The Genius of Cloning in the Academy City-Chapter 165: Violet Will Store Magic! (2)

Morning chaos left Violet and her clones deep in thought. It wasn’t just because the dining hall had been wrecked and the plate of fries overturned.

“I got new tables and chairs! There’s a hole in the ceiling, but I think we can patch it.”

A sudden beam shooting out of someone’s hand caused some minor problems, but it wasn’t anything we couldn’t fix ourselves.

Thanks to Daphne’s quick response, our friends weren’t injured, just startled.

The real issue was that we couldn’t figure out why it happened, no matter how much we thought about it.

“This is strange. Why did magic activate without any preparation?”

“It was out of control!”

We gathered together and brainstormed. Discussions erupted inside and outside the Violet network.

“Could it be that we overtrained? Maybe we practiced so much magic at once that it messed up our minds!”

Unit No. 50 expressed concern, raising an unexpected possibility that stirred the other Violets.

“Yeah, our heads have exploded pretty often lately. That must have had a bad effect on us!”

“Oh no! What if beams randomly shoot out of our hands every day?”

As negative ideas spread, I couldn’t help but feel a bit scared. Uncontrollable magic beams made us living bombs.

“Maybe our bodies are mutating!”

“What do we do? Should we start wearing gloves? Maybe we can block it with some enchanted ones!”

“We’re turning into mutants! This is the end!”

Some panicked Violets screamed within the network, and it got so bad that Unit No. 1 had to step in urgently to calm everyone down.

“Everyone, calm down! There’s no evidence that we’ve mutated or that something’s wrong with our bodies.”

Gradually, we regained composure.

Thinking about it, panicking without solid evidence wasn’t a good approach. The Violets felt a little embarrassed.

“Then what’s the reason for magic suddenly shooting out of our hands?”

“For now, let’s sit and think about it. Everyone, recall what you were doing, when, and where during breakfast.”

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We retraced what had happened around the time of our morning meal.

Some were frying potatoes, others were cleaning weapons or washing up.

And some Violets…

“The explosives team was cleaning the workshop, the security team was patrolling around the house, and the training team was asleep.”

“Not all of them! Some were awake, eating, then went back to sleep… Wait, this is a magic issue. Did the training team do something? Trainees, all hands up.”

Within the network, all Violets raised their hands. Moments later, Unit No. 15 frowned.

“Huh? Why didn’t we notice this sooner? Hey, Unit No. 377! What did you do?”

“Hehe… Why are you calling me? Wait, huh?!”

I realized what I had done. That oddly loud, crumbling stone I smashed wasn’t just any old object.

“Ugh! I didn’t know it would trigger magic! I thought it was some kind of prank installed in the network.”

Unit No. 377’s defense raised new questions among us. Unit No. 972 asked, “...Seriously? Did that stone even exist before?”

“I checked all our memories, and no one installed anything like that.”

“Then it must’ve appeared naturally.”

We turned our heads. In the network’s sky, potato fries were still flying through the air.

Sometimes, fun situations or meals we enjoyed randomly manifested in the network, and this scene seemed to belong to that phenomenon.

“It’s too artificial to have formed unconsciously.”

That’s right. If it were a product of subconscious influence, it would have resembled real-world objects more closely.

One Violet voiced an idea.

“Let’s search the network. There might be more of those things!”

It sounded reasonable.

We started scouring the network’s virtual streets for similar-looking stones, carefully inspecting our surroundings.

After about an hour in real-time, we returned to the plaza, each carrying strange stone fragments we found in alleyways.

“Got them!”

“One, two, three… There are three in total.”

Up close, the stones looked like intricate electronic circuits.

One resembled the one in Unit No. 377’s memory, but the other two didn’t.

“What are they for?”

“They’re definitely magic-related. They look like the formulas that appear when magic activates!”

Unit No. 789 stepped forward with a hammer in hand.

“Let’s smash one! If breaking it was the cause, one of us will probably shoot a beam out of our palms again.”

Unit No. 789 was about to swing the hammer when Unit No. 665 barely stopped her just before the stone slab shattered.

“Wait, stop! If it’s real magic, wouldn’t it make more sense to use a staff? Let’s equip one with me, far from others. Staves are made of materials that conduct magic well—they might attract magic like a lightning rod!”

It was a decent idea. Violets who were playing on the deserted island quickly retrieved a staff and aimed it toward the beach.

“Alright, breaking it now. One, two, three!”

