When my master told me about how exhausting it was to be a captain of the black mountain, I laughed at it. We are given nearly half a year of rest after each mission. I have yet to do anything particularly exhausting but it is what I am about to do.

For missions that normally last only four to five months, that is a lot of period of rest, don't you think? The reason is that right now I can quite easily build a class nine formation (my vine armor is a class nine formation.), but building a class eight formation that too outside of the supervision of my master is a task that I am going to struggle with, that too on a battlefield. I am pretty certain that I should be able to achieve it, but that does not mean that it is going to be easy for me or that it is not going to drain me to my bone. It is pretty much exploitation, I tell you.

Right now, I have roughly five days of traveling to the temporary fort in a Caravan. In an airship, this journey would take a couple of hours at most but this far north the volatile flow of mana will wreck most airships. That is another reason that the snowwind empire struggle to hold a defensive line here. Just communication can take so long.

I feel quite out of my depth in this rough land and Trevor is now god knows where. The man absence is affecting me more than I expected. There is little that I can do at the moment. The man cannot leave his position now. What I am doing already would ruffle many feathers in the head office. Abandoning your charges in the middle of enemy territory is what is going to get you kicked out of the the guard corps.

I certainly do not like being split up in this way, but there is not much one can do while dealing with the scholars. Their stubbornness is legendary. Anyway, what the commander speaks is also the truth. If a proper defensive fortress is set up, the defense of the ruin is going to be bolstered by a great degree.

Anyway, right now I am focusing on something that I have been neglecting for nearly a month and a half. That would be my cultivation.

Normally people are shocked to hear this. Cultivation is supposed to be practiced to a point that it seems blasphemy that you don't do so. Firstly the problem is that my strength comes from my formations. I don't really need a strong reservoir of mana in my body.

Secondly, a great amount of information about cultivation has been hidden from me. My master does not want me to be knowing about the stages behind the foundation stage of the elven path. This particular command of his has been an absolute mandate in the hexmountain.

So that would do a lot to explain my lack of interest in cultivation. So what I am mentioning here is about everything that I know about this.

To begin from the absolute basics, every sentient creature holds in his body something called the mana core. The mana core contains the life mana of a person. (Also called as his vital mana.) This life mana is the only mana that a person will have absolute control over. The only exception to this might be folks like the snowlords, who have nearly absolute control over external mana too. Their magics are something of an enigma to us. The process of growing this life mana is also called cultivation and a method of cultivation is called a magical path. Now that we have gotten the basic definitions out of the way I can discuss my cultivation.

To those not familiar with the magical path of the black mountain, we follow the magical path of the ancient elves. The elves were master magicians who believed magic to be an act of creation and cultivating to be the ultimate act of creation. Now why that is the case, nobody will tell me. It must be related to one of the later stages of cultivation.

All I know is that there are nine stages in this process and I am presently at the very first stage, which is called the foundation building stage. At this stage, I am supposed to be building something called the foundation, by absorbing mana from the world around me and using it to construct a formation in my mana core.

Even right now, I am pulling mana from the air and condensing it to form a string as I am essentially weaving a massive rectangular slab. With enough time It will turn into a segment of my life mana thus increasing my life mana reserves. However, the true magic is inside the slab, full of complicated weaves and shapes that I am only able to construct because it is inside my mana core, where I hold absolute control over mana. Trying that in real life would be like trying to draw with your brush attached to the other end of the stilt. It is ridiculously hard. I would know, I spent the first year of training trying this.

My master did not stop me, so I suffered like that for a year. Trying to spin the strings of mana to form the complicated runes that I can make so easily in my core. That is why my cultivation is actually so low. Most people at my stage tend to have their fifth foundation slab built up. My competition at the black mountain are already at the seventh slab.

Top put it simply, the complexity of the foundation is not comparable to any formation that I have ever seen in my life. The only thing that I can say that I have found comparable would be the class 1 defense formation that is used to guard the hexmountain. With that though I couldn't even watch it for even a few seconds before my mana sight got burnt. That was another headstrong decision from my side.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

The lesser that I speak of that place though the better, even thought logs are not as safe as the black mountain likes to portray them as and this is something that the head office will certainly take offense at being recorded and would certainly cause me to be executed if I were the cause of a leak. This is vital stuff that I should not be knowing anyways.

