Oath Of Iron And Fire

Chapter 3 Antoine Laurent and his magic system (Part 1)

"Hey, I can't explain it clearly. Let me demonstrate the magic to you, and then you will understand." Winters slapped his thigh, thinking that a thousand words would not be as good as an actual demonstration.

"Okay." Hearing that Winters was going to show real magic in front of him, Ike nodded.

The spellcasters in the school were all mysterious, and the school strictly prohibited them from asking about spellcasters. This was the first time Ike discussed magic and spellcasters with Winters.

As for Winters, he and Ike had studied together for six years since prep school, and this was the first time Winters had heard Ike express envy of his status as a spellcaster. This was even the first time Winters had heard Ike express envy of anything, which made Winters feel obligated to satisfy Ike's curiosity.

Winters squeezed out a few drops of sweat from his armor and dripped onto the stone bench. He first focused on his sword and practiced concentrating, then Winters pressed his left index finger with his left thumb and tried to recall the feeling of using spells in the past.

From Ike's perspective, Winters was just standing there, staring at the drops of water. But for Winters, he began to feel a "strange" squeezing and stinging sensation.

These squeezing and tingling sensations did not come from any place inside or outside his body, not from any part of his skin, any part of his tissue, or any part of his bone, but he definitely felt the squeezing and tingling.

But Winters was already familiar with this, and he tried to endure and overcome the squeezing and stinging, and soon a layer of fine sweat appeared on his forehead. Finally, the few drops of water that dripped onto the stone bench disappeared.

"Okay!" Winters clapped his hands and breathed a sigh of relief.

"That's it?" Ike asked, confused.

"That's it," Winters replied matter-of-factly.

"Is this magic?" Ike asked doubtfully.

"This is magic," Winters answered Ike confidently.

"How could this be magic?" Ike felt really confused.

"This is magic. You don't understand magic, so I showed you what magic is, but you still didn't believe it." Winters also felt very aggrieved.

"Isn't this (expletive) just water evaporating? Isn't this (expletive) just a few drops of water evaporated by the wind?" Ike was so angry that he laughed.

"Don't worry, just listen to me and I'll explain it to you." Winters cleared his throat and began to explain: "The disappearance of these drops of water in front of you is different from the evaporation of water when the wind blows. These drops of water were turned into water vapor by my magic, and they will disappear even if there is no wind."

"First of all, you have to understand that using magic is just an ability, no different from other human abilities. Just like some people run very fast and some people jump very high." Winters talked about his intuitive feelings.

Ike frowned.

"Just like fish can swim without learning, birds can fly without learning. I can indeed use magic, but I don't know the principles behind it. I can simply use this ability." Winters thought about it and felt that his explanation was still not clear.

He thought that he should start with Ike so that Ike could understand: "Just like you don't know why everyone is practicing swordsmanship but your level is higher? I think swordsmanship talent and magic talent are similar in nature."

"My swordsmanship comes from my hard practice." Ike felt that he had to correct Winters' wrong idea.

"If you insist that you have no talent for swordsmanship and that you became the best in the school only through hard work, that's unreasonable." Winters refuted Ike and said, "There are others who practice as hard as you, or even harder than you, but they are still not as good as you. I don't deny the role of hard work, but we can't ignore the difference in talent, right?"

"Tell me who is more diligent in swordsmanship than me?" Ike felt very unconvinced.

"Bud." Winters threw out a name without hesitation.

"Bard... Bard is indeed more hardworking than me, but I think his swordsmanship is not good because he has been exposed to swordsmanship for too short a time... Oh, never mind, go on." This name made Ike lose his temper.

"I didn't say that your swordsmanship is all about talent. Without talent and hard work, you can't become a top swordsman." Winters made a verdict: "But you can't deny the role of talent just because of hard work. That would be an insult to those who work harder but are not as good as you."

"Let me think about where I was going... Magic is an innate ability. The caster can only use it but does not know the principles." Winters reorganized his thoughts that were disrupted by Ike.

"But magic can achieve many different effects. Those few drops of water just now didn't evaporate. They were turned into water vapor by me. Do you feel the wind blowing?" Winters said as he made a gesture of thumb pressing middle finger, entered the casting state, and used wind control to create a breeze between the two of them.