Unit No. 789 smashed the stone slab with her hammer. A mysterious, glowing energy burst upward like fireworks, surging quickly toward the ceiling. At the same time, I felt my magic being forcibly drained somewhere.

“Whoa! It’s just like in the memory!”

Meanwhile, on the deserted island, Unit No. 1002, who was holding the staff, was startled. An undeployed magic circle materialized at the tip of the staff, and energy began to condense.

“It’s real! It’s firing!”

Soon, a thin red beam collided with the seawater. A hissing sound followed, and steam rose into the air. The beam quickly dissipated, but all the Violets who saw it were in awe.

“This, this is!”

Indeed, despite its poor range and power, the magic beam that scorched the dining hall and shot out of the staff was the fusion beam spell we had been so eager to master.

“It’s incomplete, but it’s a fusion beam!”

“That’s amazing!”

Suddenly, an idea struck me like lightning. Perhaps, we had stumbled upon a breakthrough in magic training in the most unexpected way.

After breaking all the remaining slabs, our confidence grew even stronger.

“There it is! Crimson Wave!”

“Electric Strike!”

Magic emerged from the staffs. Small waves of fire licked the sand on the beach, while electrical spheres popped and fizzled.

These were spells we had previously failed to cast!

Excited Violets began chattering.

“These slabs might look strange, but they’re definitely magic formulas. If we had a lot of them, we wouldn’t need to calculate formulas—we could just fire spells endlessly!”

This discovery was on par with a caveman finding fire. Overwhelmed with excitement, we decided to name the slabs.

“They look just like electronic circuits. How about calling them Magic USBs?”

“No! They look like SD cards. From now on, these are Vision Memory Chips!”

After a brief debate, we agreed to call the slabs “Vision Memory Chips,” inspired by the artifact Vision Prism we had encountered in a previous adventure.

“If we can mass-produce these…”

“We’d be able to cast tons of spells without any preparation!”

For a fleeting moment, the Violets dreamt of becoming Archmages.

Sadly, the breakthrough we thought we had discovered came with a new challenge.

“How do we make them?”

We tried our best to recreate the Vision Memory Chips we had seen in the Violet Network.

Although they were clearly a product of our magic training, we failed to reproduce them.

Attempts to create the Vision Memory Chips resulted in two outcomes: either magic was fired normally, or mana was simply wasted.

“This is strange! Why isn’t it working?”

We proposed several hypotheses. One Violet suggested that the Vision Memory Chips were a byproduct of the subconscious, created naturally during magic training in the network.

Another argued that the chips only lasted a short time and urged us to hurry and search the network.

“Could they be underground? Maybe there’s a Vision Chip mine here!”

“You idiot! The Violet Network doesn’t have ground!”

Desperate, we even tried mimicking formula computations or transforming the network environment into mines, factories, or magic training fields.

“Argh! Why won’t they appear!”

Even after a late lunch, we found no answers, so we decided to seek advice from an expert.

“Professor, is there a way to store magic?”

During a break in our private lessons, I got a chance to ask Professor Albert. He responded with a look that asked, “Don’t you already know this?”

“A way to store magic? Of course, through artifacts or magical equipment.”

“No, not that. I mean, is there a way to store magic in someone’s mind—like formulas? That way, you wouldn’t need to deploy magic; you could use it immediately, like a unique ability.”

The professor shook his head.

“Oh, I see. You’re asking if it’s possible to pre-deploy a formula, then store it in your mind to use later, like putting money in and out of a wallet. The short answer is no. You might as well try putting cigarette smoke back into the cigarette. It’s no different from trying to preserve fire in its original shape.”

“But what about magical equipment or barriers? Their formulas are fixed, and you can use them by just channeling mana.”

“Magical equipment’s circuits and arrays have physical substance and are fixed. Human thoughts, on the other hand, lack physical substance and are constantly changing. There’s no container or method to fix and store thoughts. How would you preserve a formula?”

The professor’s explanation made sense.

“Then how do skilled wizards cast multiple spells at once? I thought they prepped magic in their minds beforehand.”

“That’s just a skill unique to wizards proficient in computation. Think of it this way: a computer seems to do many things simultaneously, but it’s actually handling one task at a time at incredible speed. It just looks like multitasking to us. Wizards are the same.”

“I see.”

I continued asking the professor questions, but I didn’t gain any significant clues.

“Creating and storing a framework of thoughts? I don’t really get it. Maybe the professor is right, and we’re chasing the wrong idea.”

“Maybe it really was just a coincidence.”