The Science in Magic

Time flows like water, and in the blink of an eye, more than half of the semester has passed. The new magic students at Hui Dun Academy have welcomed their practical magic courses outside the academy.

During this period, these apprentice little mages have learned several introductory spells like Fireball, and their teacher for the magic apprenticeship class, Isabel, has also taught all the students meditation techniques.

What truly made Chen Cheng accept magic as different from what he learned in his previous life was this magic meditation.

And this meditation wasn't like Chen Cheng imagined, sitting there with closed eyes doing nothing, and automatically getting stronger with time and his own comprehension.

Clearly, his guess was baseless.

True meditation is a very logical existence. Its main process involves a true mage using their willpower to guide the apprentice mage's willpower, which emanates from their mind.

This process is somewhat similar to amplifying brainwaves and releasing them outward, though this is Chen Cheng's own understanding.

Then, the apprentice mage's willpower can follow the mage into the Sea of Magic. This Sea of Magic is a peculiar, independent space where the seawater itself is a corridor of complex and intricate magic runes.

What the mage needs to do is to perceive it with their willpower, then analyze it, and from it, comprehend their own usable magic rune corridor.

To Chen Cheng, the Sea of Magic is like a vast magical knowledge database, and the method to connect to it relies on synchronized brainwaves, which is somewhat similar to the brain-computer interface Chen Cheng learned about in his previous life.

However, reaching this point is not enough. The next step is to use one's own willpower as a brush to outline those magic runes and corridors within one's own body. Once this outlining is complete, one becomes a true Bronze Mage Apprentice.

The release of magic is the mage communicating with the magic rune corridors within their own body, and the magic incantation is the key to activating these corridors.

What sets magical academies apart from the haphazard methods of the streets is that they teach students some known basic magic rune corridors from the beginning. The little mages can then better find the correct magic rune corridors in the Sea of Magic by relying on their memory.

Otherwise, if they were to randomly find and engrave one, 99.9% of them would die because the rune corridors are too complex or incomplete, causing the magic drawn into their bodies by the magic runes to overload and explode their bodies.

Even those who succeed mostly engrave magic rune corridors that are more complex but less powerful than the known basic ones. Only those who truly enter the Sea of Magic under the guidance of a certain magic rune corridor and engrave it with their own willpower will achieve extraordinary success.

If such introductory mages do not perish midway, their chances of becoming legendary mages will be several times higher than ordinary people.

Such individuals are also known as Chosen Ones in the magical world, serving as the entry-level requirement for becoming a genius mage in this world.

And Chen Cheng was precisely such a genius who, in a daze, entered the Sea of Magic through his own mental power.

His first entry allowed him to truly witness what the ocean of magic was.

It also made Chen Cheng understand why the divine element was so deeply entrenched in this world. After personally witnessing the Sea of Magic, he truly began to suspect that gods existed in this world.

If he hadn't seen what supercomputers were in his previous life, or what "Googling it" meant, he would have truly believed that this was a divine miracle upon witnessing it.

In this world of consciousness, he saw all sorts of magic patterns, which were in a scattered state in this world.

The unique aura they emitted was constantly attracting Chen Cheng's consciousness, wanting him to engrave them.

Fortunately, Chen Cheng's soul, combined from two lifetimes, made his consciousness extremely resilient, and he was not at all attracted by those complex and exquisite-looking magic patterns.

Finally, Chen Cheng found the magic pattern in this Sea of Magic that had been drawing his consciousness into it.

It was a magic pattern different from what Chen Cheng knew. Its golden radiance gave it a sacred and elegant feeling.

As Chen Cheng approached it, he could feel a warm and vast aura emanating from it.

Chen Cheng used his willpower to discard all distracting thoughts and then confirmed that this warm and vast aura was not an illusion but the genuine existence of this magic pattern.

Chen Cheng could feel the magic pattern resonating with him; it was calling out to him, and he could easily memorize it and engrave it.

When Chen Cheng reached out to touch it, the entire magic pattern gave him a feeling of extreme pleasure spreading through him, as if a wanderer who had been away from home for a long time was finally returning to his own home.

However, at the last moment, Chen Cheng's hand stopped in mid-air; he did not capture this magic pattern.

Although he had a vague feeling that if he captured it, he could reach the pinnacle of power in this world in a very short time.

It was precisely because of this feeling that Chen Cheng stopped.

His pursuit of magic from beginning to end was never about reaching a certain magical realm or possessing a certain great power.

If he had truly pursued power, he would have been trained into an unparalleled powerhouse by Samlet over the past decade.

What he pursued was knowledge, understanding the truth contained within it.

Perhaps his strength could advance by leaps and bounds after obtaining it, but he didn't know if he would still have the same thirst for knowledge today.

The lack of thirst for knowledge was what he, as a researcher, feared the most.

