Lady Ilse led Red to the back of her manor, into a large storage room with multiple floors. He was surprised to find dozens of boxes strewn all over the place, packed with materials he was very familiar with.

“This is where I intend to build the workshop,” she waved her hand, showing him the room.

“Doesn’t seem very spacious,” Red said.

It was a big room, just not big enough for both a forge and a laboratory.

Lady Ilse smiled. “I know, which is why we will also build on the second floor.”

“That would change the specifics of the formation.”

“The blueprint accounts for it. Come, I’ll show you.”

She led him to a table further into the room, where she unfurled a large formation schematic.

“See here?” She pointed at a few spots amidst the drawings. “If we build more secondary nodes on the second floor and resonate them properly, the Spiritual Energy distribution will remain evenly spread.”

Red didn’t respond, instead studying the schematic. He was very familiar with the scripture used in this formation, and the only difference was the scale and the connecting symbols.

“So, are you confident, Master Viran?” Lady Ilse asked.

Red nodded. “I am. It will just take a while.”

“How long?”

“Three weeks… Two weeks if I can work uninterrupted.”

She didn’t respond to this. When Red looked up, he saw her looking at him with a strange expression.

“I expected a month at least,” Lady Ilse said.

“I have some experience with this formation.”

“So you say. In any case, by uninterrupted, do you mean you would work without resting?”

“More or less.”

“And you have no issues with doing that?”

“I would need a day of preparation first. After that, it should be fine.”

He needed to make sure that Emer, his imp, would know of his absence and be prepared in case anything happened.

“Then you’ll have it,” she nodded, furling the schematic back up. “I’ll have my servants prepare the room for your return. Should I expect you tomorrow or later today?”

“Later today.”

Lady Ilse nodded before leading him back into the main part of the manor. There, they met with a frenetic Marina.

“Where did you two go?” She asked, waving her fan in frustration. “No, nevermind that! I spoke with my people and they should be able to draft the contract for later today, but we still haven’t even discussed how we’ll divide the profits!”

“Fifty for Master Viran, thirty for me, and twenty for you,” Lady Ilse said.

“Uh, well, I guess that’s reasonable, but…” She looked at Red and trailed off.

Red nodded in agreement. He didn’t know if this was the fairest profit split, but he didn’t believe they would try to cheat him on this matter.

“Then we’ll do that,” Marina said. “And when do you start working?”

“He will start working tonight,” Lady Ilse responded for Red. “He should be done in two weeks.”

“Tonight?! Two weeks?!” Marina’s eyes widened. “That’s way too quick!”

“And? Are you complaining about your associates doing too good of a job?”

“No, that’s not what I… Agh, I will figure it out!” With that, she turned around and started speaking into her communication talismans again.

Lady Ilse smirked when she saw this before looking back at Red.

“Then, I’ll be waiting for you.”

He nodded, though he couldn’t help but feel there was a hidden meaning behind her words.

…

Red used the carriage provided by Marina to go back to his manor. There, he spoke with his imp about how long he would be away, though this time, he also gave Emer a few communication talismans.

“Since I’ll be away for some time, it’s possible some of the people spying on me will use this opportunity to infiltrate the manor,” Red said. “I want you to warn me if someone has appeared in the detecting formation.”

“S-Should I still use that last resort, master?” The imp asked.

“Ask me first. If I don’t get here within three minutes, then you have permission to use it.”

The last resort was, of course, the defensive formations Red had set up in the manor. They could threaten a Lesser Ring Realm cultivator, but they would also destroy his entire manor in the process, something he wanted to avoid if possible. As for the communication talismans, he was somewhat reluctant to use them after learning these messages could be intercepted, but after asking the Northvale butler, he was told that this was very difficult to accomplish. One would need specialized artifacts or techniques which were simply not available for purchase, and even the Duke’s household did not have the means or connection to buy them.

Nonetheless, the matter still worried him, so Red instructed the imp to be vague when sending messages. Then, after organizing his workshop, he returned to Lady Ilse’s manor just as night was arriving. He was led to the storage room by a servant, and found the mistress of the house waiting for him there, in the middle of sorting through materials. She was no longer wearing her dress, instead sporting workman’s shirt and pants, as well as a leather apron and belts lined with pouches and pockets. An alchemist’s uniform, or so Red assumed.

“I have separated the materials for the core of the formation,” she pointed at a few boxes. “I assume you’ll start by the center, correct?”

Red nodded. This was a modular formation, with all nodes connecting to a central core. It was wiser to begin by the part that would affect the rest of the formation.

“Do you mind if I stay here and watch?” She asked.

Red hesitated at this.

“I assure you I won’t bother you,” Lady Ilse added with a confident smile.

“…It’s your materials,” he said.

