It was pretty fucked up that the world of Omnio just let nine-year-olds into Dungeons to fight Monsters if they were of noble-enough blood and begged loudly enough.
And that if he didn’t get his act together in one night, he might die.
But this was progress, in a way. Archmund had helped set his House and County up for success, and he’d also secured an opportunity to gain power through the Deepest Magics. If he lived, his future would be smooth sailing.
Now he just had to figure out how to Not Die.
He was in panic mode.
The sun had set. His room was illuminated only by his Ruby of Light.
He turned the Ruby around in his hand, feeling his magic he’d flowing through it, casting shadows on the wall around him. He was frustrated.
In his past life, he’d loved fantasy stories. There was a split in the community about “hard magic” and “soft magic”. Hard magic systems were mechanistic and followed rules, being akin to solvable puzzle. Soft magic systems often aimed to set the tone or mood of the story, left unexplained to the reader. Video games treated the magic accessible to players as mechanistic, set spells that cost magic points and had predictable if pseudorandom effects, even if their lore described magic that was far more powerful and inscrutable.
His life was not a story. He had no clear insights into the mechanisms. There was no full explanation of the magic system in his books. There was no convenient wiki where he could look up the lore of his life. He’d pierced together his knowledge of magic from rumors and lies.
He had reasons to believe that the laws of the universe adhered to some non-physical game-like logic: he’d all but powerleveled his strength, endurance, and magical power. But he had no proof. Whenever he ever actually used the Ruby of Light, there was no guide or indicator or status bar. There may have been “hard rules” and principles underlying magic, but actually doing it felt “soft”.
He supposed that this was a consequence of “emergence”.
He’d studied physics in his past life. Physics that, at a macroscopic level, still held here, from his experiments in making mayonnaise.
Individual elementary particles could only sit in certain quantized energy states, like steps on a staircase. Those interactions, when between different atoms, led to complex chemical reactions. From billions upon billions of chemical reactions, life could emerge, and to understand that, the study of biology, sociology, zoology, and thousands of other fields. But none of those conclusions could be drawn from understanding the fundamental rules of quantum physics alone. Oh, you could say that electricity was a result of electron interaction, and that electricity drove the human nervous system, and the random impulses of the human mind drove the irrational decisions that led to war, but it felt like utter sophistry to use that example to prove that quantum physics was the cause of all wars. The soft might have emerged from the hard, but the hard alone was insufficient to explain the soft.
He held the Ruby up.
Physics. He knew Physics. And he knew this Ruby. He’d filled it with his power — which might’ve explained why Mary had trouble using it properly, now that he thought about it. If he was Attuned to any Gem, this was the one.
If this world truly followed the same laws of physics as Earth, then visible light, which this Gem created, was part of a spectrum. That spectrum spanned from 30-foot-wide radio waves to nanoscopic cancer-causing gamma rays.
Archmund didn’t know if Monsters, being the embodied spirits of the dead, were vulnerable to cancer or acute radiation poisoning. Mercy had asked if he could use a sword or bow; that suggested they’d have physical form.
Heat always was unreasonably effective.
First, an assumption:
Energy conservation held. Light wasn’t coming out of nowhere when he used the Ruby, it was converting his magic.
This was a big assumption, but if it was wrong, nothing he knew could work.
Gamma rays carried much more energy than visible light. That had two implications: If shooting gamma rays didn’t work as one-shot-kills on monsters, the technique would be far more wasteful. If shooting gamma rays drew more magic proportional to the amount of energy they carried, it would exhaust him much more quickly.
Infrared radiation was much better. It was pure heat. It was less energetic than visible light, which might give him more lethality per magical power expended. It would burn things — an immediate way to see if his techniques were working.
He hoped he wasn’t too far off the mark. It had been literal decades since he’d studied physics.
That was the hard magic basis. Now, he had to determine the soft magic execution.
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He went outside to the garden. Testing a method to turn light magic into fire magic in a very enclosed, very flammable study was one of the stupidest things he could imagine doing.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The stars peppered the night sky, uncountable. Were they balls of flaming gas in this world, or something magical?
Maybe he’d find out one day.
Right now, he needed to turn his magical light trinket into something that could kill.
In his old world, scientists knew how to realign all the rays from a light source in one direction, creating a potent beam known as a laser. His idea amounted to making a laser of pure heat.
