Ye Chui snatched up the wand that had fallen to the floor and sprang up from the ground. The wand cut a graceful arc through the air and leveled at one of the brutes' heads as he bellowed, "Lightning!"
The basic attack spell, 【Lightning】.
Hammerhead, the original owner of the body Ye Chui now wore, had been nothing but a rank-two novice mage, able to use only simple first-tier spells; and because Hammerhead was a meek, good-natured sort, he had always favored everyday little spells like 【Breeze】, 【Dust Removal】 and 【Light Fire】, and was hopelessly out of practice with attack spells.
So when Ye Chui shouted "Lightning" and swung his wand, he had been certain that the memories he inherited from Hammerhead would let him cast this spell called 【Lightning】 — but what actually happened was... apart from a few little sparks spitting from the tip of the wand, nothing at all.
"Holy shit?" Ye Chui blanked.
Everyone in the room was staring at him, dumbstruck.
A flicker of joy crossed Debbie's face — clearly she was delighted to see Ye Chui awake — then she swung her arms hard again. "Hammerhead, you get yourself hidden and stay hidden! If you can't fight, what are you showing off for? Just leave this to me!"
"Don't spare that one either — Quinn, go grab the little brat for me!" Busca shouted at once. "We're here under contract to remove them! They're resisting us rudely — even if we killed someone, we'd never face the law!"
The swordsman among the two brutes, the one called Quinn, sneered and walked straight at Ye Chui.
Debbie paled at the sight and swung her greatsword at Quinn at once, only for the other brute to cut her off. Her face drained of color and she shouted frantically at Ye Chui, "Hammerhead, hide, hurry up, hurry!"
But Ye Chui didn't move. He stared blankly at the wand in his hand; just a moment ago, he had discovered something very interesting —
Magic, put simply, was a person using his spiritual power and mana to construct a spell template inside his memory, then condensing a magic matrix through that spell template and projecting the matrix onto a wand or some other casting tool. Depending on how it was composed, each magic matrix produced a different effect, drawing in the magic elements of nature and manifesting all kinds of magical results.
Take the 【Lightning】 spell. To cast it, a mage first had to build the 【Lightning】 spell template in his mind; at the moment of casting, he activated that template with mana, condensed the magic matrix of the 【Lightning】 spell, and sent the matrix into the wand in his hand. The wand would then absorb the "lightning element" in the air and form a lightning attack.
Isn't that basically the same as writing a program and having it run in an application?
The reason Ye Chui couldn't cast the 【Lightning】 spell was simply that Hammerhead had been so unfamiliar with it. He had built the spell template in his mind, but the template had problems: at least nine casts out of ten drew in no lightning element at all...
And what struck Ye Chui as indescribably marvelous was this: the spell template was the very foundation of casting a spell, and in essence it was made up of thirty-two magic symbols. A mage had to master all thirty-two magic symbols and then build spell templates out of them before he could cast spells.
The former Hammerhead, being a rank-two mage, had already comprehended the first five of those thirty-two symbols, and with those five he could combine the spell templates of all sorts of simple spells. Inheriting Hammerhead's memories, Ye Chui had also inherited that grasp of the five magic symbols.
And in Ye Chui's eyes —
So-called magic can be seen entirely as software programmed out of these thirty-two magic symbols! A spell template is a program, and casting a spell is running that program! And the best part is, with these magic symbols I can do far, far more than any programming language can...
A programming language could implement every kind of function, but all those functions had to be built on computers and networks. Magic's functions were built on the whole wide earth, working upon all things in the world... Magic was so much more fun than programming, more fun than words could say!
At that moment Ye Chui's heart suddenly surged. He had spent his entire last life working with programs, and in the end he had stood at the very peak of the hacker world — and in this world, magic could be used like a program!
This world was practically made for me. Here I'll be capable of anything. I...
Just as Ye Chui's heart was racing, he suddenly found his body lifting into the air — Quinn had grabbed him by the collar, and the brute's arm strength easily hoisted Ye Chui's feet more than a foot off the floor. A cruel sneer spread across Quinn's rough, savage face. "Heh heh, Mr. Mage, your magic doesn't seem to be working too well."
"Shit!"
Ye Chui felt a chill to the bone coming off Quinn. On the other side, Debbie was screaming herself hoarse, trying to get over and save him, but the other swordsman kept her tangled up tight. Ye Chui was on his own. He waved the wand feebly, trying to trigger the 【Lightning】 spell again, but three times in a row only a few sparks spat from the wand's tip — he didn't see a damn bit of lightning...
And Quinn had plainly run out of patience. The longsword in his other hand was already raised.
Where exactly is the error... The spell template! There has to be something wrong inside the spell template!
With death closing in, Ye Chui had no choice but to pin all his hopes on magic.
If an attack spell couldn't be cast properly, then the only explanation was that the spell template contained an error.
A spell template was a set of magic symbols that a mage had engraved into his memory. Engraving a spell template and branding it into one's memory required spiritual power; only with spiritual power could one engrave magic symbols into one's own memory — which was why spiritual power was the most basic measure of a mage.
And Ye Chui could search through his own spell templates.
The template for 【Lightning】, a basic attack spell, was very simple: only five basic magic symbols were needed, and the template itself was barely a dozen lines long. Ye Chui quickly ran his eyes down the template he had engraved... Since he had inherited Hammerhead's memories, he had long since mastered those five basic magic symbols inside and out, and he could read the meaning of every single line in that template perfectly well!
As a hacker at the very peak, spotting bad code in a program was child's play.
Magic and the programming languages he had learned were not the same thing, but Hammerhead's grasp of those five basic magic symbols, plus his own wealth of programming experience... still let him develop something close to a natural instinct for the rows and lines of a spell template.
Here! This magic symbol is wrong! It lets the lightning element it draws in pile up into accumulating redundancy and breaks the lightning's release node — that's why the spell can't be cast properly. Fix this magic symbol and the whole spell is corrected!
If a mage was like a programmer, then a basic spell was like the simple program a programmer practiced while first learning to code; and seen through the eyes of a peak hacker like Ye Chui, the error in this program could still be worked out very quickly.
"Hammerhead!" Debbie's blood-curdling scream jolted Ye Chui back to his senses.
Quinn's longsword was already aimed at his chest, and the cruel sneer on the man's face announced exactly what he was about to do...
At this critical moment, a faint smile appeared on Ye Chui's face. Once more he laboriously leveled the wand at Quinn's chest.
"Lightning."
Zzzzt —
A white bolt of lightning burst from the tip of the wand and slammed straight into Quinn's chest.
Quinn let out a shriek, his huge body blasted backward, and with a loud crash he flattened a whole row of shelves...
And the boy in the black mage's robe landed lightly on the floor. He gave the wand a casual flick at his side, and at that moment he felt only one thing.
"Holy shit, that was cool as hell~~~"