Chapter 3097: Psionic Indicator

A moment later, Xia Duo stopped the act of shaping new functions for the Magic Artifact, bringing the crystal ball-like Magic Artifact close to observe it carefully; just as he had anticipated, this Magic Artifact was indeed no mere showpiece, and it successfully produced a Magic Aura without a hitch.

If he had never known of the existence of Psionic before, Xia Duo would likely be extremely shocked at this moment, lamenting that his understanding had been overturned.

However, he could now view this situation with a relatively calm heart.

Since a Magic Aura had already been produced, it meant that even within the Arcane Magic System, this Psionic Artifact could be considered a Magic Artifact.

Since it was a Magic Artifact of the Arcane system, its functions could be examined.

Xia Duo did exactly that next; he did not use it immediately, but instead checked the specific functions of this Magic Artifact through the methods of Arcane Magic.

This inspection yielded results that were both within his expectations and contained surprises.

What met his expectations was, of course, what Xia Duo had judged based on the few Psionic Artifacts he had encountered previously: after setting a new function for a Psionic Artifact, it did not actually possess complete Arcane Magic details.

It looked just like a defective product cobbled together by some clumsy Apprentice; if one followed the logic of Arcane Magic, this Magic Artifact would be completely unusable, but the fact was that some unknown force supported the Magic Artifact so it could be used normally.

Having had the experience of encountering Psionic Artifacts before, Xia Duo judged that the new Magic Artifact before him would be in the same situation, namely—

A defective product in the eyes of an Arcane Mage, yet it did not collapse on its own, but was instead able to exist stably and even function normally.

As for the surprising part of this inspection, it had to do with the "Detection of Psionics" function Xia Duo had set for this Psionic Artifact; the interaction it produced with the Magic Net clearly contained some elements of the Scrying spell from Arcane Magic.

In other words, the Scrying spell of Arcane Magic might very well be directly usable for detecting Psionic! Unlike what he had previously thought, Arcane Magic and Psionic were not mutually exclusive.

This discovery greatly increased Xia Duo's confidence in continuing his research; he even wondered, if Arcane Magic could directly detect Psionic, did it mean that within the framework of Arcane Magic, one could also achieve Awakening Psionics?

If that were truly the case, it would not be a fusion of Arcane Magic and Psionic Magic, but rather Arcane Magic greatly expanding its own boundaries.

At this moment, Xia Duo could not help but feel a sense of inexplicable anticipation toward Psionic.

……

Next, Xia Duo still did not attempt to use this crystal ball-shaped Psionic Artifact that had just been endowed with new abilities, but instead separately organized and recorded the Arcane Magic elements he had discovered from this Magic Artifact.

Then, he attempted to complete this unknown Scrying spell that had the potential to directly detect Psionic.

Within the Spell Suppression Field, Xia Duo continuously experimented with these fragmented Scrying spell elements; if it were merely a matter of incorporating them into a Scrying spell, that would be easy to do.

After all, many spells, for the sake of secrecy or to prompt Spellcasting, would inherently add some redundant Spell Elements.

Just as an experienced painter, when given some broken pieces of a painting, could easily assemble them into a new painting, but what the new painting intended to express might be worlds apart from the complete version of the broken pieces.

Just as a painter could combine and expand these broken pieces into various new paintings, Xia Duo could also design multiple different Scrying spells based on these detected Arcane Magic elements.

But unfortunately, it seemed Xia Duo's luck had run out here.

Based on the more than twenty Arcane Magic elements he had discovered, he designed a total of nearly a hundred Scrying spells, among which there was no lack of those with practical value, but the problem was that not a single one of these nearly one hundred Scrying spells could detect Psionic (Artifacts).

Such a result was somewhat discouraging to Xia Duo's enthusiasm; he tried to analyze the relationship between those twenty-plus spell elements, but the spell elements themselves only possessed Element-level magic significance.

This was like asking what a certain word in a program's source code meant; it had meaning, but that meaning had little to do with the function expressed by the program.

The reason Xia Duo considered these twenty-plus spell elements he detected to be part of a Scrying spell was largely because he had set the function of detecting Psionic for the crystal ball-shaped Psionic Artifact.

If the function he had set were an attack spell, he would certainly have thought these twenty-plus spell elements were part of an attack spell.

Considering it purely from a magic perspective, Xia Duo actually could not determine the affiliation of these twenty-plus spell elements.

After all, spell elements themselves were the most basic units of Spellcasting; they did indeed possess real magic significance, but their relationship to the spells they composed was like the relationship between letters and an article—there was actually no great connection.

The research fell into a bottleneck for a time.

Xia Duo could indeed organize manpower to continuously design new Scrying spells that could contain these spell elements, and then verify one by one whether they could detect Psionic, but doing so would suddenly increase the workload significantly.

Moreover, he had a hunch that a spell capable of detecting Psionic might not be designable through such a near-exhaustive method; he felt that it was highly likely a key element was missing.

The element here did not necessarily refer to a spell element; it could also be some kind of Psionic medium, or a special environmental requirement.

……

Fortunately, Xia Duo had never thought he could easily find a purely Arcane means of detecting Psionic; he temporarily shelved the research direction of combining and designing new Scrying spells and turned to trying the Psionic Artifact itself.

In the long run, finding a purely Arcane means of Psionic detection was indeed of extraordinary significance, but for now, all he needed was a usable detection method; it did not have to be through the means of Arcane Magic.

Looking at the crystal ball glowing with Magic Aura on the Laboratory table, Xia Duo reached out a finger with anticipation and rested it on the edge of the crystal ball, then silently held a thought in his mind—

Activate!

The next moment, the crystal ball suddenly flared with intense Magic Aura, and immediately after, the space around the sphere seemed to vibrate, becoming blurred, and subsequently, a large amount of pale purple Mist surged forth and spread continuously in all directions.

Seeing this, Xia Duo felt a tightening in his chest, but he did not intervene, instead letting the pale purple Mist continue to spread; he knew that the Mist was not Reality, but rather an existence akin to an illusion.

Soon, the Mist spread to its limit, yet it did not exceed the confines of the Laboratory, forming roughly a spherical range with a radius of two meters; the facilities and equipment in the Laboratory, and even Xia Duo himself, did not pose any obstruction to the spread of the Mist, except for—

A bracelet-shaped Psionic Artifact used as a detection target on the Laboratory table.

When the Mist spread to a distance of about half a foot from that bracelet, it seemed to be blocked by an invisible force and bypassed it, to the point that in the end, a pancake-shaped void was formed within the two-meter radius spherical Mist range.

The center of the void was that bracelet-shaped Psionic Artifact!

"This—should count as having detected Psionic, right?"