Its intelligence is also the greatest source of potential for the formation breaker. Thanks to its intelligence, the formation breaker can learn and become better at what it does.
What the formation breaker can do is just the base level of its capabilities. Because it can learn, it can grow stronger, so it will become more capable in the future.
Arthur can't say that the potential of the formation breaker is limitless. But he knows that even if the artificial intelligence reaches a limit of its mental capabilities, he can always add more physical processing units to its hardware to speed it up and grant it more processing power.
The combination of the ability of the formation breaker to learn and grow stronger physically with more processing power will ensure that he can always upgrade it and help it reach an unprecedented height of capabilities.
Because of its immense potential, he is not even sure of what the formation breaker will be capable of in the future. Already, he has begun to reap some unexpected benefits of creating an item like this.
This unexpected benefit is that the formation breaker can create its new formations for various purposes. This capability is limited now because the formation breaker was just born and because creation is more difficult than destruction, but it is a capability that will become better in the future as the formation breaker learns more formations and their methods of operation.
This made him say, "To think I set out to create something to destroy the special gift and advantage of Patriarch Sword Flash, but I ended up with something that might also be able to compete with him in terms of proficiency with formations."
He is very satisfied with the formation breaker. This is despite the fact that it has a large, unfixable disadvantage.
This singular disadvantage is that learning comes at a great price. That price being a lot of energy.
The formation breaker can learn and needs to learn in order to grow stronger. If he doesn't let it learn, he will be wasting its potential. But learning is not cheap.
The process of learning is very energy intensive. It is just as energy intensive as the process of analyzing the operation of a formation and trying to break it.
It is a great advantage for him that the formation breaker's capabilities are not fixed like those of golems. But he has to bear the cost of his artifact constantly running at maximum power and running through its energy core quickly.
He had been able to avoid most of the energy cost by adding an energy-gathering array to the formation breaker and even installing a new external golden core created with his flesh into it.
The best part of this modification is that the external golden core can grow so the power supply can improve in the future. The energy gathering array also ensures that the formation breaker can rely on external sources of power such as environmental mana and the energy in energy stones.
But even this wasn't enough. The energy requirement of the formation breaker will only increase the more processing units he installs within it. So if he can't give the formation breaker more energy, he will have to limit the processing units within it.
He didn't want to compromise on the maximum processing power of the formation breaker, so he installed as many processing units into it as he could manage but chose to limit the amount of processing power used for learning.
This arrangement ensured that the formation breaker will be able to learn indefinitely without running out of power. But it will always be able to increase its processing power for short bursts when it needs to break formations.
The energy requirements haven't been completely solved, though. If the formation breaker can get more energy, he can add more processing units to it, and it can use more of those processing units to process things faster, and it can learn faster.
The alternative is to use his energy stones or get specially made energy cores that golems use as external batteries. But he is sure that even this won't satisfy his energy needs.
The formation breaker requires an infinite amount of energy in order to have an infinite amount of processing power and take advantage of its ability to grow indefinitely. To solve this problem, Arthur decided to consider constructing a source of infinite energy.
By an infinite source of infinite energy, he means nuclear reactors. Golden cores are energy producers on par with nuclear reactors, but he wants something bigger and more powerful.
However, that will be an activity for the future. He is setting it aside for now because he doesn't have the time to work on it.
The exchange program will be held in one month's time. It is not nearly enough time to research and build a nuclear reactor, even though he believes that it will be easy to build.
Since he had one more month of time, he decided to do something that would improve his strength but wouldn't take time to complete. What he settled on was reforging the golden bow and the storm of blades artifact.
He made this decision because he liked them and because he had extra materials for creating external golden cores lying around.
The extra materials for external golden cores mean that it will be very easy to create external golden cores. It also means that it will be a waste of those materials if he doesn't use them before the exchange program.
The golden bow was a gift from Patriarch Calcetti of the Dyson family. It is a top-grade rank 3 artifact, so it has become too weak for him to use.
The main difference between a rank 3 artifact and a rank 4 one is the energy conductance, energy amplification, and power output. This is in the raw sense of power, though. There are other differences in terms of utility.