"Master Leon, someone has learned the Mystic Arts Portal and met our admission standards."
"That fast? Who is it?"
"An eight-year-old girl from Afghanistan, Shafika Mazzari. You should remember her."
"Shafika... Let me think. She's from the family I saved from those Ten Rings thugs."
Leon was still surprised when JARVIS notified him.
Someone had learned the Mystic Arts Portal in just three days, with nothing but the system AI to guide her.
That took no small amount of talent. In fact, it was remarkable.
Even Doctor Strange had taken three days to learn the Mystic Arts Portal.
Of course, the two cases weren't entirely comparable.
When Doctor Strange learned magic, he had also gone through the collapse of his worldview, self-doubt, and the process of rebuilding his beliefs.
In the game, players only needed to accept magic as part of the setting and keep practicing.
Besides, adults didn't have hearts as open as children's.
Reality had long since hammered their minds into walls of copper and iron that neither wind nor light could penetrate.
Teenagers, on the other hand, could spend all day imagining men in black arriving by helicopter to tell them, "You're the savior we've been looking for."
When those children discovered magic in the game that could only be cast through hard practice, they could train without eating or sleeping until they mastered it.
Adults couldn't practice exactly as the system instructed the way children could.
Focus their attention? Visualize the portal's destination? Most of them thought it was just pointless mystification.
This time was a case in point.
Stephen Strange was also on JARVIS's list of prospective students.
But he had never even considered clearing a four- or five-star difficulty game.
Even on the few occasions he happened to enter one, he quit as soon