Fu Anwen looked out at his new house with a smile.

  Of course, it would still take a long time for all of the formations to activate, and it would take even longer for them to store up enough energy to reach their potential. Even then, they were limited by the materials used in their construction. To store energy, he had used his ability to hollow out some of the gems that he'd found buried back at the pace, but regur gems weren't exactly the best storage material for spiritual energy.

  Not that he was compining! Once it reached full power, not even a Foundation Establishment cultivator could break through his Restriction Formation, and that's if the cultivator could detect anything unusual in the first pce. With the help of a powerful Illusion Formation, even a Core Formation cultivator wouldn't be able to find the house unless they were also a formation master.

  While giving a final check to his house, Fu Anwen suddenly frowned, having noticed that he'd made a bit of an oversight.

  He had accidentally forgotten about all of life's little necessities while building the house, and the rooms were all empty. He still needed to craft or purchase furniture, pots, pans, ptes, bowls, and so on.

  "I guess another day or two won't hurt. Right?"

  Fu Anwen took Queen Fluffytail's silence as agreement.

  From the shadows cast by his new house, he could tell that it was almost noon. While he really wanted to stay where he was so that he could watch each of his formations activate, time was almost up.

  Thinking back on everything that he'd accomplished in just a few hours, he couldn't help but smile.

  A brief series of blinks ter, he found himself in a remote location in the woods much closer to his mother's house. After quickly burying a rge formation pte to make this a secure location where he could safely enter and exit his inner space in the future, he blinked out into the forest.

  Once he was back outside, he picked a leaf up from the ground and stuck it to the back of his robe, then made his way back home.

  ~-o-O-o-~

  Fu Anwen walked into the house and headed straight to the kitchen.

  "What's for lunch?" he asked casually before climbing up onto one of the kitchen chairs.

  His mother watched him get onto the chair, then squinted her eyes and asked, "Where have you been?"

  "Exploring the vilge like I said," he replied, rolling his eyes.

  "And you didn't go into the woods?"

  He looked confused. "Why would I go into the woods?"

  Fu Qingyu walked over and plucked the leaf from his back. "You tell me."

  Fu Anwen's eyes widened for a moment, but he quickly rexed and shrugged. "That leaf could have come from anywhere. I've never seen it before."

  Fu Qingyu looked at her son incredulously. "You sure are getting sassy tely, little man! What happened to mama's sweetest baby boy?" she asked with an exaggerated fake sob.

  "He probably misses his pancakes."

  "You'll get used to it. The food mama grew up with was nowhere near as good as what we're eating now. Mama's mama didn't know how to cook like your aunties can."

  Fu Anwen grunted, but inside he was feeling beyond smug that his pn had worked. As long as everyone thought his big secret was that he'd snuck into the woods, they'd never guess what he was really hiding.

  "I guess," he grudgingly agreed.

  "You should be happy with today's lunch, Little Prince," Jing jumped in as she started carrying pots of food over to the kitchen's rge table. "The rice and steamed vegetables are the same as yesterday's, but one of the vilgers brought over some fresh fish as a welcoming gift."

  Fu Anwen scrunched up his nose, "I saw fish swimming in the river while I was out earlier. They were cute. Why would I want to eat them?"

  Back at the Jade Court, every single meal he'd ever eaten had consisted entirely of spiritual food. While it was easy for the farmers employed by the pace to grow a wide variety of spiritual crops, hunting and raising spiritual beasts were both far more difficult and expensive.

  Even on the rare occasions that spiritual meat had been avaible at the pace, it was never going to be Fu Anwen's turn to eat it. The Fu family's martial artists would always snatch it up before he could catch even a single whiff.

  The closest the little boy had ever come to eating an animal was when he'd eaten spiritual eggs for breakfast.

  Because of this, Fu Anwen had never been taught while growing up that it was okay to kill animals for food. Now that he'd met Queen Fluffytail and had closely watched the countless creatures living in the forest spending time with their families, he realized that he really didn't like the idea of eating them.

  It's not like he had no idea that humans frequently ate their fellow animals. The books in the library had been extremely explicit about that, and he even knew thousands of recipes featuring the best ways to cook them. It's just that what other people did really didn't feel right to him.

  Jing looked over at him in confusion, "Because they taste good?"

  'Would she eat me if I tasted good?' Fu Anwen squinted his eyes at Jing and wondered, not thinking very highly of the reason she'd given.

  After a few seconds of thought, he asked, "What kind of fish are they?"

  Fu Qingyu had learned all about the nearby animal life from her schor father while growing up, so she easily answered his question. "Your Aunty Jing's cooking bck carp. They're the most delicious fish you can catch around here."

