Ouyang Feng, the great villain of The Legend of the Condor Heroes, was a martial arts grandmaster.
He had captured Huang Rong to learn the Nine Yin Manual, but she had tricked him into practicing a "fake" version instead. In the end, his cultivation went awry, driving him mad until he forgot who he was.
Yet by sheer accident, his unparalleled talent and the profound foundation he had built over the first half of his life allowed him to reverse and reposition all his meridians, developing a powerful new martial art. The more he practiced, the stranger it became, and the stranger it became, the stronger it grew.
In the end, Ouyang Feng had claimed the title of the world's greatest martial artist at the second Mount Hua Sword Tournament.
What suddenly occurred to Rhode was this: could the relationship between orthodox magic and Dark Magic be like that between the Nine Yin Manual and its "fake" version?
Ouyang Feng had reversed the flow through his meridians and eventually developed an entirely different school of martial arts. So, if orthodox magic were output in reverse, would that produce Dark Magic?
It was a bold hypothesis.
After returning to the Magic Tower, Rhode laid the spell model for Fireball on his desk and began studying it.
He made changes as he examined it.
There was still an input end and an output end, but he moved the part of the model that should have handled the final processing to the beginning, then connected the beginning to the end.
After all that tinkering, Rhode found that the spell model before him was a complete mess. There was no telling it had originally been a Fireball spell.
If I cast it following this sequence, would a Shadow Bolt really come flying out?
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