The fight with the orc shaman had gone under the radar, given everything that happened afterward, but Orion still remembered the feeling of his only layer of protection crumbling under its relentless red mist.
As far as he could tell, shielding was considered essential in magical combat, mainly because most mages hunted weaker creatures than themselves in large groups and needed protection against being swarmed. In the rare cases they dueled another mage, it often turned into a slugfest.
That wasn’t to say shields didn’t serve a purpose beyond letting the caster overpower weaker opponents. No, Orion himself was proof of how useful they could be, since he managed to survive the wrath of a tier three monster relatively unscathed because of it. However, he knew that was more due to the orc underestimating him and wanting to toy with its food than because [Light Shield] was truly that impressive.
It was a decent spell, probably better than what anyone else but the most specialized casters could manage in his tier. That was why he was working to improve it, but his last experience had shown him that while putting up a barrier between himself and his opponent was useful, it wouldn’t matter much if it could be battered down before he could escape or land a decisive hit.
There were two ways he could approach this. The first and most straightforward approach was to improve the basic formula to allow for greater mana use, denser layers of light mana, and overall better defense, all expressed as the same construct he was familiar with.
Orion wasn’t convinced that was the right path for him to take. He wouldn’t necessarily discard it, but he already had [Light Exoskeleton] for personal defense that also provided a physical boost. The only use case he saw for [Light Shield] was when he was fighting with others and needed to extend his protection to them.
That was a real possibility, but it wasn’t worth dedicating himself to more than he would to other basic spells. More importantly, such an iterative improvement on an already proven concept wouldn’t give him much Exp, not until his connection to the Mana Field was upgraded, and he could do more than just fiddle with minor enhancements.
The second option seemed more promising. It moved away from what most would call traditional battle magic, but Orion wasn’t exactly a conventional mage anyway, so he wasn’t concerned about ruffling feathers.
Thanks to the data he gathered from his glasses’ sacrifice, he now had access to a much more detailed breakdown of what Light Mana was, how it behaved when inert, how it interacted with human life, and most importantly, how it could be used to establish something he was calling a [Rule].
Because that was, essentially, what the System had done to protect his mother during the rank-up. The iridescent barrier that had separated her from the rest of the world while she breached through tier four wasn't a solid construct like [Light Shield], but a boundary between what was under the System’s [Rule] and what wasn't; within the [Rule], no harm could be done.
Realizing just how much the System could manipulate the laws of reality should have been shocking, but Orion couldn’t even muster a huff of surprise.
True omnipotence might not exist, but in this universe, some things come close, and the System is definitely one of them. Since I believe Valderun’s wards work similarly, it’s not a dead-end.
Now, he wasn’t naive enough to think he could replicate the same effect with his limited connection to the Mana Field, no. Even his arrogance had its limits.
But what Orion suspected he could do was take that idea, the implementation of a law, and use the spells he had already created in that area, like [Noether’s Lock] and [Haunted Night], to develop a light-based magic-negation spell that could at least mimic it.
If he failed, he could always try again after ranking up, and if that wasn’t enough, he could use the data from his failures to gradually work his way up to it.
“How do I go about making it a reality, though?” he muttered, tapping his fingers against the cool metal of the lab’s table.
His usual approach so far had been to take the closest basic physical concept and add variables until he created a workable formula that he could eventually refine into exactly what he wanted.
That wasn’t a bad approach, but it was somewhat limited because it needed a purely scientific basis to begin with, and while Orion would never be a faith-based caster, even he could admit that what he was trying to do was less grounded in science than even the existence of the soul.
Yet, he wasn’t willing to abandon his methods, not when they’d worked so well, which left him with one option. That was to use the CC to create a new formula that would incorporate the data he’d received from the rank-up, and to develop a few strings of code to serve as his casting medium.
Essentially, I need to explain through science something that seems completely unscientific. Which I guess is what most of the greats had to do.
Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
With the CC in the palm of his hands, sitting on the metal table with his legs crossed, Orion began sifting through the readable data he had gathered, trying to isolate only those bits that were useful in this situation.
For two full hours, that was all he did—picking and choosing the best parts, reviewing his dataset, and cleaning it up again after the first pass. He repeated this process multiple times until he was left with only a few specific pieces that referenced the System’s interactions with Light mana, and nothing else.
For a moment, he was tempted to run it as it was. The CC had proven completely capable of turning his conceptual understanding into reality, but he wasn’t just trying to create a working spell.
No, if that had been the case, he would have chosen the first option and simply perfected his already decent [Light Shield].
What he needed was to make a qualitative leap that couldn’t be achieved just by increasing mana output. He had to develop a new theory.
He began with the two spells that already included some of the effects he wanted.
[Noether’s Lock] was a conserved quantity that isolated certain qualities, allowing him to effectively prevent any kind of active casting.