  From what he'd read, Fu Anwen knew that bck carp mostly ate other aquatic creatures, like snails and crayfish.

  Eventually, he nodded. "Okay, I can eat those. But not any fish that only eat pnts."

  It was his mother's turn to be confused by her son's words. "Why?"

  "Well, if you eat creatures, it's only fair that other creatures can eat you. Eating one of those bck carp is basically getting justice for all the creatures it killed," he reasoned. "But if I eat a creature that only ate pnts, that makes me the one who's wrong. At that point, it would be fair for another creature to get justice for them by eating me."

  Jing and Fu Qingyu, who had never questioned the idea that eating all sorts of animals was perfectly fine, didn't understand what he was saying at all. However, since the river was full of bck carp, Fu Qingyu set aside any worries about her son's diet for the time being.

  "Fine," she said, fanning her hand through the air as if she was waving away all of the nonsense she'd just heard. "But I promise you'll like the fish. We ate lots of them when I was growing up."

  Before long, the rest of the dies gathered around the table, and everyone started eating. Fu Anwen had to admit that his mother was right. While he wouldn't go so far as to call it delicious, the braised bck carp that Jing had spent the morning preparing at least tasted better than the terrible rice and veggies.

  That said, he still much preferred the food that he used to eat. For starters, not having bones was a huge win in favor of his previous diet. It would take some real effort to chip a tooth on tofu or choke to death after getting mashed potatoes stuck in your throat.

  In the future, while he was still willing to eat creatures that ate other creatures, he would only do so when there were no other options.

  After lunch, Fu Anwen's mother asked him, "So, what's our big Vilge Chief doing for the rest of the day?"

  "Don't call me that. This vilge doesn't need any chief. Barely fifty people live here, and they can all take care of themselves just fine."

  He didn't have any illusions that his appointment as the Vilge Chief had been a real one. While he still didn't know why he'd been sent out to the middle of nowhere instead of being stripped of the Fu name and kicked out of the Fu family, he knew that he definitely hadn't been sent here to become some little Vilge Chief.

  He did have big pns for the vilge, though. Most of them would just have to wait until he was a lot older than six.

  "Hua and Ying still need their reading lessons, and I want to practice my guqin for a while. I'll go out to explore again tomorrow."

  "But you're not exploring the forest, right?" his mother interrogated.

  "Of course not," he mumbled, looking away evasively. "I already said that."

  "Well, you better not, young man. The woods are full of bears. Aunty Murong won't be able to save you if you wander into the woods and a bear eats you."

  Fu Anwen knew that his mother was just talking nonsense. He'd blinked all over the forest that morning and hadn't seen anything scarier than one extremely cute family of foxes.

  "Yeah, yeah."

  ~-o-O-o-~

  Early the next morning, Fu Anwen walked back into the forest and arrived at the spot where he'd buried the formation stone. Standing in front of him was an enormous, weatherworn stone that hadn't been there the previous day.

  He was carrying his little backpack, which his mother had forced him to take when he'd left the house. The backpack was half-filled with food and water that were vitally important in case of emergencies, at least according to his mother. As for what kind of emergency could possibly crop up in this tiny vilge, she didn't say.

  Fortunately, the backpack no longer bounced on the ground with each step thanks to Aunty Mei adjusting the straps for him. It was still far too big, but at least that meant it could hold a lot.

  After making sure there was no one else around, Fu Anwen started walking toward the rock, eventually passing right through it.

  'This Illusion Formation should work on even Core Formation cultivators, so why can my outer senses see right through it?'

  His eyes saw a big rock, but his new senses could see the space inside as if the formation wasn't there at all.

  He could only conclude that his new ability, whatever it was, functioned at an extremely high level.

  Once he was safely undetectable to anyone outside of the formation, he blinked into his inner space. After a few quick blinks around the area to make sure he hadn't been followed, he headed over to his new house.

  Once he arrived, he saw a huge chunk of weathered stone simir to the one at the previous location, only much rger. To anyone besides Fu Anwen who stumbled upon these Illusion Formations backed by Restriction Formations, the rge stones they saw were functionally the same as regur stones.

  People could hit them, climb them, and even enjoy a nice view from the top while having a picnic. As long as they didn't try to damage the stones, which would require the strength of a Core Formation realm cultivator, these illusionary stones would be functionally the same as normal ones.

  Of course, some observers might question how these rge stones had suddenly appeared overnight, but as long as those asking didn't have Core Formation-level strength, Fu Anwen was happy to let them puzzle over that mystery.

