Virtual Reality… Or Rather, Illusion Magic Tutoring
In one corner of the academy's main building lay Professor Ash's personal laboratory. As soon as the door opened, a thick herbal scent wafted past their noses.
"Oh, Rian. Come on in."
Professor Ash was sunk deep into a plush sofa, idly scribbling all sorts of letters in the air with illusion magic for fun. Most of them were meaningless scribbles. Her ash-gray hair was tousled, as if she hadn't bothered with it. That languid vibe somehow gave off an oddly alluring charm.
Spotting Rian, she lit up and pulled herself upright. Her gaze then shifted to the two girls trailing naturally behind him, and she gave them a light nod in greeting.
"The princess and the lady have come along too. Welcome. Make yourselves comfortable."
"Pardon the intrusion, Professor."
Ardelia gracefully smoothed her skirt hems and settled onto one sofa alongside Vesperia. Vesperia, clutching Blackie to her chest, beamed brightly and plopped down right next to Ardelia.
Professor Ash's eyes soon locked onto Rian. But as she stared intently at him, a faint tremor rippled through her ash-gray irises.
"Hold on a second, Rian."
She leaned forward abruptly. The drowsiness in her eyes sharpened in an instant, like a predator's.
"Your mana fluctuations… they're completely different from this morning. Earlier, it felt like a suppressed storm, but now it's like an unfathomable abyss. What on earth did you do to yourself in that short time?"
It was the keen insight of a 7-Circle high mage. Even if his 5-Circle pentract structure formed a closed system that perfectly concealed his mana, the faint residual echoes lingered right after he'd just twisted the dimensional axis to complete it.
Especially for Professor Ash, a master of illusion magic, gauging Rian's state surpassed even the discernment of 8-Circle archmages.
Rian flopped into an empty chair and replied.
"Ah, yeah. I just advanced to 5-Circle."
"…Pardon?"
Professor Ash's lips parted slightly. She wondered if she'd misheard.
"To cut down on overload, I twisted the circle structure into a multidimensional one. Thanks to that, my brain fatigue vanished, and my processing speed shot up about tenfold. I've got ten perfectly independent cores inside me now."
Rian explained his changes matter-of-factly. But Professor Ash's mind was anything but calm upon hearing that brief summary.
"5-Circle? You were 4-Circle this morning, and after dinner, you hit 5-Circle?"
Her voice trembled. She shot to her feet.
"And on top of that, ten times the processing speed and ten independent cores? Rian, do you even realize what you're saying?"
"Yeah. I know exactly."
Rian stared back at her blankly. Professor Ash hurriedly ducked her head, worried her expression might give her away.
Hah… insanely… cool! Lady Iril! Thank you so much for giving me this gem! Ahh… it's so ecstatic I might just faint!
This terrifying disaster-class talent holder was showing the greatest interest in illusion magic. Forcing down her quivering ecstasy, she slumped back onto the sofa. Her gaze turned deadly serious as she met Rian's eyes.
"Rian. Do you know why, in the world of mages, 6-Circle marks a high mage and 8-Circle earns the title of archmage?"
"Not because of raw power, I bet. Some special conditions, right?"
Professor Ash nodded at Rian's answer.
"Exactly. It's not just stronger spells or bigger mana reservoirs. The real reason is overcoming the limits of computational power."
She tapped her temple with a finger.
"The higher the circle, the exponentially more complex the formulas for casting spells become. Up to 5-Circle, a single human brain can barely handle it. But from 6-Circle onward, ordinary neurons can't process that massive data volume. It's beyond computable."
"Hmm."
Rian nodded. Recalling the overload from designing his 5-Circle that morning made it click. He'd even used Goo-ams as a makeshift heatsink to endure the pentract's computational load.
"So mages aiming for 6-Circle have to rethink everything for survival. They artificially create 'auxiliary computation cores' made of mana inside their circles and link them to the brain with specialized structures."
Professor Ash continued her explanation.
"Double casting or triple casting—what geniuses are said to monopolize—aren't possible because they have two or three brains. They're just the result of splitting cores via this auxiliary magic."
A spark lit in Rian's brown eyes as he listened. Inference and logical computation whirred terrifyingly in his mind.