To get back to my foundation I am presently in the stage of building the second slab, hence I am considered to be a foundation level, second stage mage. I really should focus on it a bit, but I am already so busy. I have been trying to learn how to build a class seven formation.

My master has given me extremely clear instructions that I am not allowed to enter the next stage until I have built a class seven formation. Until then, I am not even allowed to know the name of the next stage or to gather any bit of information about it and granted the elves are extinct, right now the black mountain is the only force In the continent that has access to the elven path. So I cannot use my newly found independence to find out anything.

Other than my path the magic I practice is of two types which are battery magic and formation magic. Right now I shall not speak of battery magic as to practice one needs to be on the stage beyond the foundation stage. I only practice beginner level optimizations that will help me reduce mana consumption as I do my work. The only thing I know about battery mages is that they tend to have absurd amounts of mana and their efficiencies are so high that they can run on their reserves for days.

As for formation magic, It is the very core of the magic that I practice. There are four spells that every formation mage is supposed to know. With sufficient mastery in these spells, I will be able to craft nearly any formation that I wish.

There is the basic formation view that allows one to look at a formation and make out its contents. Without it one cannot even get started on the process of making a formation. It is not an exaggeration to say that this is the spell that I make the most use of. It is the only spell of mine that has reached the third level of the journeyman stage.

The second spell that one should be able to make use of is called formation decomposition, which allows a mage to break apart formations and remove all useable parts from them. This spell is not one that I have found much use for personally, but my master has assured me that it is a pretty practical spell for the future.

The third spell is formation control, a spell that allows me to take control of formations at a level that other people are simply not capable of doing so. A person at the master level of formation control can double the strength of a formation, while nearly cutting the mana costs of the formations by half. It is the spell that I have the second most experience with, reaching the seventh stage of apprentice level.

As for the fourth spell, it is one that I have barely any understanding of. It is called formation flow, whatever that means and it is supposed to greatly increase the speed of my crafting formations. It is the only spell that I have not managed to craft in all of my creations.

these four spells are the epitome of easy to learn, hard to master. Taking the example that my master used, these four spells are the foundation on which any formation mage has to work, lacking any of the spells he simply won't be able to compete with a mage who does know these spells.

To those that do not understand what the classification system that the crafters association has for crafting spells( which is also used by those meatheads that practice combat magic.) A person's mastery of a magical spell can be divided into three main stages, which are the apprentice level, journeyman level and master level. Each stage is further divided into nine sublevels called stages.

An apprentice level means that one is learning the process of using a spell. A journeyman level means that one has begun to learn the usage of a spell and the many intricacies that are involved in the process. A master level means that one can modify the spell to their preferences and interests.

Since I am speaking of cultivation and related matters here, I might as well describe the path followed by the imperials which is the draconic path. This is the path that the imperials have acquired from the draconic empire, traces of which must exist in the ruin we are visiting.

Anyways, Right now the only information that I have about the draconic mages is that their path is measured using something called circles, with each circle being roughly at the same level as a level of the elven path. I certainly do not have an idea as to how exactly their magic path works though it should be something similar to the path that is followed by the elves, but these are not matters that I do not understand, so I shall not comment on it further. For now, though I will use the draconic style of classification since my knowledge of the elven path is lacking and everybody follows the draconic path here.

With that, I think that I have given a pretty clear idea of my power and where I stand and also given all the information I have about the strength of our enemy. As for me, I am going to keep cultivating till I reach the fort after which I will have to return to the problem of building a class 8 formation. I do so little cultivating already.

Anyway, I have built only three class eight formations in my life and two of them were built by master, with my assistance.

As for the last, it is something that I built completely on my own, but sadly it is not with me. I actually sold it to get a few materials. (including my vine armor.) Well, these were my master's orders, so I had little chance of refusing them.

Let me catch myself here since my master also tends to read these logs and the man is not one to forget these stuff. If he read this, he would certainly begin to imagine even worse methods of training (torturing) me.