"Go!"
Despite standing in the middle of a near-perfect nowhere, Theo was weirdly reluctant to speaking out.
It felt as if doing so only served to invite trouble, invite some strangers to come in, watch what he was doing, ask questions, and then try to report it elsewhere.
A random encounter turning into one hell of a mess… An instance like that was something people rarely expected, until they'd experienced it happening too many times for their own comfort, too many times for them to keep turning their eyes away from the issue.
Whether it was the self-fulfilling prophecy where one's attempts to stay low-key only attracted more attention, a giggle of fate digging holes under the feet of anyone who tried to fight it, or just a law of the world itself that made every bad outcome possible happen routinely, Theo couldn't care less.
And after several close shaves back in his old life, he thought he came to learn to know better than to make an unnecessary noise, even if it was only speaking just a single, slightly louder word.
But still, when deploying his formations, Theo just couldn't help himself!
'Maybe it's because this body is younger than my old one?' he thought, carefully controlling the mana he projected to bring the pebbles to their respective spots in the wilderness by the side of the road. 'But wouldn't that add yet another angle to consider when thinking whether I'm still the old me, the new me, or maybe someone entirely else, made from the merger of my two pasts?'
Theo shook his head, gritting his teeth as he discarded those useless thoughts.
There would be a time for him to think about stuff like this. Right now, however, he had better things to focus on than philosophical debacle over who he really was and what did it mean to… be.
"Haaah…" Already a self-lecture about making noise later, Theo made sure to keep his long sigh relatively silent as he watched how all the stones fell into their precisely arranged spots.
For an independent observer, all of those carved-out pebbles would be no different from stones discarded in the most random fashion possible, turning them into but a tiny detail in the greater picture of the background. Some fell into small cracks in the dried-out ground, others hid within the bushes, while some rested by the side of the few trees that decorated this otherwise steppe-like terrain.
Either way, it would be a challenge to trace even one of those pebbles with a naked eye. Realistically, to keep track of all of them, one could do so only by relying on extremely sensitive mana-sense or by attuning to the flow of mana at a dangerous level—a level that bore the risk of the natural flows of mana literally washing out the sense of self out of one's brain.
If someone were to be able to somehow track all of those pebbles, however, they could see them arrange themselves in a beautiful picture quite alike to a delicate flower consisting of a perfectly round center and petals growing out from the nodes arranged at even distances along the center's circumference.
Theo was by all means a magical genius. Just like a blind person would have their other senses amplified, his ability to understand the inner workings of mana only grew stronger from the moment he reached his physical limit of how much of it he could ever manipulate at once. And yet, setting this formation up with nothing but the mental blueprint and precise mana control was a task that still managed to squeeze several drops of sweat from his forehead and then leave him gasping for air.
For all the mental and physical drain that Theo willingly burdened himself with to set up this stacked array, however, it was now ready to fulfill its purpose.
The main part of the formation was the control array at the very center of the complex formation. It served as the main hub through which the mana would flow while moderating the operations of all the other arrays nested in it.
Outside of the control ring, like the petals of a flower, teardrop-shaped formations stretched out from the control, growing wider the further away one looked from the center of the whole formation. And at the weighted center of each teardrop rested a crystalline stone from Theo's collection, ready to turn into a precious spirit stone.
All of the formation parts were simple if not outright simplistic. The petal formations served to gather the mana from the air and then circulate it along their edges only to then pour it all into the control array. The mana gathered at the center would then feed equally into each of the nested formations, ensuring the transformation of the stones wouldn't be interrupted by the fluctuations in the mana the whole of the formation could gather at any given moment.
A formation complex in its simplicity, genius in its straightforwardness… but big enough to still be a challenge to set up without proper prior preparation. And by all means, a multi-layered, nested formation like that approached the limits of what Theo could manifest with just the power of his brain.
"Ha… ha… ha…" a dry laugh escaped the man's mouth as he slowly lowered himself down to his knees, not in any hurry to activate the array. "I would say I fell out of shape," he commented with a wry smile only to then shake his head, "but it's more like this body was never in a proper shape to begin with."
That statement was by no means a reflection of reality, just its version skewed by Theo's bias. On an athletic level, he was stronger, faster, and nimbler than ever before. Even on the mana level, he could feel it reinforcing his flesh in a way no other mage had ever experienced.
What was out of shape was Theo's mind, unprepared for such a strain pretty much less than a day after his reawakening in a fresh body that never had the chance to grow used to this level of mental strain.
But none of this mattered now.
The formation was ready. The crystalline stones laid in their sockets, just below the centroid of their respective arrays, making it give off a slight feeling of wrongness while a result of a more modern, three-dimensional understanding of the shape the forces within the arrays would create once the formation was activated.
And so, with all the preparations done, Theo took a deep breath and, with a sliver of his mana, he activated the whole thing.
"Let there be… money," he whispered to himself, feeling how the mana from all around started to slowly break free from its stagnant flow and gravitate towards the petals of his formation, fusing into the array's inner flows only to be tossed into the formation's center from which it fed the insides of each nested array.
Finally, Theo took another step towards his goal. More importantly for the moment, though, he no longer had to keep the projection of every tiniest detail of the formation going in his head!
Freed from this burden, Theo could finally relax, breathe out a sigh of relief, and watch how the outer layer of the crystalline stones started to fizzle away, exposing its orderly structure on the inside.
At last, Theo could get some mental rest.
'I could relax, but… do I really have the time for it?'
Theo took in a deep breath, holding it in his lungs for a while before sighing it away along with all the heretic thoughts of something as foreign and treacherous like random, undeserved rest.
'Not really, huh?' his shoulders jumped a little as he laughed at his own naivete. 'Now that I'm done thinking about the formation's blueprint, it's time to figure out how the hell can I get to the city in time!'