Creating My Own Magic (2)
Flipping through the book, I found the modules packed with magic circles of all kinds of curious designs.
Every so often there was an ordinary circle whose interior was itself built from modules, but most of them looked closer to geometric drawings with magic characters woven through them.
Come to think of it, to truly master magic you had to be good at drawing — and the reason, they said, was so you could create special magic like this.
They call it "creating magic," but really it's just learning how to make the most of magic that already exists under the name of modules.
Apparently the old magic towers had been a way of sharing spells for the same reason — people gathering so they could squeeze every last drop of use out of this system.
In the end the towers vanished and became academies, but that was only because communication had gotten so easy that the whole country was basically one giant magic tower. Replacing the towers with academies — institutions that could both mass-produce mages and conduct research — was how things had ended up in their present form.
What made the system so effective was that developing a single spell suddenly meant it could be used in countless places. Conversely, you could also feel and find exactly which modules still needed inventing. Instead of crafting entire spells from scratch, people developed magic at the module level, and research became vastly more efficient.
Maybe that was how we'd ended up in an age where refrigerators and running water were all supplied by magic.
"Well, mages have been fighting over this approach since ancient times," the professor said. "Some called it treating magic as nothing more than a tool. Others insisted that, like swordsmanship, it needed a closed system of family techniques passed down through the generations. That sort of thing."
Fair enough. Creating something like that could be considered property in its own right. Being forced to share a spell you'd invented yourself could easily feel unfair.
"Of course, as you've all heard, truly difficult magic rewrites its circle on the fly depending on conditions. So unless the person who designed it can instinctively create the lines of mana themselves, it simply won't activate."
And the fact that this modular approach could never reach the level of those unique personal spells had been one of the things that shut the mouths of people arguing for closed magic back then.
Swordsmanship shared its fundamentals and only diverged into family styles at the final stage. In magic, the critics said, unique personal spells already filled that final-stage role. On top of that, wartime had driven every nation to research magic as a strategic weapon, and the people making those arguments had all had their heads cut off. None of them were left.
That was a little sad.
"I've drifted a bit into history. Let's properly look at how to use modules from here on."
The professor wrote the familiar digits from zero to nine in the air, then pointed at them and asked a question.
"Have any of you ever used numbers in a magic circle before? No, of course not. Because those values always came from the size of the magic characters themselves."
But that approach had problems — every botched revision badly damaged the original form, and setting precise values or making easy edits was difficult. So at some point, people had developed characters that clashed as little as possible with magic script while still letting you register numbers stably.
"You've all learned the dot characters, so you know this already. Placing a lone dot like this doesn't activate any magic at all."
You put that dot in the center, then recognized the number by how many strokes extended out from it. The maximum was four strokes, and counting the bare dot itself gave you five possible expressions. Drawing a circle around the outside counted as adding five. So if you started from zero, you could represent all ten digits from zero through nine.
"And as it happened, this was more convenient than the common tongue's old method of distinguishing numbers by pronunciation. It spread into everyday life quite naturally."
Unlike magic characters, which forced you to memorize difficult specific meanings, these were simple marks where you only had to count the strokes. That seemed to be the reason. So even though the number system had been invented for magic, it was identical to the ordinary numbers we already used — no extra studying required.
"So how do we put these numbers to work? The first place numbers get used is in a module's trigger."
Modules were built from three parts — trigger, main, and return. When conditions matched and mana entered the trigger in the right pattern, it activated the main registered with the same number. Once everything that needed doing was done, control passed to the return, which restored all the mana the module had been using and shut the spell down.
Yeah, this is just coding with pictures, isn't it?
At this rate you could probably make a simple game with magic. That thought led to another: if mages were already this familiar with the system, maybe all I'd need to do was build a computer and they'd write the programs themselves. I'd just have to make the language as close as possible to the magic-circle module system.
"So if I fire a trigger marked seven, the main marked seven activates?"
"Right. You can put in as many triggers as you want. But if the main is already running, it waits until the return finishes."
So the function names from coding were just numbers here. That was definitely going to be a headache. In the coding I knew, naming things made them easy to read at a glance — here you had to do it all with digits.
"And these numbers get used in other ways as well."
When you fired a module through its trigger, you could specify a particular value. That was often designed to let you choose the module's power output, options, and so on — which meant the same module could be used in multiple forms.
"For example, this module produces fire, and you can set a number from zero to nine. Zero leaves barely a trace of warmth. Nine is maximum output — a flame this powerful."
Even so, the size of the magic characters still controlled the absolute maximum output, so character size remained an important factor.
Listening to the explanation, I found it wasn't particularly hard — at least not for me. I'd learned the basics of coding back in university, and this was exactly that level of material.
"Oh, it actually works."
After the lecture ended, I decided I needed practice. Nia and I headed back to the dorm and started testing how Module Magic actually behaved.
Honestly, it felt like I was practicing Hello, world! all over again…
Still, there's one huge difference from coding.
This system never made you want to write anything complicated. Because every time you cast, you had to redraw the entire thing from scratch. Adding more drawing just to make a small improvement was basically making the magic worse. At best it was closer to an efficient launch system for certain prebuilt spells.
"…This looks like a module that checks whether an egg has been ovulated. Should we try it?"
"Hey! Hey!"
In a way it was practical information, but seeing a spell like that in a lecture textbook still felt weird.
Nia's comment, though, had already derailed us. What started as practicing simple magic mutated into hunting for the strangest modules we could find.
"There was a spell like this?"
It seemed to be magic that washed a person's skin completely clean. I wondered why anyone would bother with such a complicated module when plain water would do — until I read the description. No soap needed, cleaner than soap, and it didn't splash or mess up the surroundings the way water did. I nodded.
Do mages use this when they want to wash their hands discreetly?
Curiosity got the better of me. I cast it. A transparent liquid appeared in the air, wrapped around my hands, wriggled this way and that as it scrubbed them, then vanished in an instant.
My hands felt as squeaky-clean as if I'd scrubbed them hard with a soapy towel — only far gentler on the skin, almost soothing.
"Not bad."
The circle was fairly complex, though. The only real downside was that washing your hands the normal way would be much faster. Honestly, for anything ordinary, just drawing a single water character was more economical. Who had time to draw all this?
"Hmm. And Record Magic can't even use it — the minimum output sits just a little above what Record Magic can cover."
"Yeah. Even with a circle this complicated, a function like this feels like it should've been turned into a magic tool already. I kept wondering why it hasn't."
I started thinking about using it on body parts that were harder to wash than hands. The first idea was cleaning the inside of my mouth. I actually tried it — the moment the liquid touched my tongue, the taste was so foul I nearly threw up. It left nothing behind once it was done, so I'd figured licking my clean hands would be fine since there was no taste or smell… wrong.
Next I thought about using it on hair. The module's coverage area was so narrow that you had to carefully reposition and repeat it multiple times. I managed somehow because I was a guy with short hair, but if I'd had a woman's long hair I would have given up immediately. And the people who actually struggled with washing and drying their hair were long-haired women, so using it on hair was pretty pointless anyway.
"Somewhere that would be really nice to clean thoroughly, without soap or irritation…"
A thought struck me. I found myself staring at Nia's cute little rear end, lost in consideration.
…Yeah. That might actually work.