Chapter 93: Chapter 93: Magic Is Quite Scientific

Zog pretended to be reading the proposal.

To be honest, there were many parts he didn’t understand.

His entire understanding of Spatial Magic was, at best, limited to drawing circles on the ground to summon people.

And he couldn’t even summon anyone particularly powerful.

The most agonizing part was that the proposal was littered with jargon from the Spellcasting School.

Each term was a long string of words that made his head spin just looking at them.

These words were all constructed from endlessly nested root words.

Fortunately, Zog’s vocabulary was large enough that he could figure out a good deal of it through educated guesses.

But if the variety of Magic kept expanding, sooner or later the academic name for a new spell would be a single word two pages long.

The general gist of the proposal seemed to be about transmitting avatars through other Plane Spaces, but the specifics would require Master Xiao Xiong’s explanation.

As for Master Xiao Xiong, he was currently controlling an Elf based on Kagura Chizuru, locked in a clumsy battle with his opponent’s Devil, which was designed based on the Great Serpent.

A truly well-matched opponent.

They had turned a fighting game into a turn-based one. Both of their characters stood at opposite ends of the screen, and then they’d fairly take turns trying to execute moves.

Whoever managed to pull off a combo would get to chip away at the opponent’s health for that round.

It was a style of fighting game play he’d never conceived of. ’Elsa could probably come in and dominate at this level,’ he thought.

It wasn’t even as good as the traditional newbie technique for arcade games: randomly waggling the joystick and mashing the buttons.

At least that would look a little more intense.

It reminded Zog of his grandmother when she first started using smartphone apps.

Even though the UI designers had worked hard to make every button icon simple and intuitive...

...the old woman still had to ask about the function of every interactive element and jot it down in a little notebook.

Before performing any action, she’d flip through her notebook to confirm the steps, as if one wrong move meant there was no going back.

But later on, she got really into watching short videos and even used various apps to earn Gold Coins.

She’d listen to audiobooks—those farming novels about someone transmigrating back to the seventies with a system-granted space. She found them incredibly immersive.

The only problem was that he had to clean out her phone every other month. The inside was a mess, like a Gu-raising pot.

’The person who designed those app launch ads where shaking the phone counts as a click should be taken out and shot for ten minutes.’

Elderly people’s hands are already unsteady, and one ad could trigger a cascade of more ads.

Seeing Master Xiao Xiong, drenched in sweat and completely focused, Zog figured that from his perspective, it was probably a tense and heated match.

’I’ve been neglecting the older user base of the Divine Remains Network,’ he mused. ’Mages are one of the few professions that become more valuable with age.’

At the very least, these games can’t just have an "Elsa" difficulty; they need an "easier-than-Elsa" difficulty, complete with auto-combos and all that.

Zog, as a Dragon himself, held no prejudice against any style of gameplay.

Speedrunners, achievement hunters, story-driven players, sightseers, people who buy games and never play them, disciples of the Wind Spirit Moon Shadow sect, or even those whose base game is 1 GB but whose mods take up 1 TB...

...as long as they paid for the game, he respected and blessed them all.

’Looking down on others for how they play a game is pretty unnecessary.’

Finally, thanks to the game’s round timer, Master Xiao Xiong’s match came to an end.

He scraped by with a narrow victory, thanks to having a sliver more health.

"Congratulations, congratulations. Truly exquisite execution," Zog complimented.

"But of course. Even my apprentices can’t beat me at games."

’Your apprentices must be quite tactful then.’

Though he thought this, Zog said aloud, "Master, you’re as vigorous as ever."

"Your corporation, have you ever thought about putting those Shadows of Evil on this?" the Master asked, pointing to the gaming platform within the Illusion Mimicry.

"We’ve thought about it, but there are still technical issues," Zog replied.

After the Visible Inscription Workshop was developed, Zog had tried to expand the functions of the Divine Remains Network.

At the most basic level, it needed an operating system to serve as a platform for future expansions.

But the research and development work quickly hit a bottleneck.

