the perceived risk it brought him.

In addition, he learnt that the security of Mountain Acropolis was far more strict than that of the other outposts he had stayed at – here, much like at Starspire, everyone had a slip that identified them in order to stem any spies from slipping inside.

If the outpost was ever taken, they could simply gather everyone together and require them to show their slips, effectively outing him as a member of the military.

Perhaps none of this mattered – maybe they would spare him anyway, just as he hoped.

That wasn’t enough for Evan, and he was constantly gripped by a sense of foreboding dread.

His naïve thoughts had transformed into grim ones, but there was little he could do. The best he was able to do was to grit his teeth and work hard to get stronger, both increasing his value as a captive and allowing him to better defend himself.

For this reason, his first month was spent on truly setting his mind to defensive formations – in particular, ones he could keep on his person, rather than the large building sized ones he had been intending to work on.

He purchased what designs he could from the military, and switched tracks from mostly swords, maces, spears, staves, and axes into shields and armor for the military, as well as interspersing of more civilian oriented defensive products.

These devices took forms very similar to his rain shield and portable air conditioner – brick-like objects of varying sizes that took on a multitude of options.

Some were simple projected barriers, and occasionally omnidirectional. They would typically be turned on or off manually and were quite pricey – items that could protect a person were generally more valuable than those that caused harm.

Despite being more expensive, it didn’t make him more money than selling weapons – it wasn’t that he had overlooked the idea before, but rather that such a price tag resulted in far fewer buyers, and most of these devices were far more complex than the weapons he was used too, decreasing his overall output.

They were also necessarily designed in such a way to be longer lasting than a weapon, and to be used less frequently. At least, that was the case for the civilian devices.

For the military, he imbued more standard shields and pieces of armor, and they were usually quite simple – most of the hard work was already done in the forging of the armor, and only the addition of an imbuement focusing on durability and weight reduction was necessary, with more exotic imbuements being specially requested instead of standard practice.

All of this opened his eyes to just how difficult it was to create an effective defense against any possible situation. The civilian devices lacked power and would falter within a few blows depending on the model, while the standard imbuements for the military left many gaps for exotic types of damage to bypass.

These included things such as vibration-based attacks, or heat based spells, or ones that used light, or really any kind of magic or imbuement that wasn’t purely physical – all his imbuements would do is prevent a standard arrow or sword from injuring the soldier, and even then they were on their own to deal with the transferred forces.

Only a far higher investment into defense could protect against these things, and no defense was truly foolproof – defending was far more difficult than attacking, and was why only large, building wide formations had any chance at holding up against a true onslaught.

It was a grim thing to learn, but he held out hope – even if it was far easier to destroy rather than protect, if the difference in strength was high enough, it wouldn’t matter.

He had no true hopes of using that to his advantage for the moment, but the same couldn’t be said for the formation masters who built the core defenses. For now, he contended himself by switching out his rain shield for an omnidirectional barrier that incorporated a few adjustments from the base design.

These adjustments were nothing much, and once again he simply ordered the inscriptions he needed done. Mostly, they would add some protection against intense heat, for if the outpost was ever in flames or he was inside a burning building. Another change was automatic activation in the case of a quickly moving object; something like an arrow.

Evan figured that if an attack happened – and he was betting on it – it would be more of a raid than anything else. They would find it difficult to truly occupy the outpost, especially considering the traffic that constantly moved through it. Instead, their best move would be to simply do their best to disrupt operations and strike fear into the hearts of the residents.

Should that happen, he would be a prime target – his uniform made him out as more than just a civilian, and his low cultivation meant he had little protection or true importance.

In other words, he made the perfect target for a stealthy archer to take down.

The imbuement would struggle to stop such an attack, but he felt confident that even with his meager strength, so long as the archer didn’t send multiple arrows his way or was particularly outstanding, he would survive at least a single arrow.

It would give him time to seek cover, and would save his life, so he put extra effort into it. He wanted to start wearing armor too, but it wasn’t allowed in the outpost for anyone but on-duty soldiers.

There was also the chance it would make him an even bigger target.

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Imbuements that fit into his clothes existed, and he gave it a shot, but for most materials that clothes were made out of, it wasn’t possible to put inscriptions into them without using a spirit, requiring that the imbuements be done entirely without them, making them incredibly laborious to create and far weaker than virtually any other type of protection.

His own were virtually unnoticeable, even with a simple imbuement that only increased their ability to disperse force – something that cost him a pretty penny to get the force-aspected Substance for.

On top of everything else, he tried to learn some more spells – he had already mastered the more important ones by now, such as the ones for inscribing onto or inside metal – something he would need for his ever-approaching certification – along with a few basic spells for defending himself or staying alive.

These included a spell to fire a small bolt of force, another to create a small barrier similar to the devices he made – but it was only able to project in a certain direction, as he lacked the power for anything more – and finally, one that could condense a small amount of water out of the air, a channeled spell he could only maintain for about half a minute.

Since arriving, he started learning two more, though he only had hopes for one of them: a very weak spell for stemming bleeding, along with a spell that would create a small flare.

The flare was virtually useless to Evan, as his mana decayed so quickly and his magic domain was so small, but he wanted to learn it anyway.

Healing spells were orders of magnitude more complex than any other spell he had learned, making the spells to carve look easier than the first light spell he had learned. They also took far more mana than he had to be very useful, but he thought it better to have and not need than need and not have.

