Science in Magic

Time flowed like water, vanishing in the blink of an eye. More than half the semester had hurried past, and Huidun Academy's new magic students were finally ushered into their outdoor magic practical course.

Over this period, these apprentice magicians had learned several beginner spells, such as the Small Fireball Spell. At the same time, Isabel, their instructor for introductory magic lessons, had taught every student the method of meditation.

What truly made Chen Cheng accept that magic differed from what he had learned in his previous life was this magical meditation.

This meditation was not as Chen Cheng had imagined—sitting with one's eyes closed and doing nothing, then gradually growing stronger with time and one's own enlightenment.

Clearly, his guess had been complete nonsense.

True meditation was actually something very reasonable. Its main process involved a real mage using their will to guide an apprentice mage's will out from their mind.

The process was somewhat like amplifying brainwaves and releasing them outward, though that was merely Chen Cheng's own interpretation.

The apprentice mage's will could then follow the mage into the Sea of Magic. The Sea of Magic was a strange independent space, and the seawater within it consisted of intricate, complex Magic Rune Corridors.

What a mage needed to do was use their will to sense them, then analyze them and gain insight into a usable Magic Rune Corridor of their own.

To Chen Cheng, the Sea of Magic was an enormous database of magical knowledge, while the method of connecting to it relied on brainwaves of the same frequency. It was somewhat like the brain-computer interfaces he had learned about in his previous life.

But that alone was not enough. Next, one had to use their will as a pen to draw the Magic Runes and corridors they had comprehended within their own body. Once the drawing was complete, they would become a true Bronze Magic Apprentice.

The release of magic involved a mage communicating with the Magic Rune Corridor inside their body, while the magic chant was the key that activated that corridor.

What made a magic academy better than some roadside wild school was that it taught students several known foundational Magic Rune Corridors from the beginning. The young magicians could then rely on their memories to better locate the correct Magic Rune Corridors within the Sea of Magic.

Otherwise, if they found one at random and inscribed it, 99.9 percent of them would be blown apart by the magic power drawn into their bodies by the Magic Runes, either because the rune corridors were too complicated or because they were incomplete.

Even those who succeeded usually ended up with Magic Rune Corridors that were more complicated than the known foundational ones yet weaker in power. Only those who truly entered the Sea of Magic under the pull of a certain Magic Rune Corridor through their own will and inscribed it would achieve a success that set them apart from ordinary people.

If such beginner mages did not die young, their chances of becoming a Legendary Mage would be several times greater than those of ordinary people.

People like this were also called Chosen Ones in the magic world. This was the entry-level requirement for becoming a genius mage in this world.

And Chen Cheng was precisely such a genius, one who had muddle-headedly entered the Sea of Magic through his own spiritual power.

That first entry had allowed him to truly witness what a sea of magic was.

It also made Chen Cheng understand why the influence of divine authority was so heavy in this world. After truly seeing the Sea of Magic himself, he genuinely began to suspect that gods existed in this world.

If he had not seen what a supercomputer was in his previous life, what it meant to search online and know everything at once, then after witnessing all this, he truly would have believed it was a miracle of the gods.

Within that world of consciousness, he saw Magic Runes of every kind, in all shapes and forms. These Magic Runes drifted freely through that world.

The unique auras they emitted continuously tugged at Chen Cheng's consciousness, trying to make him inscribe them.

Fortunately, the souls of his two lives combined had made his consciousness extraordinarily resilient. He was not drawn in at all by those intricate and exquisite-looking Magic Runes.

In the end, Chen Cheng found within that Sea of Magic the Magic Rune that had drawn his consciousness into it.

It was a Magic Rune unlike any Chen Cheng recognized. Its lines radiated golden brilliance, giving off a feeling of holiness and elegance.

When Chen Cheng approached it, he could sense a warm and vast aura emanating from within.

Chen Cheng used his consciousness to cast aside all distracting thoughts, then confirmed that the warm, vast aura was not an illusion, but the true existence of that Magic Rune.

Chen Cheng could feel the resonance between himself and the Magic Rune. It was calling to him, and he could memorize and inscribe it with remarkable ease.

When Chen Cheng reached out to touch it, the entire Magic Rune gave him the feeling of overwhelming joy spreading through him, like a wanderer who had been away from home for years finally returning to his own house.

Yet at the final moment, Chen Cheng's hand stopped in midair. He did not capture that Magic Rune.

Though he vaguely sensed that if he captured it, he could reach the pinnacle of power in this world in an extremely short time.

But it was precisely because of that feeling that Chen Cheng stopped.

From beginning to end, he had not pursued magic to reach some magical realm or possess some great power.

If he had truly pursued power, then during the more than ten years he had spent following Samlet, Samlet would have long since raised him into an unmatched powerhouse.

What he pursued was knowledge—the truths hidden behind all of this.

Perhaps after obtaining it, his strength could soar by leaps and bounds. But he did not know whether, by then, he would still possess the same thirst for knowledge he had today.

