Chapter 244: The Magic Array Sent Flying

"What... what is going on here!?"

Lan Qingyou frowned, squinting at the scene before her in sheer bewilderment.

The herb field outside the main tower remained exactly the same, and the Great Alchemy Workshop in the distance stood just as she had left it.

Everything seemed perfectly peaceful and quiet, completely unchanged.

But that facade could only fool outsiders. As the master of this place, who had personally arranged every blade of grass and every tree, Lan Qingyou naturally recognized the glaring difference between how things were now and how they used to be.

Simply put, the outermost circle of her magic array was gone!

No, more accurately, the form was still there, but the soul was missing.

To be even more precise, her magic array had been inexplicably dismantled.

It was incredibly bizarre!

Unable to wrap her head around it, Lan Qingyou simply took to the sky, intending to get a top-down view to spot the exact problem.

Ignorance was bliss on the ground, but once airborne, the sight gave her a genuine fright.

Squinting and leaning slightly forward to steady her broom's sway, she finally spotted her runaway outer circle.

It was not too far away—just a few kilometers out from its original position.

'Why did this happen?'

Completely baffled, Lan Qingyou hopped onto her Magic Broom and darted straight toward the boundary.

Judging by her own senses, she estimated the distance to be roughly two and a half kilometers. Did that mean the total diameter of the magic array had instantly expanded from one kilometer to around five kilometers?

Observing the chaotic destruction wreaked by the Mana Tide just outside the barrier, Lan Qingyou realized that her Five Dragons Reincarnation Magic Array had indeed expanded—and it was still fully functional.

'Could it be because I plugged in the big cute eye?'

'That cannot be it.'

'The Eye of Cthuya is, at best, meant to serve as a power source. It absolutely should not possess the ability to alter the magic array itself.'

'Furthermore, this boundary array is not actually a real, solid magic array. At most, it has just been forcibly inflated to this massive size by the sheer energy output of the big cute eye.'

In layman's terms, it had bloated, yet it remained remarkably stable.

Determined to get to the bottom of this mystery, Lan Qingyou skipped lunch entirely and flew a meticulous lap around the entire circumference of the magic array.

Afterward, she pulled out her notebooks filled with array diagrams and threw herself into research.

In her eyes, once she eliminated all impossible explanations for this phenomenon, only one conclusion remained: the magic array itself had a flaw.

The Five Dragons Reincarnation Magic Array and the Demonic Energy Evil Sealing Magic Array.

She had only installed these two specific magic arrays in this location.

Because of their diverse functions, either one could be considered a composite magic array. But perhaps it was precisely because they both tried to do a little bit of everything that a conflict arose?

It was just like building a custom computer.

If the hardware components were incompatible, it was extremely easy to trigger all sorts of bizarre, unprecedented errors.

"Hmm... there seems to be a slight issue here, and here, and here..."

She never would have noticed without taking a closer look.

When she overlaid the two magic arrays and analyzed them as a single, unified formation, Lan Qingyou discovered quite a few glaring problems.

The Five Dragons Reincarnation Magic Array was originally designed to project a barrier that ensured internal stability.

Yet, right inside that barrier, she had erected a Sealing Magic array designed to protect against the outside.

Both arrays firmly believed they were solely responsible for protecting this territory.

This overlap resulted in a rare phenomenon of mutual repulsion between the two forces.

The final result acted just like a pair of magnets. Under the pressure of like poles repelling each other, the outer magic array was violently shoved away.

That was right, it had literally been sent flying.

This reaction forced a circular perimeter that originally measured roughly one kilometer across to violently expand into a circle stretching five kilometers in diameter.

Her actual controlled territory had skyrocketed by five times.

Ultimately, after figuring out the underlying mechanics of this bizarre phenomenon, Lan Qingyou made a firm decision to do absolutely nothing.

Yes, absolutely nothing.

She would just let this expelled magic array maintain its current expanded state.

If a block of haphazardly mashed code somehow managed to run perfectly, the best possible troubleshooting method was to never, ever touch it.

Besides, now that she understood the exact principles behind the glitch, she even pondered using this logic to design a brand-new iteration of the magic array. She could keep it securely tucked away as a backup, ready to deploy the moment her current setup failed—or even looked like it might fail.

With that satisfying thought in mind, her stomach grumbled, prompting her to return to the main tower for a very late lunch.

Leaving aside Lan Qingyou's mealtime for a moment.

Over on the Regional Channel, a massive, storm-like discussion was currently raging.

And the eye of this conversational hurricane was none other than the sudden, violent expansion of the magic array.

"Did you guys feel that tremor just now?"

"I felt it. I have no idea what caused it this time."

"The weather has been warming up lately. Do you think we are about to get hit by an earthquake disaster?"

"A natural disaster? This world literally has magic in it, and you are worrying about a mundane natural disaster?"

"Are you listening to yourself? How could simple magic ever compare to the sheer destructive force of nature?"

"Holy crap! Holy crap! Holy crap!"

Just as the crowd debated the merits of natural disasters, one survivor abruptly burst into the chat, using an incredibly obvious, panic-stricken tone to instantly draw everyone's attention.

"What is up with you? Did you eat crap?"

"No, listen! That tremor just now, guess what caused it?"

"An earthquake?"

"Do not tell me a giant is out there throwing a dance party?"

"No! Let me tell you, but brace yourselves. Do not freak out."

"Relax, we are professionally trained. Under normal circumstances, nothing phases us."

"Spit it out already! Stop keeping us in suspense over some trivial nonsense."

"Alright, alright! I will tell you. That tremor just now was caused by the Witch."

"The Witch?"

"Are you talking about something similar to that magic array that dyed the entire sky purple last time?"

"Exactly! In fact, it is highly likely that it was the very same magic array."

"Give us the details. What exactly happened?"

Hearing that Lan Qingyou seemed to be stirring up massive trouble yet again, the crowd's interest was instantly piqued.

"I was chilling in my Shelter playing mahjong with the others when, out of nowhere, we felt a violent, unmistakable tremor. Right as the shaking stopped, a brilliant purple ring of light from a magic array swept straight through our Shelter. And immediately after that, the Mana Tide outside completely vanished!"

"Hold on a second!! Are you saying a purple ring of light actually penetrated right through your Shelter?"

"Yes! I absolutely did not see it wrong."

"What kind of misplaced focus is that? Shouldn't the main takeaway be the fact that the Mana Tide straight-up disappeared?"

"The Mana Tide disappeared? Now that is a genuinely hilarious joke. It actually caught me off guard and made me chuckle."

The survivor's recounted experience only drew widespread mockery from the majority of the chat.

After all, you could never expect humanity to immediately comprehend phenomena they had never witnessed before.

"He is telling the truth. The Mana Tide over here also vanished right after a burst of purple light. I just stepped outside to take a look, and it feels like our entire sector has been enveloped by some sort of massive dome. The Mana Tide is only raging furiously outside the boundaries of that magic array now."

"Huh?"

"Wait a minute!"

"Why do I suddenly feel like I can no longer read the common Federation language?"

"Are you trying to say that the Witch somehow cooked up a magic array capable of completely isolating the Mana Tide?"