That was to say, if she messed up his work, it would be her money that would be wasted. That, however, didn’t seem to deter the woman, who stood aside and sat by a table, half-observing him and half sorting through some notes of what Red assumed were her alchemical studies.

He didn’t delay his work any further, getting the schematics and setting the initial parts of the formation.

First, Red would need to calculate to calculate the measurements of the room and the future workshops to make sure the formation was designed correctly. To his surprise, he found the schematics of the formation were annotated with the exact numbers he needed, something that was definitely not present when he saw it earlier.

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As if sensing his question, Lady Ilse spoke up. “I took the necessary measurements before you returned. I would have already put them there earlier, but I wasn’t sure until this afternoon that this would be where the formation would be built.”

Red didn’t respond, instead studying the numbers in silence.

“You can double check them, if you want,” she said.

He did as much, examining the room. After confirming the first few placements were correct, though, he didn’t bother checking the rest and set about gathering the materials for the formation.

Since Red already had some experience with this formation, none of the scripture gave him any trouble, though the sheer volume of them was something he had never done before. It took him until dawn to draw the peripheral symbols. To his surprise, Lady Ilse held true to her word.

She didn’t make a noise while he was drawing or calculating, and she only moved once there was a lull in Red’s efforts. When the light of the sun first shone through the windows, she turned off the lamps and sat back down, half-focused between watching him work and writing something on her papers.

A few hours later, Marina came into the room, looking like she hadn’t relaxed for a moment since yesterday.

“I have managed to secure all the materials,” she said, rubbing her temples. “They will start bringing them in today so-”

“No, not today,” Lady Ilse cut her off.

“What?! What do you mean ‘not today’?!”

“Shh!”

Marina recoiled under her friend’s glare before looking over at Red, who was sitting on the ground writing on a paper, in realization.

“We can’t afford to have that much noise while Master Viran is working,” Lady Ilse said.

“B-But I have already ordered all the building materials…”

“So? Store them somewhere else.”

“I-It’s not that simple. Some of this stuff is really expensive and needs to be stored in special storages…”

“I’m sure my brilliant merchant friend can figure something out.”

“Agh, you!…”

Marina seemed like she wanted to say more, but she just left, crestfallen.

“I’m sorry for the interruption, Master Viran,” Lady Ilse said.

“It’s fine,” Red said, not looking up from his papers. “Just make sure they don’t come at any crucial points.”

Finishing the core of the formation took him the rest of the day and half of the day after. In the center of the room now stood a glistening golden formation circle, resembling the same formation Red had in his manor.

“The outer nodes next?” Lady Ilse asked.

Red nodded and looked around the room. He was not surprised to see that the materials he needed were already set aside in neat piles right around the places he needed to build the node.

Although these secondary nodes were simpler to build than the core, it was still a very taxing and meticulous task to connect them together, since the formation was so large. This was not something Red had done before, so he made a few miscalculations which didn’t lose him any materials, but made him waste more time than was necessary.

It took him a day and a half to finish one node, and that was without substantial breaks. This didn’t make him happy.

Of course, as he went along, his performance would improve, but it seemed he wouldn’t quite be able to finish this in two weeks. A bit more than a day passed by before he finished the second node, at which point, Lady Ilse, who had been mostly silent during the entire process, spoke up.

“Do you need help?”

Red looked at her. “How would you be able to help?”

“I’ve studied arcane scripture in the past, and although I’m not a specialist, I still know some things. Besides, I have also been watching you work, so I’ve picked up a thing or two.”

He didn’t respond immediately, looking back at the formation in thought.

“Can you draw the outer circle?” He asked.

Formation symbols and their nodes were mostly circular, and the outer edges of this circle tended to be the easiest part of the formation to draw.

Lady Ilse nodded. “I can.”

She walked over to Red, sitting on the ground across from him with the formation plate laying between them. Without prompting, the young woman set aside the ink pots and brush, dipping her tool in preparation.

“The minor gathering symbols first,” he instructed.

Lady Ilse didn’t ask for instructions before beginning to draw. Red watched her movements like a hawk, ready to stop her if anything went wrong, but to his surprise, she drew the symbols without problem. Her hand movements were steady, and although she went about it slowly, she didn’t commit any mistakes.

When she was done, Lady Ilse looked up at him. “Did I do it right?”

“It will work,” Red said. “Just follow what I say.”

The woman smiled at this and nodded.

With her help, Red was able to delegate easier tasks to her while he focused on more complex symbols. Her talent in arcane scripture wasn’t outstanding, but it seemed her experience in alchemy had tempered her to adapting and learning these simple symbols rather quickly. Whenever she became stumped with a sigil or didn’t know how to proceed, she would ask him for assistance, and would never commit the same mistake again.

Because of this, their work went about smoothly, and in less than two days they had completed three more nodes, a speed Red wouldn’t have been able to accomplish on his own. However, her mental fortitude and stamina weren’t at the same level as his.

