At first, Zhou Fan was tempted to find a tall mountain and sit on its peak. However, he remembered that he almost always did that. In fact, he couldn't remember the last time he hadn't chosen a mountain.
While the saying did go "If it ain't broke don't fix it", Zhou Fan felt that he should at least try another place.
After flying around the world for a while and passing oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges, he finally found a worthy area. It was a tall tree in the middle of the jungle. It was almost suspicious that it was so tall compared to the other trees, but Zhou Fan thought that it would be a struggle to find a better place.
While it was kind of like the mountain in the sense that it had a great view, it was still very different. For example, Zhou Fan had to strengthen it a bit so that it wouldn't suddenly collapse during one of his experiments.
After he did that, he sat below the top bush of leaves and on top of a log. It was a little smaller than he was used to, but at least he had shade. Since he was hard pressed to move, Zhou Fan decided to work on formations first. They wouldn't require any movement since he already had the materials.
Right now, they were being kept within a pocket dimension that he had created. He had finally reached a level where he didn't need a spatial ring and could simply create a separate dimension without losing any Qi. It wasn't because it was suddenly a Qi free process, but because his Qi recovery speed was much faster than the amount of Qi it took up.
Zhou Fan held his hand out and a chunk of emerald ore at the 7th level of the lesser dao creation realm fell into it. It was the size of his head and oddly round. Zhou Fan decided that this would be the first material he used.
Of course, he had to enhance it before he used it. He imputed some of his Qi into the emerald and made sure that it didn't explode. After a while, the emerald was much brighter and greener. It was also much stronger.
Now, the emerald reached the first level of the god realm. He originally wanted to upgrade it directly to the second level with him, but he realized that he wasn't strong enough after he tried.
It was the first time he had encountered such a situation. Because of his superior talent, he had yet to be unable to upgrade something like an ore or wood to the same level as him.
While he believed that he would be able to craft a weapon that reached the same level as him with the ore, it was quite surprising that the ore itself couldn't be upgraded to his level.
Zhou Fan eventually ignored it and continued what he was doing. Now that the ore was strong enough, he put one hand on top of it and one hand below it before he began to squeeze down. After using nearly all of his strength, he was able to make the emerald ore flat. After another show of strength and Qi, he managed to condense it down to a flat plate the size of his head.
What was actually harder than the strength part was trying to keep the emerald intact while he was squishing it. If he didn't it would have exploded and been ruined.
With the flattened and condensed emerald plate, Zhou Fan was ready to carve formations.
He began to use his mind and think of the different types of formations. The ones he was using to this day were invented when he was extremely weak. Although it may take a bit of time, he was sure that he could create better and more complex formations.
After thinking a bit more, he attempted to write an attack formation that he had visualized in his head. He coated the tip of his finger with Qi and began to carve the formation into the plate.
As soon as he took the last stroke, the formation plate exploded. Zhou Fan was both surprised and disappointed, but he knew that he would need to take his time in order to create better formations.
He once again took out another material, this time iron, before imitating the plate forming process.
After he did, he coated his finger with Qi and tried to inscribe upon the plate. This time, it worked. However, it was only so easy because he was making formations at the level of void traversing. He had long surpassed that realm and he only failed the first time because it had been a while.
After successfully carving the first formation, he could be considered a 6th rank formation master. It was a term he had just created off the top of his head. He had heard of formation master ranks in the Zhou world, but they were stuck using the formations he had created a long time ago. They only measured the formation master level by how strong the formation was.
Once he passed this new knowledge on, however, they would be able to truly rank themselves.
On his first try every time, he made higher level formations for every cultivation level below void traversing.
Next came the hard part. Although it would be fairly quick, creating formations for the space shattering realm wouldn't be an easy feat.
As expected, the first hundred attempts failed. As Zhou Fan learned from his mistakes and comprehended more, he succeeded after ten hours and his five hundredth try.
He was now a 7th rank formation master. Next was an even harder challenge. The lesser dao creation realm. He wasn't sure how long it would take, but it would surely surpass ten hours.
Zhou Fan took materials out from his spatial pocket, made them into plates, carved them, and failed until he ran out of materials. Without playing around again, he teleported to the nearest thousand planets under his mortal dao and took a good amount of materials before upgrading them.
"Looks like I'll be here a while." He said to himself.