The effects of Illusion Runes were limited; they could only process "programs" based on Illusion Techniques.

And many of the planned functions were not.

For example, displaying Shadows of Evil.

Although a Magic Crystal Stone ultimately presents a Shadow of Evil through Illusion mapping, the data is stored as digital signals composed of basic Elemental fluctuations.

This is unlike the games, where the animations are generated by controlling Illusions in real-time.

How Magic Crystal Stones read these fluctuations is actually an achievement of the Transformation School; Illusionists just reprocess and utilize it.

Similarly, the development of a great many functions couldn’t proceed because of this.

Unlike with computers, where a single programming language can do almost anything, with only differences in efficiency...

...the Divine Remains Network requires specific types of Inscriptions to implement corresponding functions.

Perhaps only when the Inscriptions of all the Schools are combined can it be called a complete language.

Zog had also tried to recruit Mages from other Schools.

The problem was that other Schools weren’t as poor as the illusionists; anyone with a bit of skill was part of the elite class.

Even offering high salaries couldn’t attract Mages of too high a level.

And for those at the Legendary Level, it was no longer a matter of money.

The Illusionists had come not just for the money, but also out of a need to legitimize their craft and achieve self-worth.

Other Schools didn’t have this spiritual need. Necromancers might, but Zog wasn’t short on those who study the dead.

He couldn’t just throw money around indiscriminately. What would the Illusionists who joined earlier think? Having their salaries inverted after only a year of work—who could stand that?

If he gave everyone a raise, well, Zog had fought for every single coin he had. If the project failed in the end...

...it would be worse to lose money than to not have earned it in the first place.

So Zog’s plan shifted to simply waiting. He could afford to wait, after all.

Wait for the Divine Remains Network’s influence to grow, attracting Mages from other Schools to join of their own accord.

It was like how if you make a good game, mods will sprout from the player community on their own.

Sometimes they’re even better than the original game.

And hadn’t he just attracted Master Xiao Xiong from the Spellcasting School? Although, he was really only here for the Demon Vision.

"So, how exactly does your proposal work? I gather it’s about transmitting avatars in other spaces?" Zog asked.

"More or less." When it came to his area of expertise, the Master was clearly much more confident than when he was playing games.

"You should know that Space Magic doesn’t create new space, right? It just opens pathways to other parallel Plane Spaces."

"I know." Zog didn’t know, but he was stubborn.

"Take the stable material plane we’re on, for example. Planes like this are very rare. Then there are planes that have matter but are unstable and can’t sustain life for long. Those are also uncommon."

"Although different planes are parallel, their scales can vary drastically. Teleportation, for example, is actually just traversing an unstable material plane with a large scale."

"So, we can also transmit the Magic Crystal Stone avatars through an unstable material plane?" Zog asked, starting to get the picture.

"No, no, no," Master Xiao Xiong said, waving his hand. "The resources in unstable material plane spaces are very scarce. They’re either all used as transit corridors or have been partitioned for storage space."

"We’ll be transmitting through non-material planes. There are plenty of these useless, unwanted spaces. Only magical energy bodies can exist in them, and even they dissipate over time. But the avatars are one-time use anyway."

"Hasn’t anyone ever thought of using these planes for long-range magical strikes?"

No matter how he heard it, Zog felt the military applications of this thing were limitless. It was impossible that nobody wanted it.

"Here’s the thing: a magic model can’t be activated after passing through an unstable plane, but an avatar..."

"...doesn’t need to be activated. It just needs to carry the wave data across," Zog finished, a look of sudden realization on his face.

’At this rate, not only can we transmit Demon Vision signals between cities, we might even be able to set up live broadcasts.’

"But there is a small problem."

"What problem?"

"We need to establish the spatial correspondence between the Main Plane and the transmission plane. To do that, we first have to set up markers all over the Continent for post-transmission identification. It’s a tedious job."

"Then it’s not a problem. Have you ever heard of a game console? Each console is assigned a network ID based on its physical location. The entire Continent is already covered in my markers."