“I’m sorry,” Lady Ilse said with a tired expression. “I didn’t realize formation drawing was this tiring.”

“It’s fine,” Red said.

“Alchemy is also a taxing process, but at least it doesn’t require this much physical coordination,” she stood up and stretched. “I’ll take a break and rejoin you in a few hours.”

Red was about to say there was no need, but he decided against it. Since she was funding this and was of actual help, he saw no reason to deny her.

As Red became more familiar with the process and their cooperation deepened, they were able to finish the remaining eight nodes in five days, though by the end of it he was doing most of the work. Lady Ilse, knowing better than to mess up the process with her fatigue, stood aside and returned to observing him.

Then, on day twelve, Red had finally finished the formation two days ahead of schedule.

It was a behemoth of a formation, a circle of golden interconnected symbols punctuated by plated nodes that stretched the entirety of the large storage room. The core and six of the gathering nodes stayed on this floor, while the remaining half was on the second floor, connected by resonating symbols that would distribute the Spiritual Energy in the future workshop evenly.

Lady Ilse couldn’t help but stand up with excitement as she saw this.

“Does it work?”

“Do you have the spirit stones on you?” Red asked.

She smiled and hurried away, returning a few minutes later with a bag full of Spirit Stones. She set each one on its corresponding spot, and Red used a controlling formation plate to activate it once all of them were in place.

The formation glowed, and a torrent of Spiritual Energy flooded into the room, so much that Red felt his entire body shiver in reaction. The insubstantial energy gathered in droves until it started to become a fine mist that could be seen with the naked eye, and it eventually covered the entire room.

It took a good minute before this mist dispersed, though it was still possible to feel the incredibly dense Spiritual Energy around them.

“Magnificent!” Lady Ilse couldn’t contain her joy and spread her arms to experience the incredible sensation.

However, a moment later, the formation started glowing, and the energy dispersed. The woman seemed surprised and looked over at Red.

“Why did you deactivate it?”

“Not good to waste Spirit Stones. Look,” he pointed at a node in the formation.

There, one of the Spirit Stones Lady Ilse just set a moment later had lost almost all its luster. She seemed a bit shocked by the sight, but regained her composure a moment later.

“Well, it doesn’t matter. I knew how expensive this would be, after all.”

“Then have you learned anything?” Red asked.

Lady Ilse looked back at him with a pleasant smile. “I’ve learned more about arcane scripture observing you than from years of study, Master Viran.”

“I’m not talking about arcane scripture.”

“Hm?” She frowned. “Then what are you talking about?”

Red didn’t respond, staring at her with his impassive gaze beneath his mask. A few seconds of silence went by before Lady Ilse's expression relaxed and let out a chuckle.

“How could I have learned anything about you, Master Viran? You barely speak and your actions seem calculated with mechanical precision. I feel that even if I could see your expression beneath your mask, I wouldn’t be able to learn much.”

“Then what about your oracle techniques? Have they not helped you?”

“At my level, I can’t divine at will.”

“So you haven’t seen anything about me in your dreams?”

Lady Ilse looked at him with a helpless expression. “You know I have not.”

Of course, he knew that. He was protected by an anti-divination technique that even the Imperials couldn’t pierce through, so how could a Lesser Ring Realm cultivator be able to do it?

“Your words earlier made it seem like you knew more about me than you let on,” Red said.

This was something that had been in his mind since their meeting almost two weeks ago.

“I can’t divine you or your past, Master Viran,” she said. “But I can divine the things you will affect.”

Red frowned in confusion. “If you can’t divine me, how can you know what I will affect?”

“It’s not simple to explain, but events have a cause and effect. If the cause is often absent in my visions where it shouldn’t be, then it’s simple to conclude that there is anti-divination magic at work, and you’re one of the few people I know with such powers.”

“…Is that rare?”

“At our level, very rare.”

This revelation somewhat worried him. It was fine if the Empire, who was half a continent away, was stumped by his anti divination shield. But what if someone who was right next to him found out they couldn’t divine him? The mere revelation he had such protections could lead to people being more interested in his background.

‘I suppose it is still better than having all my past revealed.’

“You said you saw things I will affect,” he said. “Could they not have been done by another person?”

“It’s possible,” Lady Ilse nodded. “But I find that hard to believe, given what I now know.”

“Which is?”

She hesitated at this. “…I saw a formation that covered this entire city, something that definitely wasn’t here before. I could feel someone was controlling it, but it was like a curtain was drawn over my eyes, and I could never pinpoint that figure.”

“…I understand.”

With such a description, it would be impossible not to suspect the formation master. Before Red could ask what this vision might have meant, though, Lady Else cut him off.

“That’s not all,” she said. “The formation rose above the city like a shield… and then something fell down onto it trying to break through and swallow the city below…

A crimson moon.”