Throughout the carriage ride back to the Outer Residence from the examination grounds, Great Mage Camilla kept watching Xu Yi with a rather peculiar smile on her face.
Her gaze made Xu Yi squirm. At last, he said, "Great Mage, what are you smiling about? You approved of me using this to pass last night, didn't you? Surely you can't call it cheating now?"
"If I thought you were cheating, I would have exposed you back there." Great Mage Camilla shook her head. "I simply still find this utterly baffling. You were clearly using nothing more than simple wind magic, so how could a tiny piece of magic machinery cause lightning magic elements to fluctuate and produce lightning magic? Even more absurdly, the spell was so powerful that it exceeded the limits of what your mana could control."
"That's why I couldn't control it at all." Xu Yi spread his hands. "If the examination grounds hadn't had a magic barrier, those lightning bolts would have gone flying everywhere. Someone might have been hurt."
"Hurt someone?" Great Mage Camilla scoffed. "That spell of yours certainly was powerful, but without deliberate control, its power was spread far too thin. Its actual destructive force was probably weaker than a Level Six spell. Who could you have hurt?"
"What if I could control all of it?" Xu Yi couldn't help asking.
Great Mage Camilla considered this carefully, her expression turning serious.
"If you could control all of it... even I would probably have to take it seriously."
After a pause, Great Mage Camilla held out her hand to Xu Yi. "Let me see that generator thing again. I want to study it properly."
Xu Yi rolled up his sleeve, revealing the homemade miniature generators strapped in dense rows around his arm. He took one