Genius Mage in a Cultivation World

The rolling monsters clearly didn't have any intention of respecting the romantic moment between Layn and Irea. Right when Layn made his oath, the rumbling caused by their continuous advance once again reached the couple's ears. It put a stop to the comfy atmosphere the two of them were immersing themselves in. 

"I will protect you," Layn announced once again, filled with confidence. But as he turned his head around towards the source of the noises, his confidence turned into a troubled expression. "But I guess I need to deal with those monsters first," he said before helping Irea up and turning towards the noise. 

"Wait, I didn't tell you how I did them..." Irea stumbled as she rushed forward, worried that Layn would just leave her anyway. 

"It's okay, I'm not going anywhere," the archmage turned his head around before sending the girl a wink. He then turned back to the direction the monsters were coming from and closed his eyes. 

His hands reached forth as if he attempted to grasp something ahead. But rather than just tightening into fists, his fingers started to weave the air as if Layn was actually holding a spool of invisible thread. 

'There is no need to hurry. I have a lot of time,' Layn continued to slow himself down. As someone used to the super-rapid pace of fighting, weaving the spells using the classical method just felt weird. 

Rather than creating structures with his mind alone and just shaping the mana as it was outputted, Layn this time went with the more time-consuming yet far more efficient method. 

The manual spell casting consisted of three steps.

First, a mage would pour a tiny bit of magic out of his fingers as he would weave different shapes together directly in the air in front of him. Each shape would have a specific function connected to the inner mechanisms of one's own mind. 

The shapes would be connected to a phenomenon or instances through the mage's memory. Someone who grew with a stove in his kitchen would use a square for fire function, while someone who grew roasting the food over a circular fireplace would use a circle for the same function instead. 

The main problem of this so-called classical spell weaving laid in the fact that there was a limited number of geometric shapes that one could produce. As such, unless one could come up and memorize wast number of more and more complicated symbols and still be quickly withdrawing them in the thin air, there was a hard limit to how far one could take this kind of magic. 

Or at least, that's what the magical capitule of Layn's academy thought before he came in with the revolutionary thesis that granted him the title of grand mage and started his legend.

Layn's graduation theorem was split into a simple and counterintuitive part. 

The simple part was made with a single sentence, "why do we need complicated shapes for different functions if we can use simple shapes for simple functions instead?" 

This question was the founding stone of the number's magic, a discipline that was growing in popularity for quite a while before it ended up as the seventh most popular type of magic in the world. 

It took the concept that the scientists came up with, that any and all functions could always be expressed with a set of basic functions in the first place, and applied it to the magic itself. 

That's why a mage following Layn's theorem wouldn't bother creating a complicated function like "draw the air towards" but would instead use the "draw" function, "Air" target, and "six degrees to my left" as directed. By replacing the ambiguous functions with one that had strict borders to their usefulness and functionality, Layn gave birth to what later grew to be called the first scientific magic. 

The other part of Layn's theorem was what brought strenght and popularity to this otherwise obsolete approach to magic. 

Layn randomly decided that rather than using complicated functions and bringing the number of required founding functions up, one could improve the power or any other aspect of the spell... by condensing it instead. Rather than using ten basic, or rater fundamental, functions to do one thing, it was better to use a single fundamental function... but stacked ten times on itself!

Rather than using a high-tiered skill like Incinerate, Layn realized that replacing its structure with the same amount of squares and triangles that made up the simplest 'fire' function was not only easier and more efficient but also more powerful.

But even with all those things aside, even if one could successfully create a structure for his spell to prosper, there were still two more steps in the procedure. 

"Cover your eyes," Layn smiled to Irea behind him as he finally opened his eyes. 'Now that the structure is done, it's time for the worst part, huh?' he thought, as he started to fill the structure with magic. 

The second step was the exact reason why numbers magic only reigned at the top seven spots instead of at the very pinnacle of magic. It wasn't a factor that limited its power... But a factor that made it impossible to adjust the spell once its structure would be set. 

By using fluid structures, ones constructed on the go with one's thought, a mage would be versatile with what exactly he wanted to do with his magic. But what was even more important, he was free to cut it free at any time he wanted. 

Layn didn't have the same luxury right now. 

"Irea, I need you to pass me stones," the archmage uttered through his tightened lips, unable to even speak ours properly. All the energy he managed to recover so far was now gushing out of his body and filling the empty spots in the structure Layn drew a moment earlier. 

And it wouldn't tell long before Layn would completely drain his mana up without even filling half of the structure. 

"I'm on it!" Irea could sense that this wasn't the moment to hesitate or ask questions. Before Layn could ever imagine it is possible to finish the task, she was already pouring them on her palm from a small bag before pressing the same palm of hers against the side of his shoulder. 

Once Layn's exposed skin made contact with the stones, something weird happens. Even when Irea pulled her hand away, all the stones somehow stuck in a thick barrier towards Layn's shoulder, as if something was sucking them in. Yet, no matter how Irea strained her eyes, she was unable to see anything at all. 

"It's the magic draft," Layn explained as he continued to infuse the energy from the stones into his body before giving it out to the structure in front. "I'm sucking the magic out of them so quickly that it creates a physical acceleration," he explained the phenomena to the girl before turning his head back. 

Now that his spell was almost entirely filled, he had to start paying attention to it. 

Bit by bit, Layn continued to fill the structure all the way up the upper limit of how much energy it could hold. Only when not even a single bit of magic could fit, Layn redirected his energy and used the stones to refill his own mana. 

'And now the third step,' Tom thought. If the first step was the challenge to one's creativity and ability to oversee a huge thing all the way up from the smallest detail to the greatest crevice, while the second step was about amassing a perfect amount of energy to fill the structure, an amount that often proved to be too massive to handle, the third step was all about accuracy. 

With the spell that Layn constructed, this task turned out to be even harder. Given all the resources Layn had to invest in creating such an overwhelming spell, there was no way he could afford to do it again for every other monster trying to reach him. 

It was never his intention to do something like this in the first place. 

"Now, it's time to show off a bit," Layn muttered before sending another wink to the girl. And then, he just snapped his fingers. 

The third step was all about aiming. It was easily the hardest step of the procedure despite just how simple it sounded. 

In order to aim such a structure that had no initial momentum, one had to decipher the flow of magic within the structure. Acting like waves in the sea, one had to be right on the point to release the structure in just the right time for magic to be oriented in a specific way. 

Layn forced the entirety of his attention towards this task. For a moment, the world around him appeared to disappear, replaced with just the tiniest changes in the flow of magic in his structure. 

And then, he snapped his fingers. 

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