Chương 228

The sun was bright. The air smelled like cheap rum and pirate sweat. He saw Rudra standing nearby, casually leaning on a black staff. The young Duke had just finished slapping another pirate crew into unconsciousness. Mumud did his job without saying anything as this was already the 6th time he was doing this. He drew a massive teleportation circle and sent the rescued villagers and the tied-up pirates directly to Stormbreak. When the light faded, the beach was empty. Only Mumud and Rudra remained.

"Thank you, Mumud," Rudra said, turning around.

"I know you were probably busy reading."

"I was researching," Mumud corrected politely. Rudra smiled. He walked over and stood next to the ocean, looking out at the crashing waves.

"Hey, Mumud," Rudra said. His tone was casual, but his red eyes were serious.

"You remember what we talked about, back on the witch's island? About you becoming the first Magic Saint?" Mumud stiffened, then folded his hands behind his back—a lecturing posture three centuries old that not even death had managed to cure.

"I have thought of little else, My Lord. And the more I consider it, the less sense it makes." He paused, choosing his words carefully.

"A Legend shapes the rare. A Legendary swordsman does not simply swing harder than other men, he develops techniques beyond ordinary comprehension. A Legendary magician does not merely cast larger and more destructive spells, he understands principles so profound that the impossible becomes possible. Every advancement is built upon deeper knowledge, greater precision, and increasingly complex foundations." He looked directly at Rudra.

"The complexity is not an obstacle. It is the proof of mastery."

"And a Saint?" Rudra asked. Mumud's expression grew thoughtful.

"A Saint is different." He spoke more slowly.

"A Saint takes the most ordinary principle imaginable and perfects it until it surpasses everything built upon it." He frowned.

"That is the part I cannot reconcile. If the simplest spell truly contained limitless potential,. why would magic have evolved at all? Why would countless generations of magician dedicate their lives to creating more advanced formulas? Why would legends exist?" Rudra rested his staff against his shoulder.

"Braham needed every equation, calculation, formula" he said quietly.

"His magic was built on understanding exactly why the impossible should become possible." Mumud nodded.

"Precisely."

"But Piaro..." Rudra continued, "... split a boulder with the same stance my Military camp trainer showed me during my first day of training. There wasn't anything extraordinary about the technique. It became extraordinary because Piaro had practiced it until there was nothing unnecessary left." He smiled faintly.

"I don't think Saints reject complexity. I think they stop relying on it." Mumud remained unconvinced.

"My Lord... that is an attractive philosophy. But philosophy is not magic. A novice magician's Fireball and Braham's Fireball are fundamentally the same spell. But the difference lies in understanding. If perfection of the basics were truly enough, every apprentice who practiced diligently would eventually rival a legend. Yet I don't see them doing that." Rudra chuckled.

"You seem to be misunderstanding, I'm not saying that you path is wrong." Mumud blinked.

"My theory, and I mean that, it's only a theory, is that you don't make all the formulas and calculation for your magic at the beginning. You decide the result first, and make sure you will able to make the result happen" This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. Silence settled between them. Mumud lowered his eyes, considering the idea despite himself. After a long moment, he sighed.

"It is an elegant theory, My Lord. But it remains only that. A theory. And I need to mention one thing, from our recent discussion it seems that while the ceiling between the saint-type legends and normal legends is different, so is the lower floor. While Saints can become a God, a Legend, using the correct tools, can already handle things a Saint who has only mastered 'the basics, perfected' may never manage to touch at all." He met Rudra's gaze once more.

"I have devoted centuries to pursuing greater knowledge. You ask me to believe that the path forward lies not in discovering something new, but in understanding what I have overlooked from the very beginning." He shook his head.

"I cannot accept that. Not yet." A faint smile tugged at Rudra's lips.

"I wasn't expecting you to." Mumud raised an eyebrow.

"No?"

"No." Rudra picked up his staff.

"I only wanted you to start questioning whether the ceiling you've accepted, is really the ceiling at all." Rudra patted Mumud's shoulder.