The loss of curiosity was the thing Chen Cheng, as a researcher, feared most.

Chen Cheng apologized to the Magic Rune, then his consciousness withdrew from the Sea of Magic.

Back in the real world, Chen Cheng tested it and discovered that he could still enter the Sea of Magic through the Magic Rune's pull.

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

After his consciousness entered the Sea of Magic, although he had accepted the existence of magic as a special system, he also began to suspect that an exceedingly brilliant magical civilization—or perhaps an energy civilization—had once appeared in this world many years ago.

The height of that civilization had far surpassed the Earth of his previous life.

Moreover, that civilization had compiled all the magical knowledge it knew into volumes and made it open-source, eventually forming the Sea of Magic that anyone could enter through meditation.

Within it, they would also seek out geniuses capable of learning magic, allowing them to enter and receive the complete inheritance of magical knowledge from a particular system. In this way, they continued the knowledge of their civilization.

Honestly, when Chen Cheng thought of this, he truly admired that vanished civilization. Even after the civilization perished, the fruits of its development could still be preserved and passed on to people of the next era, allowing them to continue the progress of that civilization.

Through Isabel's later explanations, he also learned that magic had its own science.

At the same time, he cast his former conclusion that magic was chaotic and irrational out of his mind. Magic was now, to him, a new scientific subject that could be studied.

He also understood why magic could use those diagrams to transform forms of energy.

A simple example made it easy to understand. Take gasoline, a stable chemical energy source. When it was poured into an engine and ignited, releasing its stable chemical energy, that chemical energy could be transformed into thermal energy, which drove the engine to do work and became kinetic energy, ultimately moving the car.

This was a reasonable process of energy conversion.

Magic was the same. It was simply a form of energy more efficient than chemical energy such as gasoline, and almost no useless loss existed in its conversion between forms of energy.

As for the tool—or rather, the engine—of this energy conversion, that was the unique Magic Rune Corridors representing particular directions of energy transformation.

The ignition step was the magic chant. After magic passed through those rune corridors activated by chanting, it became the new form of energy the user needed, just as gasoline became something else after passing through an engine.

After Chen Cheng understood all this, he was practically delirious with joy. Many scientific hypotheses from his previous life that had seemed utterly mad could now be realized here through magic.

And he had already found the blueprint repository for the different engine models that had posed the greatest obstacle—the Sea of Magic.

Furthermore, with magic's nearly lossless nature, the superconductive energy transmission that scientists in his previous life had long researched could be achieved through it.

And things like the various engines used for clean energy in industry might even make the marvelous concept of cars running on water genuinely possible here.

It could be said that during this period, apart from attending classes, Chen Cheng spent almost all his daytime hours in the library. At night, he entered the Sea of Magic in his dreams, using the Magic Rune Corridors he knew to construct different rune corridors for scientific purposes.

As long as his research succeeded, the world of magical science he envisioned could truly appear in this world.

Yet amid this busy studying and research, Chen Cheng seemed to have forgotten his original intention. Rather than becoming an idle spectator, he had instead become a crazed scientific research fanatic.

The entire class assembled on the training ground. Fini looked at the energetic Chen Cheng beside her and asked curiously, "Brown, what happened to you today? You used to look miserable every day, so why are you so happy today? Don't tell me this magic practical lesson on the outskirts of Nanmu Forest has given you a chance to run away. Don't forget, your key is still with me."

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

Recently, Fini had become one of the academy's most talked-about figures. At first, it was because the glasses Chen Cheng made had solved Melinda's eye troubles, drawing cries of amazement from everyone.

Later, this young lady had independently entered the Sea of Magic during Isabel's class, obtaining a unique Wind Magic Rune Corridor within it.

What came afterward made her name resound throughout Earl Huidun's territory. She was the only apprentice mage in the entire territory to independently enter the Sea of Magic in the past twenty years.

Everyone knew that a genius like her might one day become one of the most powerful mages on the continent.

When her father learned of this, he was overjoyed. If the academy had not had rules forbidding parents from visiting during the school term, he would have already come to celebrate with his precious daughter.

At the same time, Earl Huidun, the earl of the entire territory, had decided to reward Fini at the academy's camp outside Nanmu Forest after the magic practical lesson.

Although it was somewhat excessive for an earl to personally reward a student, the lands of Wisdom Shield were far from the Royal Capital, and there were simply too few decent talents here. Giving her a little extra attention was not unreasonable.

Yet what the delighted Fini and her servants did not know was that Coles stood behind them, holding an Image Recording Crystal and wearing a venomous smile.

Earl Huidun would attend this magic practical lesson, which gave him the perfect opportunity to get rid of Chen Cheng, that eyesore. At the same time, he could strike at Fini, who had recently been stealing the limelight. He had no desire for Fini's family to swallow up his territory after he inherited his title upon coming of age.