Jia Xiu's research progress had been far from ideal.
A week had already passed since he returned from the Caster Association. The week had felt busy, yet it also felt like he had accomplished nothing at all.
But if he had to say he'd spent the whole week slacking off, it had still been exhausting.
It was a little like the days before the college entrance exams. Every day, he drilled problems, corrected mistakes, filled gaps in his knowledge. He seemed rushed off his feet, but had any of it really brought meaningful improvement? Probably not.
At most, he had been keeping his hand in.
Jia Xiu felt that his work progress this week had been much the same. He had basically been marking time, doing nothing but keeping his hand in.
His study of Magic Microcontrollers was still crawling through Chapter Two. He had not even started on a topic for his graduation thesis. He still had not figured out how the Dream Demon had made the Flame Demon die slowly, and Quaternary Magic was even more of a complete mystery.
He had bragged too much when speaking to Ambassador Thorin.
Back then, he had paid tribute to Faraday, pointing at the project documents and calling them a newborn. Faraday had at least discovered electromagnetic induction before saying that. His own progress could barely be considered a fertilized egg.
Jia Xiu believed that the representational form of Quaternary Magic was likely related to spell structures more microscopic than runes.
The mainstream theory here was the String Hypothesis: mana strings vibrated to form all magic and so on.
So he began cramming knowledge in that area.
Yet the reason the String Hypothesis was called a hypothesis was precisely because it had not been proven, much less reached any conclusion. All