Lynn stared at his phone screen.
"Lin, are you listening?" Tony's voice came through the speaker. "Should I keep going?"
"Go ahead."
"Your ability essentially uses your brain as a processor. Every time you modify information about matter, your brain processes enormous amounts of data in the background. Those uninvited blackouts and gaps in your memory are your brain clearing its own cache. It's been pushed into a corner, so it has no choice but to delete things at random to free up space."
"Right, you already told me that part. Tell me something I don't know," Lynn said.
"The problem before was that this clearing process was completely beyond your control. You didn't know when it would delete something, how much, or which part. Blacking out in the Sanctum library only cost you a few minutes. Blacking out in front of Iron Monger nearly burned you out and shut you down."
Tony's tone shifted from technical analysis to a conclusion. "So there's only one approach. If clearing it is unavoidable, turn it from something passive into something active."
Lynn's fingers stopped at the rim of his teacup.
"Instead of letting your brain delete things at random when it hits its limit, delete them yourself. Set a clearly defined deletion range, activate it only when you need it, and switch it off when you're done. That way, you can go about your normal life without any more random blackouts."
"What's the deletion range?"
"One second! Delete only the previous second."
The Ancient One set her teacup on the low table and took over. Her voice lacked Tony's technical excitement. It was calm and composed, as though she were relaying a conclusion that time had long since proven.
"Tony's idea happens to complement the magical means I can offer. Kamar-Taj's collection contains soul and memory magic originally intended to aid meditation. During deep meditation, practitioners actively clear away distracting thoughts to keep their consciousness clear. This kind of magic can establish a stable imprint at the soul level, precisely removing specific memories according to preset rules."
She paused and looked at Lynn.
"I can inscribe Tony's proposed one-second limit into the magic circle's parameters. For every second that passes, it deletes one second, no more and no less. You can activate it yourself, and you can switch it off yourself. When you need to use your ability on a large scale, activate the magic circle and set a temporal anchor, so that every second of information your brain processes is erased the instant processing is complete. Space for computation and memory will be freed up in real time."
"One second?" Lynn repeated.
"One second," The Ancient One confirmed.
Tony's voice came through the speaker. "The Ancient One and I discussed longer intervals... But extending it to two seconds, three, or even five led to the conclusion that it wasn't safe. The longer the memory-clearing window, the greater the accumulated cognitive discrepancies. One second is the most stable option. I had JARVIS assess your brain's processing speed. It's far beyond an ordinary person's. One second is plenty."
Lynn fell silent for a few seconds. He ran through the entire chain of reasoning again in his head.
Passive blackouts were dangerous because they were uncontrollable. He never knew when one would come or how much it would delete. But if deletion became an active operation, with him deciding when to trigger it and the deletion range precisely limited to one second... aside from losing the sense of experiencing it, there seemed to be no reason to reject it.
"What about everyday minor spells?" he asked. "Opening portals, firing energy beams, conjuring fireballs-would I need to activate the circle for those too?"
The Ancient One shook her head slightly. "Memory itself has a capacity. An ordinary person's brain automatically clears away old, useless memories every day. That is a normal physiological process. Your previous problem wasn't that you used minor spells, but that you were unconsciously processing far more additional information than those spells required at the same time. Once you know what you're doing, you can narrow your information processing to the task at hand. For your brain, everyday spellcasting is fundamentally no different from an ordinary person memorizing a word."
"You only need to activate the magic circle when you have to modify reality on a large scale, with something like Iron Monger or a more advanced target. Set the target you want to modify, activate the circle, process it, and switch the circle off. Aside from having no sense of the experience afterward, there are no other drawbacks."
No sense of the experience. Tony delivered those last words lightly, as though describing a known software bug. But Lynn understood what they really meant. If he wanted to dismantle an Iron Monger-level target, he would have to keep the magic circle active throughout, with every second of memory erased the instant it formed. He would see the result after the process ended, but he would not remember how he had done it. There would be no tangible sense of having rewritten reality with his own hands, no process, only the result.
He looked down at his hands. These hands had swept through the air once in front of Iron Monger and dismantled the six-meter-tall steel giant into photons, but he remembered none of it.
"Better to lose the experience than my life," Lynn said.
The other end of the line went quiet for two seconds. Tony did not argue.
The Ancient One rose from her meditation cushion and walked to a wooden rack at one side of the study. Yellowed scrolls were neatly stacked on it. She took out a parchment scroll tied with dark red silk thread and spread it across the low table. On its inner surface was a magic circle so intricate it made his scalp prickle.
"I will readjust this magic circle's parameters to match your soul's frequency. The outer ring fixes the time limit, and the inner ring binds the triggering mechanism. The circle's core will be embedded with your soul imprint in the frontal lobe region, directly connected to your brain and the center of your consciousness."
"Will the embedding process hurt?" Lynn asked.
"No," The Ancient One said. Then she looked into Lynn's eyes and gently added, "You will feel it there. Like a switch you can reach at any moment."
Lynn nodded. He liked that comparison. A switch. A switch he could control himself.
"When do we start?" he asked.
"Reworking the magic circle will take a few days."
The Ancient One rolled the scroll back up. "Stay at Kamar-Taj during that time. Get your body into good condition and replenish the energy you overtaxed before. Tony will need to be present on the day of the embedding."
"Me?" Tony sounded distinctly taken aback over the speaker.
"The magic circle handles precise memory deletion, but judging when to trigger it-when it needs to be switched on and when it can be switched off-requires real-time data. Your AI can help Lynn make those judgments. So you will have to cough something up too."
Tony was silent for a while. Then a soft chuckle came through the speaker, full of the helplessness of someone who had been convinced but did not want to admit it.
"All right. I'll have JARVIS build a real-time algorithm. It'll need his brain's processing capacity entered into it, along with a prediction module. That should take a few days."
"Modifying the magic circle will take time too," The Ancient One said.
"Then I'll see you in a few days."
Lynn picked up the phone, turned off speakerphone, and held it to his ear.
"Tony."
"Yeah?"
"Thanks," Lynn said, his voice calm and unadorned.
There was a pause on the other end.
"Save the thanks. Once you're better, get ready to work for me to pay off your debt."
Tony's voice regained its Stark-style nonchalance, but he did not hang up right away. After half a beat, he added, "Get some proper rest these next few days."
The call ended. Lynn set the phone on the low table. Its screen went dark, reflecting the outlines of the snowy mountains beyond the study window. The Ancient One had already put the scroll away and returned to her meditation cushion. She lifted her teacup, her expression unchanged, as though she had merely arranged an ordinary cultivation lesson.
"Ancient One," Lynn said.
"Yes?"
"Did you know from the start that I would end up here?"
The Ancient One set down her teacup and glanced at him. The light reflected off the snow outside fell across her face, revealing the fine lines at the corners of her eyes.
"I cannot see your future, child. But I have lived a very long time and met many people. When someone chooses to stand up again after despair, it means he is already prepared to accept whatever outcomes may come."
Lynn did not answer. He lowered his head and looked at the cup of thoroughly cold tea before him. Wind blowing down from the snowy mountains seeped through the gap in the window, gently stirring the prayer flags.