Chen Cheng apologized to the magic pattern, and then his consciousness withdrew from the Sea of Magic.

Returning to the real world, Chen Cheng felt himself and found that he could still enter the Sea of Magic through the attraction of that magic pattern.

Perhaps in the future, when researching magic, he could use this to more clearly understand the essence of magic.

After entering the Sea of Magic with his consciousness, although he accepted the existence of magic as a special system, perhaps many years ago, a very brilliant magical civilization, or perhaps an energy civilization, had appeared in this world.

Their civilization's advancement far surpassed that of Earth in his previous life.

And their civilization had compiled all the magical knowledge they knew into books and made it open-source, thus forming the Sea of Magic that anyone could enter using meditation techniques.

And within this, they would also search for talented individuals learning magic, allowing them to enter and receive the inheritance of an entire system's magical knowledge, thereby continuing their civilization's progress.

Honestly, when Chen Cheng thought of this, he truly felt admiration for that perished civilization. Even though the civilization was destroyed, the fruits of its development could still be preserved and passed on to people of the next era, allowing them to continue their civilization's progress.

During Isabel's subsequent explanations, he also learned that magic also had its own "magic science."

At the same time, he discarded his previous conclusion that magic was chaotic and irrational. To him now, magic was a new scientific subject to be researched.

He also understood why magic could transform energy forms through those diagrams.

It can be understood with a very simple example, like gasoline, a stable chemical energy agent. When it's poured into an engine and ignited, releasing its stable chemical energy, its chemical energy can be converted into thermal energy, which in turn drives the engine to do work, becoming kinetic energy, and finally making the car move.

This is a rational energy conversion process.

Magic is the same, except it's a more efficient energy than chemical energy like gasoline, with virtually no wasted energy during its conversions.

The tools or engines for this energy conversion are the unique Magic Runes corridors that represent specific directions of energy transformation.

The ignition step is the magical incantation. After magic passes through these Rune corridors activated by chanting, it transforms into the new energy form required by the user, just like gasoline passing through an engine.

When Chen Cheng figured this out, he was ecstatic. Because of this, many of his seemingly crazy scientific conjectures from his previous life could be realized here with magic.

Moreover, he had already found the blueprint warehouse for the biggest obstacle, the different engine models: the Sea of Magic.

And with magic's almost lossless characteristic, the superconducting energy transmission that human scientists researched in his previous life could be achieved with it.

Also, like the various different engines for clean energy in industry, the wonderful idea of cars running on water might actually be realized here.

It can be said that during this period, besides attending classes, Chen Cheng spent almost all his daytime hours in the library, and at night, he entered the Sea of Magic in his dreams, using the Magic Rune corridors he knew to construct the functions of various scientific Rune corridors.

As long as his research is successful, the magical scientific world he envisioned can truly appear in this world.

However, amidst this busy study and research, Chen Cheng seemed to have forgotten his original intention. Instead of being a detached observer, he had become a mad scientific researcher.

All the students in the class gathered on the sports field. Fini looked at Chen Cheng, who was full of energy beside her, and asked curiously:

"Brown, what's gotten into you today? You looked so glum every day before, why are you so happy today? Don't tell me you found a chance to escape the magic practical class outside Nanmu Forest?

Don't forget, your key is still with me."

As she spoke, Fini stuck out her tongue and gave a mischievous smile.

Recently, Fini had become a prominent figure in the academy. At first, it was because the glasses Chen Cheng made solved Melinda's eye problems, which caused a stir.

Later, this young lady entered the Sea of Magic on her own during Isabel's class and obtained a unique wind-element Magic Rune corridor.

The events that followed further spread her fame throughout Earl Huidun's territory, as she was the only apprentice mage in the territory to have entered the Sea of Magic on her own in twenty years.

Everyone knew that a genius like her had the potential to become one of the top mages on the continent in the future.

Her father was overjoyed upon learning this. If not for the academy's regulations prohibiting parents from visiting during the school term, he would have come to the academy long ago to celebrate with his precious daughter.

At the same time, Earl Huidun, the Earl of the entire territory, upon hearing this, prepared to reward Fini at the academy's outpost outside Nanmu Forest after the magic practical class.

Although it seemed a bit excessive for an Earl to personally reward a student, it was understandable given that this land of Huidun was far from the capital, and talented individuals were scarce here, so it wasn't unreasonable to place importance on it.

However, unknown to the happy Fini and her servant, Coles, standing behind them, was holding an Image Recording Crystal with a malicious smile.

Earl Huidun would be attending this magic practical class, so he would use this opportunity to eliminate the eyesore that was Chen Cheng, and at the same time, strike a blow against the recently prominent Fini. He didn't want his territory to be annexed by Fini's family after he inherited the peerage upon reaching adulthood.