202 The Power of Belief (2/2)

”Good evening, Mr. K, Mr. Evans.” greeted an ordinary-looking, black-haired young man. Lucien was not sure if that was a smile on his face.

Keeping a poker face, K responded, ”Good evening, Beate.”

Then he turned around and walked upstairs to the fourth floor, followed by Lucien after a quick nod.

”You don’t like us, Mr. Evans.” Beate smiled, ”It seems that you haven’t realized what you did wrong.”

K turned around again and said to him angrily, ”You don’t have to do this, Beate. Even if Lucien did break the rules, he’s new here, and you could have talked to him first.”

”Well… well… Our Mr. Nice’s angry now. That’s rare,” said Beate’s friend. Then, his long face looked more serious, ”Mr. Evans needs to receive this lesson to realize how acceptable it is to break the school traditions here.”

Before Lucien said anything, Beate cut in, ”Now I don’t care who broke the rules. The most important thing to me is the development of the school of electromagnetic wave. If you keep sticking to your wrong theories and believing that atoms are the basis of the world, K, I’m afraid that your head is gonna explode as you think too hard, ha. Now we’re gonna study the application of electromagnetic wave following Mr. Fernando, and good luck to you element guys.”

Beate was usually not a very talkative person, but now he was feeling great, and so were his friends.

Lucien was pissed off, but there was nothing he could do right now. After they walked away, Lucien asked K confusedly, ”K, what does that mean by… one’s head… explodes?”

K answered in his low voice, which echoed in the space, ”This is not a formal theory, and this’s an assumption put forward by the president of the congress. He believes that one’s meditative world is a reflection of one’s own understanding of the nature of the world, and one’s own ideas and knowledge.

Lucien nodded, and in his heart, he agreed with Mr. Douglas.

”In addition to the more than ten common meditations that suit most meditation environments, each of the other meditations has to work with its specific environment. If not, or if the environment is not stable enough, one’s spiritual power is likely to explode, and that may do damage to one’s soul and brain structure, or, directly blow up one’s head,” said K seriously. ”If a sorcerer’s belief was proved wrong by some new theory, and if he or she could not accept or understand the new one, his or her meditation environment could hardly change. As you may know, Lucien, changing one’s ontology and understanding of the nature of the world can be very, very difficult, thus failing of adjusting oneself to new knowledge can greatly disturb a sorcerer’s way of doing mediation and the stability of the mediation world. At the same time, losing confidence and belief is fatal to a sorcerer as well, consequently. People could die from it. Only few sorcerers can overcome this and come back to the right path.”

Lucien was deeply shock. He could not understand why Felipe became that angry and emotional when Lucien synthesized carbamide right in front of him, but now he got to know the reason. Fortunately, his experiment was not able to fully overthrow the theory of Life Force, or he would have been killed by the crazy necromancers right on the spot.

Intelligent and hard-work as Felipe was, Lucien was sure that the necromancer belonged to the group of the few people who could switch their mindset fast enough, as mentioned by K. Lucien also guessed that Felipe was right now working on overthrowing the theory of Life Force himself in order to leave no chance to his enemies, which would make a huge difference.

No wonder the Hand of Paleness sent that powerful undead thing to watch Lucien.

Without noticing Lucien’s reaction, K continued, ”But all the existing theories are still under heated discussion and facing all kinds of criticism, hence they’re not solid enough to completely destroy many sorcerers’ beliefs. Therefore, spiritual power explosion was something very rare. Recently, however, in the past several great discussions, when electromagnetic induction was verified, a few senior and middle-rank sorcerers died as their beliefs were destroyed. It is said that recently when light was proved to be of the form of electromagnetic wave, several pastors in Holm got killed by the holy light in their bodies when they were praying. All those things prove that the president’s assumption is correct, and people who can withstand those great shifts are going to become stronger.”

”The development of arcana and magic comes with blood and tears.” Lucien nodded, looking rather serious. He believed that the reason why he could change his meditation environment so easily was because he actually had the correct knowledge from his original world, but here he needed to verify this knowledge first.

”So, the biggest challenge for sorcerers here who originally followed the ancient magic system is that they have to switch their understanding of the world. Many of them don’t accept it, and they can never make further progress,” K nodded to Lucien. ”But you’re different, Lucien. You’re not only growing together with the apprentices when you’re teaching, but also even doing experiments to verify some of the arcana theories. You were born to be an arcanist, Lucien.”

...

In the following month, under the watch of the Hand of Paleness, Lucien completed his verification experiments of the nature of all existing elements in this world. However, he did not show the correct order of his element cards in his study. In order to hide his findings, Lucien did the key part in the lab and his spirit library.

Then Lucien started to develop his second paper, and its title was:

The Periodic Relation between the Nature of Elements and Prediction of New Elements.