Chapter 152: Classic Magic Weaving (1/2)

The rolling monsters clearly didn't have any intention of respecting the romantic moment between Layn and Irea. Right when Layn made his oath, the rumbling caused by their continuous advance once again reached the couple's ears. It put a stop to the comfy atmosphere the two of them were immersing themselves in.

”I will protect you,” Layn announced once again, filled with confidence. But as he turned his head around towards the source of the noises, his confidence turned into a troubled expression. ”But I guess I need to deal with those monsters first,” he said before helping Irea up and turning towards the noise.

”Wait, I didn't tell you how I did them...” Irea stumbled as she rushed forward, worried that Layn would just leave her anyway.

”It's okay, I'm not going anywhere,” the archmage turned his head around before sending the girl a wink. He then turned back to the direction the monsters were coming from and closed his eyes.

His hands reached forth as if he attempted to grasp something ahead. But rather than just tightening into fists, his fingers started to weave the air as if Layn was actually holding a spool of invisible thread.

'There is no need to hurry. I have a lot of time,' Layn continued to slow himself down. As someone used to the super-rapid pace of fighting, weaving the spells using the classical method just felt weird.

Rather than creating structures with his mind alone and just shaping the mana as it was outputted, Layn this time went with the more time-consuming yet far more efficient method.

The manual spell casting consisted of three steps.

First, a mage would pour a tiny bit of magic out of his fingers as he would weave different shapes together directly in the air in front of him. Each shape would have a specific function connected to the inner mechanisms of one's own mind.

The shapes would be connected to a phenomenon or instances through the mage's memory. Someone who grew with a stove in his kitchen would use a square for fire function, while someone who grew roasting the food over a circular fireplace would use a circle for the same function instead.

The main problem of this so-called classical spell weaving laid in the fact that there was a limited number of geometric shapes that one could produce. As such, unless one could come up and memorize wast number of more and more complicated symbols and still be quickly withdrawing them in the thin air, there was a hard limit to how far one could take this kind of magic.

Or at least, that's what the magical capitule of Layn's academy thought before he came in with the revolutionary thesis that granted him the title of grand mage and started his legend.

Layn's graduation theorem was split into a simple and counterintuitive part.

The simple part was made with a single sentence, ”why do we need complicated shapes for different functions if we can use simple shapes for simple functions instead?”

This question was the founding stone of the number's magic, a discipline that was growing in popularity for quite a while before it ended up as the seventh most popular type of magic in the world.

It took the concept that the scientists came up with, that any and all functions could always be expressed with a set of basic functions in the first place, and applied it to the magic itself.

That's why a mage following Layn's theorem wouldn't bother creating a complicated function like ”draw the air towards” but would instead use the ”draw” function, ”Air” target, and ”six degrees to my left” as directed. By replacing the ambiguous functions with one that had strict borders to their usefulness and functionality, Layn gave birth to what later grew to be called the first scientific magic.

The other part of Layn's theorem was what brought strenght and popularity to this otherwise obsolete approach to magic.

Layn randomly decided that rather than using complicated functions and bringing the number of required founding functions up, one could improve the power or any other aspect of the spell... by condensing it instead. Rather than using ten basic, or rater fundamental, functions to do one thing, it was better to use a single fundamental function... but stacked ten times on itself!

Rather than using a high-tiered skill like Incinerate, Layn realized that replacing its structure with the same amount of squares and triangles that made up the simplest 'fire' function was not only easier and more efficient but also more powerful.