To prevent overload, they build multi-cores inside the circle and link them.
It was essentially identical to the structure of his freshly completed 5-Circle pentract—housing ten independent tesseracts for tenfold parallel processing in a geometrically compressed code.
The mages in this world aren't idiots. They've been grappling with computational bottlenecks in a similar direction to me.
Rian inwardly marveled. Of course, the 6-Circle mages' method—spending decades to barely add one or two cores—was inefficient. Lacking topological math to twist dimensions, they'd crammed them into flat rings. It demanded not just knowledge but intuition too. Efficiency-wise, it couldn't compare to his ten-core setup.
But the overarching algorithm is similar. A rational survival method born from centuries of magical history. Worth learning.
Intellectual curiosity stirred in Rian.
"Professor. Can you show me the formula structure those 6-Circle mages use to link multi-cores?"
Professor Ash smiled faintly and nodded at his earnest request.
"Of course. Since you've already mastered ten independent cores at the 5-Circle stage, tweaking the 6-Circle linkage formula should let you apply it immediately in amazing ways."
She rose and approached the blackboard, picking up chalk to densely scribble complex magical symbols and ancient Arke.
Rian scanned and decoded the formulas in his head without blinking. From the back sofa, Vesperia petted Blackie blankly while staring at the board.
"Whoa. The black stuff's the board, and the white's the writing."
Vesperia didn't understand a thing. Ardelia, meanwhile, strained her eyes trying to grasp the formulas. But to her, with knowledge only up to 4-Circle, the 6-Circle multi-core linkage was like alien script.
I can't make heads or tails of it. Is this the realm beyond 6-Circle?
As Ardelia quietly swallowed a sigh, Professor Ash's lecture finally shifted to the main topic: illusion magic.
"Once multi-core linkage is possible, that's when illusion magic truly shines. It's not just refracting light in the air to project fake images."
Deep pride colored her voice.
"It's a delicate process injecting full sensory data—sight, sound, smell, touch—directly into the target's nervous system via mana. Like force-feeding sentences from a novel I've written straight into their brain."
It matched exactly the rhetorical theory Rian had pondered while dismantling illusion magic that morning. Professor Ash poured out knowledge from basic frameworks to advanced multisensory synchronization without restraint.
Rian devoured it all, running his ten parallel cores at full throttle.
Rendering code for visual data. Frequency modulation for audio. Mana density control to stimulate touch nerves.
A satisfied smile tugged at Rian's lips. In his mind, a massive virtual reality simulation was already spinning up based on her knowledge.
This database is plenty.
Rian coldly weighed his current mana reserves against his ten-core processing power. His true goal was an open-world-grade virtual reality with perfectly synchronized senses.
To run a flawless VR without lag, I'd need at least 7-Circle-level computation and capacity. Protocols for spatial expansion and multi-user handling are still lacking.
But he wasn't disappointed.
Still, I could whip up a small-scale story or a single-room scenario right now.
His thoughts didn't stop there.
Wait. Instead of just injecting data into the brain, what if I overlay the illusion texture on real-world coordinates? If I project the illusion into the air while preserving mana mass.
That veered into augmented reality territory, beyond mere VR.
Augmented reality by layering illusions over reality? Done right, I could even give illusions physical substance via mana.
It was the dream any modern person would thrill at. His body itched to test if his theory worked. Creation lust burned hot. AR needed more prep, but VR he could try now.
As Professor Ash wrapped up the theory lecture, Rian raised a hand lightly.
"Thanks for the explanation, Professor. I think I've got the theory down."
"Already? All that volume?"
Professor Ash blinked in surprise, but Rian snapped his fingers instead of answering.
Snap—
With a light friction sound, his ten cores spun wildly in unison, flooding the air with vast formulas. The space in the lab's center warped faintly, birthing a transparent dome barrier about three meters across—tiny and simple illusion magic.
"What's this, Rian?"
"A small-scale virtual reality… or rather, illusion demo I just made."
Rian turned to Vesperia, who was playing with Blackie oblivious to the boring theory lesson, and Ardelia petting her head.
"Vesperia, and Your Highness."
At his call, the two girls perked up from the sofa.
"Want to step into the small-scale illusion demo I just made?"