Chapter 2222: First Experience with Time Acceleration

————Still about two hours left~~

————

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

Niya curiously examined the surroundings, which seemed similar to yet different from the Tower of Time, while Xia Duo looked at 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 to search for the flaws in the Illusion, Xia Duo continued to remind her:

"The details of the scene's furnishings being different from 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 indeed do not seek to set up scenes the target is familiar with, but if it is a shared Mental Image World, it will allow the target's Subconscious to participate in creating the Illusion, and it may even evolve in real-time. If one relies solely on surface details, it is very difficult to truly escape.

The goal of Xia Duo's training was, of course, not to ensure that Niya could definitely escape from the Mental Image World—even he himself couldn't do that. What he wanted was merely to let Niya 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 a circle, her brows gradually furrowing. Finally, she came before Xia Duo and asked with some embarrassment: "Can I use Spellcasting to check?"

"You can. The scene does not prohibit Spellcasting, but you must be careful; 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 obvious.

The Spells difficult to verify that he spoke of actually refer to vague Scrying Spells that directly provide results, such as asking for truth or falsehood, or pointing out flaws, etc.

But if one wants to test specific lengths or weights, Spells can be used to perform simple verification through methods similar to recursion. 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.

Here, I only cite length or weight as examples; in reality, there are various other parameters that can be verified using such methods. Combined with the characteristics of the Plane itself, even if a non-professional creates an Illusion, no matter how realistic it is, it is hard to avoid having flaws.

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

Most Psionic Mages do not (want to actively) understand reality, because the weight of reality is, to a certain 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 a deviation in cognition appears, it will lead to a loss of control over power. Although it wouldn't immediately cause one's head to explode, if it happens too many times, one might lose the power of Psionic.

Therefore, in Zhamu Dasi, even the Anti School, which tends to view Psionic as a Magic system parallel to others, rarely verifies reality, and instead uses "what they think" to force reality.

Thus, the Illusion 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 discover the flaws.

To use terms from Earth, the Illusion Spellcaster has actually created a virtual scene, and the real-world physics engine used cannot fully simulate reality, and there are still many bugs.

However, Xia Duo is not a Psionic Mage from Zhamu Dasi. Perhaps he is not as good as a Psionic Mage in the surprise level of creating scenes, but in the construction of the world's internal rules, he is far stronger than a Psionic Mage.

Especially since he has many experiences of intentionally triggering bugs while playing games in his hometown, he knows which places in a virtual scene are more likely to reveal flaws.

Therefore, although this scene in front of him is his first training for Niya, the actual difficulty for a native Netheril Mage is not even at the entry level.

At this moment, Niya was looking here and there, quietly testing this and that with Spells, her eyes filled with confusion one moment and annoyance the next.

In fact, Xia Duo hadn't even started interfering with this 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 in a virtual game.

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

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

In this way, the training can continue, and both people can 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 unrefined manner, holding her head with both hands and scratching her hair incessantly, muttering to herself:

"Where exactly is the problem? What exactly is a flaw?"

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

"It's very simple, you don't even need to use Spellcasting to discover it!"

As he spoke, Xia Duo picked up a teacup from the table in front of Niya, then found a hair she had pulled out from between her fingers, waved it in front of Niya, and signaled her to pay attention:

"Watch closely!"

"I'm watching!"

Niya crossed her arms over her chest in a huff. She wanted to see what tricks Xia Duo could pull, but the next moment, the expression on her face froze, because 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 items, one light and one heavy, actually fell to the ground at exactly the same speed. This seemed to conform to certain potential rules, but it did not match the intuition of reality.

That clearly contained a flaw. What exactly was it?

Niya instantly realized that this scene had simplified the attributes of the wind element, and the internal logic of the reality rule system is very rigorous. If one were to delve deeper, one would certainly be able to find more flaws.

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

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

"Mm."

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 was deduced from the simplification of the scene's wind element attributes, and the other was a brand-new discovery from a different angle.

"You said there weren't more than two flaws!" Niya said with some embarrassment, yet feigning arrogance.

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

In fact, the flaws in this Illusion scene are far more than just those limited ones; one could even say there are infinite ones!