The Innkeeper

"How can you be okay with this?" asked an exasperated Drum. It had been a few hours since they arrived and both he and Lex had been given one room to share in the village leader's house.

While Drum had tried hard to impress upon the villagers that he could help reinforce their buildings, or perhaps build some formations, the villagers did not take up his suggestions. First of all, their houses were not weak structures, and had survived their fair share of snow storms. Secondly, due to the weather in these parts, they had encountered many wild beasts and so long as they stayed inside their well-built homes, they would be fine.

Not only were their homes sturdy, the wood they had used was actually an excellent insulator, so they could remain warm and cozy even in the harshest of conditions. The only thing they had to care about was food.

"If they don't want our help, then it's not like you can force them. Just take your own precautions. The assessment will last a long time, and I don't like relying on others. Maybe you should scavenge some food, 40 hours is a long time. Or, if you really want to build a formation, build one in our room. We tried to help the villagers, if they don't want help it's on them, doesn't mean we need to risk our own lives."

"Fine, let's go scavenge what we can."

"Not right now, I'm taking a nap."

Lex's reply irked Drum, which in turn entertained Lex. Once Lex was done with his 'nap' they went out to gather some more food from the forest and helped out around the village however they could. Once they returned to their room, Drum confessed that he couldn't build a formation because he didn't have any of the materials required, as he had hoped that the villagers would be able to provide him with the basics since he was supposed to be helping them.

That reminded Lex of the ring John had given him which stored a book about arrays. Since they were stuck in a room for 40 hours, or so it seemed, Lex took out the ring and started reading up on it.

The books did not seem to be written in an instructive format, but was rather the author's introspection on the topics being discussed. Let alone the universe, even a single galaxy was too wide a scope for the author to speculate on the origin of formations and arrays within it, so he simply discussed how he himself first discovered them.

It started when the author became the strongest being on his planet, but was not strong enough to actually leave the planet, nor was his civilization technologically advanced enough. With endless power and nothing to do, the author began to explore his world when he encountered a strange phenomenon.

There was a single point in an otherwise unremarkable place that had the highest concentration of spirit energy he had ever seen. But the energy only covered roughly ten square feet of area. A single step outside, and not only would he return to an area of common energy concentration, he could not even detect the higher concentration energy, as it was perfectly camouflaged.

After studying it for a while, he discovered that there was no hidden heritage or overwhelming secret. The way physical features influenced the common world, like wind speeding up in a valley or the chill of winter turning rain into snow, so too were various coincidental spiritual features resulting in this specific outcome.

The small area happened to be above the tip of an undiscovered spirit stone vein. But the vein was covered by a certain type of rock that acted as an insulator. However, a recent earthquake caused a crack to form, which allowed the spiritual energy to break through. Then, there was a certain type of vegetation in the area that had deep roots and absorbed any stray spiritual energy, but the specific ten square feet area was devoid of roots as it was host to a kind of insect that fed on roots.

Long story short, basically a series of seemingly mundane events led to a phenomenal result. That's when the author started experimenting, since he literally had nothing better to do. He did not delve into the nature of his experiments, and skipped directly to the result.

According to the author, formations and arrays both were simply taking the mundane and using them to produce extraordinary results.

After that the book was abridged and directly went to the topic of arrays. Lex read for about five minutes before he facepalmed. Then he read the description again and then facepalmed one more time.

Drum noticed Lex's strange behavior, but he was not in the mood to inquire. After a few minutes of feeling sorry for himself, Lex resumed reading the book.

The author gave a long and convoluted, as well as unnecessarily philosophical explanation for what arrays were and how they functioned. Lex, instead, could define an array in three words. It was programming.

Arrays could theoretically do everything a formation could do, albeit a weaker version of it, but the benefit was that arrays did not require any external material the way formations did. Arrays only required the array master, spiritual energy and a series of symbols that the author had categorized as the universal language.

The symbols weren't really a language, but the author observed that when spiritual energy was manipulated in certain shapes outside of one's body, in the natural environment, they gave birth to certain effects. The author compiled these symbols by studying things that existed in nature. For example, by studying a plant that released frosty spiritual energy, after a lot of trial and error, he was able to surmise a symbol that did the same - again, on a much weaker level than the actual physical plant. The symbol itself was identical to the venation of that plant.

After collecting thousands of such symbols, he gathered them together and called them the universal language, since these patterns were what the universe used to express its design. Of course, just having the symbols was not good enough, he needed to understand the 'grammar' of the language to understand how the multiple symbols could be arranged.

So much fancy jargon, but to Lex, it meant something simple. An 'array master' was the programmer, the array itself was the software, and the universal language was the programming language, and the 'grammar' was the syntax.

No doubt, arrays were an extremely useful tool as the author had given many examples of scenarios where he had used them, but just thinking about the fact that Lex had to learn yet ANOTHER programming language made him facepalm.