[Haunted Night] came at it from a different perspective, filling an area with hostile mana and blocking light-based spells from manifesting when below a certain threshold.
If he could fasten the two together and connect them to the System’s methods, then he’d accomplish what he wanted, but he knew it wouldn’t be that simple, especially since they operated on different principles from each other.
He pulled the cleaned rank-up traces from the Crystal’s memory, spending more time removing anything he felt was impossible to achieve and keeping only the elements he could confidently explain with his Knowledge.
The CC accepted the set and waited for a purpose.
“All right,” he said, drawing the first version with little finesse. “Let’s give this a try."
NULLLIGHT(Ω) =
RuleBoundary(Ω, forbid=CoherentMana) °
NoetherLock(channels={Heat,Impulse,Charge,Phase}) °
Dampen(λ≈Light, spill≈{Thermal,Acoustic}) ;
It was a clumsy, misshapen thing, combining the formulas of every other spell just to see what would work.
He engaged it without hesitation.
The lab didn’t shake, but he definitely did. The Arcane field in Valderun was generous and ever-changing, and his spell started draining from it greedily. The pressure in the Crystal quickly rose enough to make his palm sting, and he saw the draw curve spike and hit the SafetyNet’s switch before the spell could blow him up.
The crystal cooled with a hiss, while Orion flexed his fingers until the sensation subsided.
“That was way too hungry,” he grumbled. “I need to work on efficiency.”
Privately, he added that he shouldn’t have expected anything else. His style relied on Knowledge and Intent, and he was lacking both at this moment, as he was casting more out of curiosity than with a specific goal.
Still, he went to work and added several baffles, measured the intake, and installed a rate limiter that wasn’t very refined but would prevent repeated failures.
Then he grabbed a line from [Schr?dinger’s Defense]—the little probabilistic trick that let him hide his lab without any obvious use of mana—around the outside of Ω. It wasn’t really meant to boost the effect, but it was one of the most stable spells he knew, and he could use some stability.
He tried again.
For a brief moment, he felt it take effect. The air inside the boundary Ω became still. A slight prickling ran along his arms as something outside him stopped being able to interact with him.
Then the Mana Field disengaged.
The mana supporting the shell flowed back into the environment, as the very effect he was trying to achieve blocked the connection that was fueling it.
It was obvious, in hindsight, but he could only know that after trying.
Setting the crystal down, Orion pushed his disappointment aside, especially since he had a potential solution in the form of spell crystals, the pre-cast constructs with [Slow] that he had been working on before the trip.
He sighed and picked up a citrine practice shard from his inner pockets. He wasn’t trying this on the blood crystal again until the math started making sense.
The initial lattice he carved into stone was perhaps a bit overcomplicated. He designed a template RuleBoundary over a hollow sphere and positioned a tiny Noether anchor at each hex node for one of the four channels: heat, momentum, charge, or phase. Using [Slow], he meticulously set the symbols to avoid cracking the crystal and made the shell collapsible, programming it to recognize only his signature.
After he supplied enough mana for a few seconds of operation, the crystal activated, forming a shell over his hand like a glove. It lasted a moment before the anchors began consuming their own tails, forcing Orion to extinguish it, check the error margins using the [Verification Principle], and adjust the baffles.
To solve that problem, he added the [Schr?dinger’s Defense] line only to the edges after spending twenty minutes scratching his head at the failure. It turned out that the center didn’t need superposition, but the boundary certainly did. He changed the sequence so the probabilistic veil activated first and directed the other kernels where to expect strangeness.
He started over. It was more effort than he’d expected, which for him meant it was worthwhile. Anything solvable in a few minutes wouldn’t give him the experience he needed.
The second version went smoothly, but it didn’t negate anything because there was nothing to negate. He threw a weak [Torchlight] at the shell and watched it fray and reform as the barrier didn’t let it in.
More promising than everything so far.
By the third revision, he was able to foresee which anchor would fail beforehand, leading to a complex cycle of fixes.
Hours passed as he worked. Kissea peeked in once, noticed the red eyes and the stacks of failures, and left a plate of food without comment. Orion forced himself to eat half of it sometime around when he reworked the equation the seventh time, but the rest went cold and inedible.
He pushed himself until a yawn cracked his jaw and made his eyes water. The crystal on the table reflected his stutter and flickered, as the flow of mana became unstable, and he took it as a sign that he’d done enough for the day.
The next day was a race against time. Technically, nothing was forcing him to finish his work before heading to the vampire embassy, but he wanted to have something to show for his efforts.
That desire led him to temporarily set aside crystal refinement because he already knew it would take more than he had to solve that conundrum, and to unravel the formula for [Infinite Laser], which he hadn’t touched in quite some time.
As it turned out, turning this lab into a perfect replica of his previous one wasn’t as hard as he feared, since it now had a very similar gash on the wall where his new and improved attack spell had melted through the stone in moments.
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION
+31.300 Exp
Level up!
