Chapter 2060: Hacking Genesis, the Aesthetic of Order

Iolum's Creation Blueprint contains a total of forty-six levels of elemental transformation, with each level involving a minimum of 12 and a maximum of 22 transformation methods; the number of elemental transformations involved is an exponential expansion of the transformation methods themselves.

And all of this must be attributed to the spellcasting elements, which use the Magic Net String as their unit; basically, every single elemental transformation involves at least one spellcasting element.

It involves over ten thousand spellcasting elements in total—one must know that the 【Mythallar】 device only involves spellcasting elements on the order of a million, so this spell for creating a demiplane is already one-tenth of that!

In other words, the complexity of this spell far exceeds that of the spell to create Arcane Fire, and also exceeds most War Spells.

Of course, complexity cannot be equated entirely with the difficulty of spellcasting; it refers more to a lower fault tolerance and a longer spellcasting time.

To ensure that the tens of thousands of spellcasting elements do not go wrong, Xia Duo must be exceptionally careful; fortunately, spellcasting itself requires Focus Training, otherwise the success rate of this spell would be too low.

Yet even so, under the long-duration focused spellcasting, Xia Duo felt traces of anxiety. Even if the end was in sight, and he had long since calculated how much time the entire process would take, a person is ultimately a person, not a spellcasting machine, and will always feel fatigue and weariness.

Thus, in his first attempt at spellcasting, Xia Duo failed without exception. Even though the progress was already past the halfway point, he still chose to give up. That feeling was like a person alone in a dark, quiet, and narrow space; it was easy to endure at first, but as time went on, his heart began to grow restless, as if an irrepressible anger was constantly battering his own consciousness.

"Hoo—"

Xia Duo lay flat on the cold ground, gasping for air. Although he did not need to breathe at this moment, that suffocating feeling lingered in his heart, unable to dissipate for a long time.

He found it hard to imagine just how iron-willed Iolum must have been to complete this spell in its entirety!

A long time ago, Xia Duo had once imagined having a Level 1 Mage cast a 9th Circle spell through the method of "high-circle elements expressed via low-circle means." The process might be very tedious and the spellcasting time very long, but theoretically, it was entirely feasible.

But if he were to speak now, he would no longer say such naive things. It might be theoretically feasible, but in reality, it is likely impossible to achieve—unless one is a spellcasting machine.

Human strength has its limits. Xia Duo was not discouraged; this further proved that he was currently on the right path, and even gods have domains they cannot reach.

Only by condensing the power of civilization can one continuously transcend.

……

As for the present, Xia Duo feared he could not reach the level of inner fortitude possessed by Iolum in the short term.

Considering that the purpose of coming out this time was not to practice creating a demiplane, but to produce at least one finished demiplane, he decisively chose to "cheat"—

【Mechanical Mind】!

Come to think of it, this spell, like the Creation Blueprint, also came from Iolum, and it had provided Xia Duo with convenience more than once.

Iolum's 【Mechanical Mind】 is essentially the inversion of the subconscious and the conscious mind, allowing the subconscious to take the lead and placing the spellcaster in a state of near-absolute rationality.

But at the same time, the conscious mind is not completely "melted" into the vast ocean of the subconscious; it still retains a certain degree of independence and provides a guiding role in the general direction of the subconscious's judgments.

This had the same effect as the integration of the subconscious and conscious mind that Xia Duo had previously envisioned, though Xia Duo's vision was more advanced and more complete.

【Mechanical Mind】, however, takes a shortcut through spellcasting. The reason it is called "mechanical" is that the actions of the subconscious have relatively fixed patterns, and the spellcaster's own conscious mind cannot control everything.

If an enemy were to unfortunately learn of this and exploit it, it might be easier to deal with than if 【Mechanical Mind】 were not cast.

But for Xia Duo at his current stage, fully integrating the subconscious and conscious mind is a distant prospect, so using this "substitute" for now is acceptable.

Under the enhancement of 【Mechanical Mind】, Xia Duo transformed into an emotionless spellcasting machine, almost completely unaffected by the weariness and annoyance that normal humans experience during long-duration spellcasting.

Xia Duo's conscious mind could perceive them, but to the subconscious, those emotions were merely sensory information, no different in essence from sensory information in any other situation.

In fact, the subconscious is receiving and processing massive amounts of sensory information at every moment; this is its primary job, so naturally, it is not affected.

The spell proceeded very smoothly, in some ways even more fluidly and naturally than when Xia Duo cast it with his conscious mind personally. If it were a spell with very high requirements, one could "self-teach" in this way.

Of course, if it were just a matter of the spell being tedious, that likely wouldn't work; more advanced Focus Training or emotional control training would still be required.

……

Soon, the Plane Root of the demiplane was woven. If this were Xia Duo's own experiment, the next step would be the critical point of whether the experiment could succeed.

However, because he used Iolum's mature Creation Blueprint, reaching this step could actually be considered more than half successful. The next step was to inject elements to let the demiplane take shape.

The process of injecting elements is actually the process of strengthening the Plane Root. Although the Plane Root is a type of rule, it also has a physical form, which consists of streams of elemental torrents.

When elements are injected into it, these elemental torrents begin to transform according to the set transformation methods. When the transformation methods contained in the Creation Blueprint end, it comes to the part where one leaves it to luck.

If one is lucky, it might continue to evolve into a demiplane.

If one is unlucky, it will likely end up like Xia Duo's previous experiments, resulting in a mass of collapsing Element Turbulence.

The effect of Iolum's Creation Blueprint was astonishing. After departing from the blueprint's settings, it continued to evolve in a very orderly fashion. During this process, Xia Duo only needed to adjust the flux of each element at the right time; the workload was countless times smaller than when he was shaping the Plane Root earlier.

It was just that he still needed to maintain the spell, so he could not do other things for the time being and could only observe the evolution of the plane. This scene seemed quite dull, but Xia Duo found joy in it.

Some otherwise ordinary elemental torrents, for some reason, collided and evolved into a world (plane); this process was truly marvelous.

Primordial planes were born from chaos in this way. Later spellcasters, through studying the essence of planes, deduced the Principles of Plane Creation and, after a large number of experiments, formed the spell to create a demiplane.

The more he watched those elemental torrents collide and flow, the more Xia Duo could appreciate the sense of orderly beauty contained within them—not just the order of civilization, but also the endogenous order of the universe, born from chaos in the infinitely vast Universe, which could be called a miracle.

Or rather, the meaning of life that arises from "nothing" to "something."