"Why am I even looking at this?"
Late at night, Caster Association, project team for devising methods to kill the Devil Race, Jia Xiu's office.
Jia Xiu began reflecting on what exactly he had done over the past few hours.
He had studied a detection spell that, strictly speaking, should not have been particularly difficult—at most second-ring—but whose logic was incomparably tricky, whose execution was utterly bizarre, and which he did not even know why it worked.
And he still had not fully figured it out.
This wild mage, who looked as though he had been carved from the same mold as middle-aged Planck, had a far wilder approach than Jia Xiu had imagined.
The spells he designed practically stepped on every pitfall schools taught students to avoid. When copied into a Magic Grimoire, the error warnings could fill several pages. Jia Xiu had briefly wondered whether he had copied something wrong, but after checking again and again, he found that he had not. It was simply that strange.
Stranger still, this spell brimming with irrationality actually worked.
Jia Xiu had initially tried to use his understanding of magic to correct the mistakes in the spell.
But once he corrected one mistake, the spell stopped functioning in an utterly absurd fashion.
Left with no choice, he changed the mistake back, then tried correcting other mistakes, only to get the same result.
Jia Xiu could not help suspecting that every single mistake had been deliberately designed.
The entire spell actually operated on the basis of errors, a chain of mistakes ultimately leading to the intended result.
Or rather, perhaps this error-ridden spell was precisely how this wild mage learned and mastered magic.
Which meant that modifying it according to conventional logic—even changing the slightest thing—would destroy its existing fragile balance.
Only