The question was not whether such a thing was imaginable, but possible within the limitations of magic.
Of course, there was the worry about whether “spell slots” was a concern — if he learned how to shift from light to heat, and how to shift from diffuse light to laser light, would that take up two “spell slots” and render him unable to combine the techniques to a third “heat laser” spell? The real answer was that he couldn’t afford to worry; he’d be as bad off not trying at all.
He cupped the Ruby of Light in his hands, blocking its light so it wouldn’t awaken the rest of the household. He could sense the magic he’d poured into it over the past few months, surging and pooling in the facets of the Gem. It felt like his hand in an oven mitt, or perhaps the pressure of a weighted blanket, or perhaps the feeling of coffee after a long run — comfortable yet tempting. He knew this Gem, in and out, and how his power interacted with it, flowed through every cranny and flaw, agitating this crystallized soulstuff to set the world alight.
He could feel his magic swirling within the Gem, like water through pipes or electrons in a circuit, the constant motion and vibration transforming into visible light. It flowed over a sense he didn’t know he had, over his very feeling of self, tumbling and tickling.
It was still his magic, even if it had been poured into the Gem, and even if there was a foreign magic mingling with it that he knew had to be Mary’s. He could still feel it, reach out to it, and control it.
Infrared radiation was less energetic than visible light. By physical analogy, it was as if it vibrated slower.
He willed his magic to stop. Controlling it was like instinct, like swimming or walking or breathing. He had spent so long forcing the magic out that he knew how it should feel.
The tumbling of magic over his spirit grew slower and slower until it was like water dripping out of a tap (oh, how glad he was this world had indoor plumbing). And then it ceased entirely, and the Ruby of Light grew dark.
It had worked.
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That was the easy part. The hard part was control.
He hoped, desperately, that this wasn’t a problem of “discrete” vs “continuous.” A light switch had two discrete states — on vs off. But sometimes there were dimmer switches, that could slide between various levels of dim to bright light bulbs.
Computers in his past life seemed to be continuous, capable of having all sorts of states, but fundamentally at the heart of their architecture they were discrete — all data in computers, all programs, all instructions were stored at the fundamental level as either 1 or 0. They looked continuous to the end user because there were just so many of those fundamental 1s or 0s. The illusion of continuum emerged from the discrete.
Hopefully magic was continuous and not discrete.
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It was easy to relight the Ruby. It was instinct. He touched it, his magic surged, and it lit up.
He could pull it back, stop the magic, dim the Gem. That too had become easy.
This was all he could do. In, out. In, out.
How much time had passed? The moon was starting to set; did that mean they were halfway through the night, or almost at dawn?
In, out. In, out.
He dropped the Gem on the grass before him.
In, out. In, out.
He no longer needed to touch it to make it pulse on and off with light.
That meant he was Attuned, right?
Or maybe he’d been Attuned. He’d just realized it.
In, out. In, out. In, out.
His breaths had slowed. The Gem was synced to his breaths. Light on the inhale. Dark on the exhale.
Lighting slowly on the inhale, turning from red to orange to sunlit yellow, and fading the other way on the exhale.
From red to orange to yellow.
A chill ran through him. This was it. It was possible.
He picked up the Gem. He took the deepest breath he could, so far that he felt his lungs might burst, and with it he pushed the color of the Gem to be as brilliant white as possible.
And then he exhaled. The light dimmed, as expected, from white to yellow to orange to red. And still he exhaled, pushing out every last molecule of breath from his lungs.
He felt the magic in the Ruby grinding to a halt in harmony with his breath. He focused on that motion, feeling through that unspeakable sense beyond the body. Slower and slower still… yet still moving… down the electromagnetic spectrum…
The Ruby burned.
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Archmund Granavale
Lifespan: 9/91 Stat Value Titles Achievements Bound Items Relationships Skills Strength 7 Granavale Heir Reincarnated Memories Ruby of Light (Awakened) Lord Reginald Granvale, Father (*new*) Heat Dexterity 7 Lady Sophia Granavale, Mother (deceased) Constitution 6 Amelia Granavale, elder sister (deceased) Intelligence 6 Linus Granavale, elder brother (deceased) Wisdom 7 Calla Granavale, elder sister (deceased) Charisma 6 Luck 5