Chapter 2221: Xia Duo, I Am Your Wall-Breaker!

Within the illusion, Xia Duo and Niya stood facing each other.

Niya curiously examined the surroundings, which looked similar to yet different from the Tower of Time, while Xia Duo watched her with a smile and said in a relaxed tone:

"Try to find them; I've set two relatively obvious flaws in this scene. If you can find them within an hour, you pass."

"One hour? Don't underestimate me!"

Niya retorted, refusing to be outdone, and then her expression became serious. As Niya began searching for the flaws in the illusion, Xia Duo continued to remind her:

"Differences in the furnishings and details of the scene compared to reality don't count as flaws, because if I were an enemy, I wouldn't set up a scene you are familiar with. Remember, you are looking for logical loopholes within the illusion."

Generally, illusions do not involve setting up scenes the target is familiar with, but if it is a shared Mental Image World, it allows the target's subconscious to participate in creating the illusion, and it may even evolve in real-time. If one relies only on superficial details, it is very difficult to truly escape.

The goal of Xia Duo's training was certainly not to ensure Niya could definitely escape from a Mental Image World—even he couldn't do that himself. All he wanted was for Niya to become familiar with the patterns of this type of illusion so she wouldn't be at a loss when encountering one.

Soon, Niya had searched around, her brows gradually knitting together. Finally, she came before Xia Duo and asked somewhat embarrassedly: "Can I cast a spell to check?"

"You may; the scene does not forbid Spellcasting, but be aware that I might interfere."

"You're going to interfere too! Then how could I possibly find the flaws?"

"I said 'might'—it might happen, or it might not. So, when choosing a Spell, you should avoid those that are difficult to verify." Xia Duo's hint was very clear.

The Spells difficult to verify that he spoke of were actually vague Scrying Spells that directly yield results, such as asking for truth or falsehood, or pointing toward flaws, and so on.

As for Spells intended to test specific length or weight, one could use methods similar to recursion for simple verification. This process also involves redefining weights and measures, but the internal logic of the transformation remains unchanged. If it changes, then that is clearly a flaw in the rules.

I only cite length or weight as examples here; in reality, various other parameters can be verified using such methods. Combined with the characteristics of the Plane itself, no matter how realistic an illusion created by a non-professional may be, it is inevitably going to have flaws.

After all, Magic is an internally self-consistent system. If an outsider does not have a deep understanding, any point that does not align is where the flaw lies.

Most Psionic Mages do not (want to actively) understand reality, because the weight of reality is, to some extent, a negation of the frivolity of idealism, which is something they find difficult to accept.

This point is somewhat similar to the definition in a certain novel Xia Duo read in his hometown; once cognition deviates, it leads to a loss of control over power. Although it wouldn't immediately cause one's head to explode, if it happened too many times, one might lose their Psionic power.

Therefore, in Zhamu Dasi, even the Anti School, which tends to view Psionics as a system parallel to other Magic systems, rarely verifies reality, preferring instead to force reality to conform to their "own assumptions."

Thus, the illusionary worlds they subjectively create have significant deviations in internal logic from reality. Even if they look exactly the same on the surface, as long as one verifies them slightly, it is not difficult to find flaws.

To use terms from Earth, the illusion Spellcaster has created a virtual scene where the real-world physics engine used cannot fully simulate reality and contains many bugs.

However, Xia Duo is not a Psionic Mage from Zhamu Dasi. Perhaps he is not as good as a Psionic Mage at creating surprising scenes, but in terms of constructing the internal rules of a world, he is far stronger than them.

Especially since he has plenty of experience intentionally triggering bugs while playing games in his hometown, he knows which parts of a virtual scene are more prone to revealing flaws.

Therefore, although this scene was his first training session for Niya, the actual difficulty for a native Netheril Mage was nowhere near entry-level.

At this moment, Niya was looking here and peeking there, casting Spells to test this and that, her eyes filled with confusion one moment and annoyance the next.

In reality, Xia Duo hadn't even started interfering with the virtual scene itself yet. If he were to interfere, that would be another level of difficulty, equivalent to having an administrator fixing bugs in real-time within a virtual game.

As soon as a player shows signs of finding a bug, it gets patched in advance. Of course, this requires the administrator to be very knowledgeable about, or even proficient in, the various rules of reality and their Application in virtual scenes.

Xia Duo's intensity of intervention in the illusionary scene was far from reaching that level, but he was also learning and improving. While training Niya, he was also perfecting the relevant experience.

This way, the training could continue indefinitely, and both of them could improve together.

……

"How is it? Haven't found them yet?" Xia Duo asked with a grin.

Niya's eyes were now vacant. She rested her head on the table in a very ungraceful manner, clutching her head with both hands and scratching her hair incessantly, muttering to herself:

"Where exactly is the problem? What on earth is the flaw?"

Finally, she sprang up from her chair and glared at Xia Duo: "If the flaws in the scene's furnishings don't count, where else could there be flaws?!"

"It's very simple, you don't even need to cast a Spell to discover it!"

As he spoke, Xia Duo picked up a teacup from the table in front of Niya, then pulled a hair that she had torn out from between her fingers, waving them in front of her to get her attention:

"Watch closely!"

"I'm watching!"

Niya crossed her arms over her chest in a huff; she wanted to see what kind of trick Xia Duo could pull. But the next moment, the expression on her face froze, as Xia Duo held the teacup and the hair above his head in front of her and then let go of both at the same time.

The two objects, one light and one heavy, fell to the ground at exactly the same speed. This appeared to conform to certain underlying rules, but it did not match the intuition of reality.

That was clearly where the flaw lay. What exactly was it?

Niya realized it instantly: this scene had simplified the attributes of the wind element, and the internal logic of the real-world rule system is very rigorous. If one were to delve deeper, one could certainly find more flaws.

"Oh my, why didn't I notice that!" Niya couldn't help but feel frustrated.

"Then I'll leave the remaining one to you!"

"Hmm."

Once she knew the problem had a solution, Niya was immediately full of energy again. Before long, she found two flaws in the illusion—one deduced from the simplification of the scene's wind element attributes, and the other discovered from a completely different angle.

"You see, there's more than just two flaws!" Niya said, feeling a bit embarrassed but pretending to be arrogant.

Seeing this, Xia Duo smiled slightly. "I only said there were two relatively obvious ones; I didn't say there were only two. However, even though you found an extra one, an hour has already passed, so you didn't pass the first round!"

In reality, the flaws in this illusionary scene were far more than just those limited few; one could even say there were infinite flaws!

Because Xia Duo cannot fully comprehend the rules of the real world. In areas he has not yet stepped into, he is just putting on a show. If someone with a better understanding of those areas were to look, they would find flaws everywhere.