"Anyway, I'll find the divine catalyst. You just focus on the ceremony on becoming a human again." Mumud stood frozen on the sand. Rudra's words echoed in his head, stacking perfectly on top of what he had just seen Euphemina do. If you grasp the concept of the end result, you can bend the rules to reach it. You tell the magic what to do. Mumud bowed deeply.

"I will return to my tower, My Lord." The Tower of Limits was silent. Mumud stood in his private study. The room was dark, lit only by a few floating blue orbs. In front of him were three massive black chalkboards, covered edge to edge in dense white chalk formulas, the resurrection equations. Centuries of Braham's teachings were written on those boards. Every single calculation ended in the exact same result: a fatal explosion. Mumud held a piece of white chalk in his trembling hand. He stared at the numbers.

He had spent his entire life obeying the rules of magic. He was a scholar. He respected the foundation of magic above all else. To abandon the formulas felt like stepping off a cliff in the dark. It terrified him. He raised the chalk to the board. He tried to write a new variable to balance the divine and demonic energy. His hand shook so badly the chalk snapped in half. He dropped the broken piece.

"I am a coward," Mumud whispered into the empty room. He looked at his own words hanging in the dark, and something in them snagged. Coward. Not wrong. He turned that over, and it led him somewhere he hadn't expected — back to his teacher. Braham's Enhanced Magic. The formula every mage on the continent still failed to steal, centuries after his death. The secret of it had never been raw power.

It was the lowest tier of magic there was, the same trembling first-year spell every apprentice learned and then discarded, improved so much by compounding the formulas, increasing its power tenfold at the cost of a little extra mana and much higher difficulty in learning. That was the whole trick. Braham had taken something ordinary and forced it past what it was ever supposed to do, until it could level a hillside. Mumud had spent two hundred years believing that was the pinnacle of genius.

Tonight, for the first time, he understood what it actually was: his teacher standing at the exact door Rudra had just shoved him through, and turning away from it. Braham hadn't transcended the formula. He had buried twenty formulas inside one motion, stacked so precisely, so violently fast, that it only looked like transcendence. He had gotten close enough to touch the idea that ordinary things have no real ceiling, and his answer had still been more complexity, more formulas that allowed him to alter the world.

He had never once simply just forced the world to adhear to him, so that his magic can be cast. And then there was the existence of dragons, the originators of magic. Mumud had read every surviving account of them a hundred times over without ever letting the fact mean anything: the strongest, most untouchable beings in the world. They did not draw circles or balance variables or spend years perfecting a single spell. They simply willed a thing to be true, and it was.

No formula had ever been recovered from a dragon, because a dragon had never needed one. Mumud had always filed that away as myth — the kind of story mortal magicians told themselves to explain a power too far above them to actually study. He understood, now, standing in the dark with a broken piece of chalk in his hand, that it had never been myth. It had been the answer, sitting in his own archives, for as long as he'd been alive to read them.

He had simply never believed it could apply to a magician instead of a god. He looked at his fragile, artificial hands. He thought about the beating heart in his chest. Rudra had given him this life. Rudra believed he could be a Saint. Mumud closed his eyes. He took a slow, deep breath. When he opened his eyes, the fear was gone.

In its place sat something colder and far more absolute: not faith, but certainty, the particular certainty of a man who has just realized he was standing on solid ground the entire time and calling it a cliff. He didn't pick up another piece of chalk. He set it down and reached for a wet rag instead. He walked up to the first chalkboard, pressed the rag to the slate, and wiped a long, deliberate streak straight through the center of Braham's most complex equation. He moved to the second board and wiped it clean.

Then the third. He erased centuries of formula. He erased his teacher's ceiling — the one Braham himself had spent his whole life circling and never crossed. He erased the fear along with it, because there was no longer a difference between the two. Mumud stood alone in the dark study, surrounded by blank, wet slate. He didn't need the calculation anymore. He knew what the end result looked like. He only had to make the world agree.

"I am ready, My Liege," Mumud whispered to the shadows.