A New Use for Magic

Drogo's Toy Store was busy every day now.

Thanks to Blazing Teens' no-submission-fee, free-reprint policy, only the most respectable newspapers still had no comics.

It had also spawned a large number of fan works and, incidentally, inspired the market for long-running serialized comics.

As a crowd of starving artists frantically competed against one another, artistic techniques showed signs of innovation, and the rudiments of panel layouts had already appeared.

The artist behind Blazing Teens had even put up a sign outside the shop, listing Blazing Teens as their representative work.

As its popularity spread, the age range of yo-yo players grew increasingly diverse.

At first, only children came with their parents. Later, many teenagers began showing up, as well as people in their early twenties.

There were also parents who claimed they were buying one for their children but clearly enjoyed playing with them themselves. These people usually entered the shop and deliberately said loudly, "Our child wants such-and-such yo-yo."

It was understandable. The social climate here still believed toys were only for children. Adults had too much to worry about and were not allowed to have simple joys.

"Good job, baby! You learned to walk so quickly. What reward do you want from Daddy?"

"Oh, a yo-yo? You like Speed Demon? Then do you want the red one or the blue one?"

"You want both? All right, I'll make an exception just this once..."

Drogo watched a father pushing a stroller put on this smooth little performance.

Seriously, man, wasn't that a bit too much acting?

Speed Demon was so big. Could your child who was not even two hold it?

Drogo turned over. He had not done much lately, yet he still felt mentally exhausted.

That was what being a boss was like. Employees only needed to throw themselves into their work, follow orders, and work hard at sales. But a boss had many things to consider.

Like what to eat for dinner tonight.

It was not as if this world had no good food. After so many years of eating raw meat and drinking blood, they could digest anything.

But still, it just felt like something was missing.

Ah—

I miss Chinese food so much.

I want savory sweet-and-sour pork, candied milk curds, braised pork hock—hell, even a bowl of spicy hot pot would do...

I can't think about it anymore. If I do, tears are going to flow from my mouth.

Think about magic. Fight hunger with study.

Earth, water, fire, wind—the four basic elements, the elementary structures of elements, the rules governing elemental arrangements...

Wait!

Hunger made the dragon clear-headed. Drogo suddenly realized that the essence of magic seemed to be a quaternary language.

Different types of magic used instruction sets with different architectures, while the many schools derived from each category of magic corresponded to various high-level languages, each with its own characteristics.

So that was why these schools loved declaring themselves the best in the world at every turn. What kind of mages were they? They were programmers!

Although Drogo had been a game designer in his previous life whose entire family was routinely cursed by players, he had actually studied engineering in college.

Not computer science, but he had still learned programming, microcontrollers, and similar things.

Magic suddenly lost its air of mystery in his eyes and became familiar instead.

And thanks to the Dragonkin's near-hyperthymetic memory, he could directly read quaternary strings.

After looking through the Primal Inscriptions used by the major pantheons—that was, their instruction sets—two questions arose.

First, why were there so few magical effects nowadays? By all rights, there should have been plenty of room for development. Surely the natives of another world could not simply lack imagination?

Second, why was there nothing like the internet or the Magic Web?

The reason magic was so difficult to learn in this world was that the spell models constructed by each person could not be shared.

When apprentices learned new magic, their mentors could not simply copy over an already-built spell model. They could only construct one themselves from scratch.

But once they had built a spell model themselves, they could use it directly when casting.

In other words, every magical programmer in this world had to reinvent the wheel several times whenever they learned a spell.

And it was the kind of wheel-reinventing without an editor to help, where every inscription had to be written by hand.

What terrible efficiency!

It was practically like...

A thought terrifying enough to frighten a dragon entered Drogo's mind.

Something was restricting the development of magic in this world!

"Attention, little friends and big friends, Drogo's Toy Store is now closed for the day. We hope to see you again tomorrow!"

Aisha's voice interrupted Drogo's wild thoughts.

Forget it. He would not think about that for now.

Drogo planned to try putting together a few spells according to his own ideas first, but he would need Aisha's help.

Although he could understand the Primal Inscriptions, that did not mean he could directly use Primal Runes to construct spell models.

Programming in machine language and programming in a high-level language were completely different things.

The latter was cooking in a modern kitchen.

The former was also cooking, except one had to start by drilling wood to make fire and forging a pot from iron ore.

So he needed the high-level inscriptions used by Aisha's school.

As for creating an entire set of high-level inscriptions himself, that was fundamentally a mathematical problem. Mathematics was the sort of thing where, if you could not do it, you simply could not do it. It could not be forced.

After closing the shop, Aisha slumped into a chair like a deflated ball.

Selling things was exhausting. Selling things to a bunch of children was work that could only be described as despairing.

"Can you show me the inscriptions used by your school?" Drogo leaned closer.

"What?" Aisha struggled up from her sprawled position into a sitting one.

"I want to try magic."

"Huh?" Alarms warning of unemployment blared in Aisha's mind. No way, had he discovered that these little illusions were not actually worth twenty-five silver coins a month?

"I'll raise your pay according to the tuition fees of a spell academy."

The unemployment alarm shut off. The excellent employee system activated!

The facts proved that Drogo's talent for magic really was excellent. In just a few hours, he had basically mastered the inscriptions of the Illusion School, with dinner in between.

They had steak. It tasted all right, but it was not as good as beef stew with potatoes.

This was supposedly the greatest city on the continent, so why were there no bay leaves, star anise, or cinnamon? There were not even similar seasonings.

Drogo drafted out his first spell model.

"See if there are any problems with this."

Without an editor to tell him where the errors were, he could only check it manually.

"In theory, it should work, but it can't be cast."

"It can't be cast?"

"That's right. People can't guide magic power like that. Dragons probably can't either. At least, I've never heard of it."

Drogo understood. Magic was not a purely data-based system. It also had a hardware component—the caster. That was why the effects of spells were so limited.

"Then is there a way to make a spell model run without considering the caster? It does not need to produce an effect in reality, just something like a virtual ideal environment."

Drogo did not know whether Aisha could understand what he meant by virtual.

"Of course there is," Aisha answered almost without thinking. "Illusion Mimicry. You can use illusions to reproduce the effects of a spell model, but you can only see it. It has no actual effect, so hardly anyone uses it."

"Being able to see it is enough!"

Drogo felt as though he had grasped the key to the door of a new era.

Aisha quickly completed a mimicry of the model on the draft.

A line of text appeared in the air.

"Hello, world."

"What is that?" Aisha asked curiously.

"This is the future."

For the first time since transmigrating, Drogo felt so excited.

"But why is it 'Hello, world'?"

"Because that phrase feels the most ceremonial."