"Do you feel this wind? This wind is also achieved through magic." Winters couldn't hold on for a while and stopped casting the spell.

"I just felt a little breeze blowing on my face. Is this magic?" Ike did feel the wind blowing on him just now.

"This is just the effect of magic. When I use magic on you, you don't feel the 'magic', you only feel the effect of the magic."

"Just like when I used wind control just now, did you feel the magic? No, you just felt the wind. You couldn't even tell whether it was natural wind or magical wind."

"The human eye cannot see magic, people can only observe the effects of magic. Because the effects of magic are numerous and disorganized, we need to summarize and generalize, and transform our perceptual knowledge into rational knowledge."

"What is sensory knowledge? What is rational knowledge?" This was the first time Ike heard these two new terms.

"To put it simply, at the beginning, spellcasters only knew how to use magic, which is emotional cognition. Some great men were not satisfied with just knowing how to use it, and tried to summarize and find out the internal laws of magic, which is rational cognition." Winters was tired of talking, so he changed from sitting on the stone floor to sitting on a stone bench.

Winters thought he had to give an example from something Ike was familiar with: "Like swordsmanship, people who first used swords would only know how to swing and chop randomly, but after using the sword more, they would discover a few useful routines and gain so-called experience, which is perceptual cognition.

If a swordsmanship master can develop a swordsmanship theory system, so that people without experience can also learn swordsmanship, and can also invent more powerful swordsmanship moves based on the swordsmanship theory system, then this is rational knowledge. Let me use the few drops of water as an example. "

"First of all, think about it, if you put water in an iron pot and boil it on the stove, the water will eventually boil dry and disappear, right?" Winters first explained the basis of the reasoning.

Ike nodded. It is common sense that water will be dried up by fire.

"Where did the water go?" Winters asked persuasively.

"It turns into water vapor," Ike answered without hesitation. It is common sense that white water vapor appears when water boils.

"The process of boiling water is that water is burned by fire and then turns into water vapor, right?" Winters continued to ask.

"Isn't this nonsense?" Ike was a little irritated by Winters' nonsense.

"Here comes the key point. Listen carefully. General Antoine Laurent believes that it is the effect of fire that causes water to turn into water vapor." Winters carefully explained the alliance's magical history.

"At the same time, the general believes that using magic to turn water into water vapor, although there is no open flame, can achieve the same result as boiling water. In essence, magic is playing a role instead of flame. You didn't see any open flame just now, did you?" Winters asked Ike.

"I definitely didn't see any flames." Ike was sure that he didn't see any open flames.

"So this kind of ability whereby magic takes the place of fire was summarized by General Antoine Laurent as fire magic. The above is the general's reasoning process for summarizing fire magic."

"Similarly, 'the ability to accelerate objects' is summarized as acceleration magic."

"Abilities related to sound are summarized as sound magic. These are the three major categories of spells summarized by the general," Winters said a lot in one breath.

"Huh?" Ike was completely stunned.

"Think back to the gust of wind just now. That was magic used to speed up the wind, so it was acceleration magic. This spell is called Wind Harnessing. If what was accelerated was the nails, it would be Arrow Harnessing." Winters quickly helped Ike review the previous knowledge points.

"Before General Antoine Laurent summarized these three categories of magic, the Alliance knew nothing about what magic was."

"And it's different from the usual practice of first having a perceptual understanding and then a rational understanding. Magic is monopolized by the emperor and the nobles, and the general himself is not a magician. He started from scratch and relied on his experience of facing the imperial court magicians on the battlefield several times to summarize the three major categories of magic and gain rational understanding.

It is equivalent to a person who has never touched a sword for a day, but has only been wounded by others with a sword, but has summed up a set of sword-fighting theories, and they are truly effective sword-fighting theories.

It was the general who first constructed the magic theory system, and then invented the detection equipment based on the magic theory system, so that the alliance could select people with magic talent from the crowd. "Winters recalled the deeds of General Antoine Laurent and said admiringly.

Winters then added, "If a person has no long-term training and only has magical talent, his ability is very weak, so weak that he and others cannot detect it on a daily basis. If it weren't for General Antoine Laurent, there would be no magicians in the Alliance."