  These Restriction Formations had no effect on Fu Anwen, however. He had used his blood in the creation of the formation ptes, so he could pass through the formations as if they didn't exist.

  After he walked through the illusionary stone, he checked the formations to make sure they were all working properly.

  He pnned to test some of the formations when they were needed in the future, like the Air Purifying Formation, which would remove smoke from the air, and the Water Purifying Formation, which would remove filth from water.

  All of the others seemed to be in order. He especially liked the Perfect Temperature Formation that he'd created by combining Heating and Cooling Formations. That one kept every room besides the cold storage basement at the perfect temperature year-round.

  Formations were way too convenient!

  He still didn't understand why he hadn't seen formations all over the pce back at the Royal Pace. In fact, the only pce where he'd seen even a single formation was in Fu Tianchen's hidden basement under the library.

  'Could it be that no other Fu family members understand formations? The books said that formation mastery was the most difficult field of study, but it didn't seem all that hard to me,' he pondered, forgetting for a moment both that he was a monstrous genius and that his recently improved thinking ability made it so that he could now process what would have previously been years worth of thinking in only a matter of minutes.

  He hoped that his guess was right. It would be a good thing for him if nobody else in the Fu family was an expert on formations. That would mean that there was likely nobody in the entire Fu Kingdom who could even detect any of his illusions.

  With nothing else to do, he quickly popped back into his inner space. He pnned to visit Valiant City, which was the closest major city to Big Tree Vilge. The distance to Valiant City was nearly three hundred miles, so he was going to have to rush through his trip if he wanted to get back in time.

  Before leaving, he first decided to finally measure his inner space. That would let him know exactly how far out his outer senses could reach, since his inner space and his detection range seemed to be exactly the same size.

  In preparation for measuring the inner space, he had asked his mother to measure his height that morning. That was why he now knew that he was exactly two feet and one inch tall. Even though he'd already had a rough idea of his height before, his heart had still broken when he'd first learned his exact height.

  Fu Anwen had always thought that something strange was going on with his height. Typically, when someone was very short, their appearance would be unusual in some way. He, however, looked exactly like any other six-year-old, only his body seemed to have been shrunk down to approximately half the normal size.

  He wasn't worried, though. He was healthy now, and whatever the draining sensation that he'd noticed after the Awakening Ceremony had been, it was gone now. He'd start growing again soon.

  After cutting a rge block of stone into hundreds of small pieces that were all equal in length to his height, he lined them up across the entire space. The space's total width was 465 feet, or 232.5 in each direction feet from the center.

  This meant that each of his blinks was transporting him a distance of roughly 232 feet.

  After a quick bit of testing and practice, Fu Anwen found that he could blink approximately forty-five times in a single second as long as he didn't focus any of his attention on his surroundings. At 232 feet per blink, that meant he could travel a bit over ten thousand feet per second.

  Realizing that he was able to blink nearly two miles in a straight line in a single second shocked him. From what he'd read, even a Golden Core cultivator couldn't reach that speed.

  With each day that passed, his body seemed more and more impressive. He desperately wanted to find out the truth behind his body's secrets.

  After a few quick calcutions, he started blinking off toward Valiant City at his highest speed, only stopping slightly over two minutes ter. He didn't know the exact distance between the two locations, so he'd need to go slower now that he'd gotten close.

  While slowing down, he also took the time to investigate the forest. It looked basically the same as the woods near his new home. The only difference was in the types of creatures he saw.

  Back in Big Tree Vilge, there hadn't been a single dangerous animal. Here, he saw wolves, bears, a few different types of wildcats, and the occasional snake.

  It was obvious that the woods near Big Tree Vilge had been cleaned up before his group had arrived. After thinking it over for a few seconds, he was almost certain that his mother had already known that. If not, would she really have allowed her very young and tiny son to run around on his own?

  Impossible!

  While browsing through the forest, he came across an enormous brown bear. The bear was nearly ten feet tall even with all four legs on the ground, which meant that it was either already a spiritual beast or well on its way to becoming one.

  Fu Anwen stopped and stared at the bear. Specifically, his eyes were focused on the bear's huge paws.

  "This one definitely eats other creatures," he remarked, gncing at the body of the deer that was currently being devoured in rge bites.

  The fish he'd eaten for lunch the previous day had been pretty tasty, and he knew that bear paws were considered a rare delicacy. He even knew seven different recipes for cooking them, each of which had been personally verified by Fu Cn schor Fu Tianchen to be wonderfully delicious.

  A moment ter, Fu Anwen continued his trip to Valiant City, now with an extremely rge bear corpse in his inner space that was being expertly dismantled at a very fast pace.