Ouch, ouch, ouch.

In his excitement, Fabric completely forgot his tongue was injured. When he spoke, his teeth scraped against the burn, and it felt like someone had stomped on his outstretched tongue.

"Ah, isn’t it our lunch break?" The student jumped, thinking he’d broken a rule by playing a game.

Fabric waved a hand to show it was nothing, then grabbed a piece of paper and wrote that he just wanted to ask what game he was playing.

"Oh, it’s Druid vs. Necromancer. The full version was just released today," the student replied. "I thought you weren’t interested in games."

This particular student was the most addicted gamer in the entire building. When a new game was released, he’d often skip proper meals, just grabbing a piece of bread and using every second of his break to play.

Fabric himself wasn’t particularly interested in games. His children, on the other hand, were always clamoring to go to the game store.

Every time they went, his kids would play while he zoned out or thought about some easy, low-effort optimizations to meet his performance targets.

So his entire understanding of games was limited to the one his two kids loved most, with one character in a red hat and another in a green hat, jumping around on various platforms and between monsters.

"Do you want to try it?" Fabric’s grim expression was making the student’s skin crawl, so he tried to ease the awkward atmosphere.

He had no idea what his advisor was up to. All the students had noticed that he hadn’t been in the right state of mind recently.

The man would just bang his head on the desk for no reason. It was super creepy. At one point, the student suspected he was being controlled by a Necromancer and was about to turn into an undead corpse.

But he wasn’t a Druid, so he couldn’t grow a peashooter to protect himself.

Fabric stared intently at the screen, and he finally understood where those three colors were coming from.

One pea shot green projectiles, and there was a blue pea that shot blue projectiles.

Green projectiles passing through a flaming tree stump were ignited, turning them red, while blue projectiles passing through it turned green.

The entire right side of the screen was dense with these three types of projectiles, which would blend into various colors when one’s vision blurred.

’Why is this happening?’

Before he’d begun his research on a color Magic Vision Device, he had consulted a Painter for an opinion.

In the beginning, he too had felt that getting a single screen to display all colors was unrealistic, whereas Painters could mix a huge variety of colors from just a few pigments.

He learned that in painting, one could theoretically mix any desired color using magenta, cyan, and yellow.

So he experimented with fluorescent materials that could emit these three colors, but he quickly got stuck.

First, how to mix these three colors on the screen was a huge problem. Second, after repeatedly layering the three lights at different intensities, he found they couldn’t produce many new colors.

He couldn’t even match the number of colors produced by the three types of projectiles zipping across the screen.

Fabric seemed to have realized something and immediately launched the Social Circle.

Every lab was equipped with a Magical Device for logging into the Social Circle, convenient for researchers who lacked the ability to use Casting.

He opened an internal Zog Group forum: the Web of Knowledge.

It archived nearly every paper one could find and was equipped with a search function.

It was free, so reposting papers didn’t create any intellectual property issues.

Fabric loved the Web of Knowledge. It was much more convenient than digging through stacks of books in the library.

He also appreciated Zog’s decision to not charge for it. If they charged money to read papers, they could probably make a killing.

He had read a large number of papers on color recently, and he searched from memory for one he had read before.

It was about how the color we see from an object is the color it reflects.

That was why his magenta, cyan, and yellow fluorescent materials couldn’t produce the colors he needed when layered.

Pigments work by reflecting light, while fluorescent materials emit light themselves. The Illusion Technique projections for games are also light-emissive.

’The principles of color presentation are completely different.’

’I’ll note down red, green, and blue first. Later, I’ll verify if fluorescent materials of these three colors can synthesize all the others.’

But first, he had to confirm something else.

He walked up to the game screen, starting extremely close, and backed away little by little until the colors in his vision blended together.

And then, Fabric understood.

’I was too obsessed with literal mixing, always trying to layer different kinds of light on top of one another.’

’But it’s completely unnecessary. As long as each light source is small enough, they’ll appear blended from the viewer’s perspective, presenting a new color.’

’It’s just like looking at those densely packed projectiles from a distance.’

He immediately canceled his scheduled treatment. A mere burn couldn’t be allowed to block his path to discovering the truth.

Deep down, every accomplished researcher probably has a bit of a workaholic streak.

Fabric didn’t even eat, diving straight into his experiment.

He couldn’t be bothered with neatness or rigor. He just started testing the fluorescent materials on one of the walls.

The student watched from the side, his heart pounding. ’How many rules from the "Laboratory Precautions" manual did he just violate? Is this lab going to explode?’

’I chose to join this lab because I thought researching light wouldn’t have any safety issues. Now, I’m not so sure.’

Fabric grouped three fluorescent materials together, treating them as a single light-emitting unit. This would be the smallest unit making up the color screen.

He decided to call this unit a "pixel," the smallest indivisible element of an image.

Then, he set up a Magic Array across from the wall to activate the fluorescent materials on it.

In truth, a Magic Vision Device only has one Magic Power Emission Tube that scans from one side to the other, but for this experiment, he didn’t have time to make such a large tube.

So he bundled three tubes together to correspond to a single pixel on the wall.

Besides, the lab had plenty of emission tubes.

This was the largest experimental setup Fabric had ever created.

With its coarse wiring and wild style, it already had some of the flair of a goblin creation.

What doctoral student isn’t a little mad?

He manually fed different intensities to the emission tubes to verify the color synthesis.

By the time he finished all this, it was late at night.

The student also realized Fabric was engaged in incredibly important work, so he stayed and worked overtime with him.

Working overtime. A daily occurrence in the lab.

Even though it was nearly the next day, the lights in more than half the rooms in the building were still on.

But Fabric turned off the lights in his lab.

He ran all the way to a room in another building that faced his lab, a room from which he could see the colored wall through the window.

The student stayed behind in the lab to change the preset activation intensities of the emission tubes according to the plan.

Fabric issued commands via a Chatting Spell.

"Ready?"

"Ready."

"Power on!"

After a short delay, patches of the three primary colors lit up on the wall, each with a different intensity.

But from Fabric’s perspective dozens of meters away, it was a brilliantly colorful wall—a wall that announced he wouldn’t have to worry about his performance reviews for a long time to come.

He suddenly felt Yuno might have had a point; sometimes, chaos can lead to creativity.

With the principle proven, the next step was implementation.

The goblins in charge of implementation were as efficient as ever, cranking out the first prototype of the color Magic Vision Device in less than a week.

However, to meet the deadline, the workmanship was a little on the wild side.

Zog looked at the machine on the desk, which didn’t even have a casing. The three picture tubes were completely exposed. He reached out a claw, unsure where would even be safe to touch.

’Now that’s what I call extreme cooling. Looks like one of those budget PC builds, doesn’t it?’