Of course, he had little hope of learning the spell – healing magic was seen as nearly requiring a genius to learn at his level, with even the simpler spells – like what he was learning – being incredibly complex. Any healer was incredibly well regarded and paid handsomely for their services.

His struggles continued into the end of his second month at the Mountain Acropolis, and while he had learnt the flare spell – and it was truly useless, he discovered – he had made almost no progress with the healing spell.

Master Isaac said he had some hope though, as while healing spells were mind-numbingly complex, they could always be accomplished later in life when he had some mental cultivation to support his efforts.

In this time, Evan also received orders for more of his imbued beams, from places other than Iron Guard. It seemed news had gotten around to some other mines at last, and he relished the opportunity to bring in even more money.

He also stopped his efforts at defensive devices – he had learned enough and would need more strength to make anything better. They just weren’t very practical at his level as a personal device.

Instead, he turned his efforts back to getting experience with larger formations, while making the beams on the side – they made him too much money to ignore.

With his self-imposed date for becoming certified fast approaching, he started to feel a time crunch to learn everything he could before leaving his master’s side. Once he became certified, he would be a genuine, fully fledged crafter – and that came with certain expectations.

It would get a lot harder to learn new things, and he would lose the protection he was granted by his status that he was used too – unlike Master Isaac, most crafters couldn’t just make requests of the military and expect them to be mostly fulfilled, and in a timely manner at that.

He would be at the whim of the military, and they could send him straight to the front lines if they wanted. They probably wouldn’t – it was in his contract that any time spent on the front lines was counted as basically double in regard to his service – but it was always a possibility.

The best way to prevent this from happening was to make himself more valuable, so he coordinated with his master and soon found a request he could fulfill while learning the ins and outs of imbuing large-scale formations.

What was needed was simple – one of the craftsmen of Mountain Acropolis, an alchemist, wanted a primary formation laid down at his newly constructed home before he arrived, along with two connected formations that would function as lighting for the entire home and a preservation formation for one of the rooms, where he would be keeping materials for his work.

It was a perfect request for Evan – the owner wasn’t yet at the outpost, allowing him to work and learn in peace, and they needed the formations done from scratch; there were no imbuements already present, making it perfect for his master to teach him how everything was done, from start to finish.

And there was a lot to learn, despite everything he had read and been taught thus far – formations that went onto buildings instead of tools were very different in practice despite being in the same field. He knew of the terms, of course. The primary formation was essentially the foundation of everything else.

When it came to a building, there were typically far more moving pieces than in smaller imbuements. At the same time, it was rare for more not to be added, removed, or adjusted as time went on – unlike smaller imbuements such as his weapons, which were imbued knowing the result from the start, with changes rarely made afterwards.

Because of this, the first thing a formations master did when laying down the formations of a building is constructing a master formation that everything else could be slaved too and controlled from, in addition to some infrastructure – such as security, to keep any unwanted formations from connecting, or the easy monitoring of what maintenance was needed.

There were even more advanced functions, but they would vary greatly. Buildings typically didn’t share a common design that the crafter could simply build – each building was slightly different and had different demands, so the crafter would be forced to create them anew each time.

Evan liked this – it felt much closer to his original vision of freedom a crafter experienced with their work, not the relatively strict way most formation masters followed designs without thought.

This was especially so for the military, he had noticed. While Starspires way of doing things produced great differences between each soldier, they went to great lengths to organize them and ensure a very general type of uniformity among the soldiers. They didn’t look kindly on any potential gimmicks.

Being built in this way also meant that it wasn’t simple to learn from a book – the circumstances had to be considered each time, and the crafter would have to make decisions. It was also well established by now that even the military wasn’t very generous when it came to giving out knowledge.

Constructing formations for a building was one of the most profitable ways a formations master could spend their time, and for good reason – it took much more effort than simply following an already established design, and while much more freeform, there were designs.

One such example was the preservation formation – each crafter would have their own understanding of how to lay down such a design, and they would each have drawbacks, strengths, and a price. Comparing this to his own design of the beams, parallels could be seen – what if he didn’t include the checks to reduce the load on the beam?

It would still be able to accomplish its goal with enough strength, but it would far be inferior to his own implementation.

Each design would still have to be adapted to the building in question, but these designs – or rather, methods – served as a way to build a “brand” and increase the value of their work.

At least, that was how it worked outside the military – inside, things worked through the request system, and while demands could be made of who could fulfill an order, it wouldn’t be too exacting.

The crafter was coming to them, after all, not the other way around. Since the alchemist was currently traveling, it would be difficult to get a hold of them and decide which formations master they preferred to take up the request, and it would also be incredibly demeaning for such a thing to take place – it was one thing for someone to go looking for a specific crafter to fulfill a request, and another to turn them away at the door.

For this request, the requirements were quite low – it was apparent that the alchemist was trying to keep costs low by hiring a weaker crafter, even if it would increase the maintenance costs.

Evan didn’t blame him – the pay wasn’t bad, but it was secondary to what he would learn by working on the request, as well as something else that was mentioned – whoever did the original work would get priority for any future requests made of the building!

This was good, as many of the other requests required a certain amount of experience.

A few days later, when the first of the Substance he would need arrived, he was bursting with excitement to get started! The day had come!