Over the next few days, Li Wei attended classes as an observer under the pretext of being a trainee.
After all, his top priority was to figure out exactly what magic was in this world and what principles governed it.
And the best way to learn that was to sit in on basic magic theory classes for the lower grades.
After a few days of introductory study, Li Wei finally understood how magic worked in this small world.
Simply put, this magic really did put mind over matter, but not entirely.
For example, magic could turn a rock into a pot of flowers.
The limitation was that it could not produce flowers absent from the caster's memories.
Then there was the basic offensive spell, Magic Bolt. Anyone could use it, but what determined its power?
In most fantasy novels, that depended on the amount of mana, the degree of compression, or additional spell enhancements. Here, however, a magic bolt's power depended largely on how powerful the caster imagined it to be.
If you believed the magic bolt could punch through your opponent, it could. If you believed it could blow your opponent apart, it could do that too.
The problem was that this "imagination" was not daydreaming. It was not as simple as falling asleep in class and fantasizing. Rather, it had to be something you took for granted as common sense, like waterfalls flowing downward or apples falling from trees. You could not simply glare viciously at an enemy, imagine them exploding, and have them actually explode. That was impossible.
There was another issue: when an attack formed from mana struck a being that also possessed mana, some of its power would be canceled out. Exactly how much depended on the opponent's mana reserves.
For instance, if a first-grade