Shades of the New World

Chapter 137: Success

So Evin's new plan was more about clarity and focus. He started treating this issue as a psychological barrier of some sorts.

'What do I want to achieve with spell gestures?' Evin would ask himself and write his answers on a piece paper with large, bold fonts. Just knowing about one's goals sometimes didn't quite cut it, but the next best thing was to try writing it down on paper and then write out possible solutions.

The human brain was pitifully easy to delude and motivate. Just by putting something down on paper would make it feel like it achieved something great, making it more motivated to finish a task. Especially for a vague task like this. 

If it was a more complex task and Evin knew exactly what he was going to do, then this move wouldn't really do much to motivate him. 

For example, imagine yourself working as an architect and you just got a job for a two-story house in the suburbs. And after wrestling with the problem a bit, you finish drawing the draft on a nice, clean, white paper. It's nothing too special, a simple drawing of a house with some wacky looking roofs. Altogether, it all looks quite nice to the eyes. 

This will motivate you, slightly, yes. But deep down inside your head, you know you have a mountain of tasks that you need to finish. Exporting your nice little drawing to a proper program or a paper, preparing a presentation for your clients, consulting engineers who for some reason really hate you, double-checking whether you're breaking some kind of law or not, making sure your project doesn't cost 2 million dollars for whatever reason, arguing with the construction crew, all that good stuff. 

But for something super vague like this this "subconsciously casting magic after snapping your fingers magically" a simple bullet list would do the trick. 

After looking through the possible solutions he could take, Evin finally settled on concentrating very deeply on the process, in hopes of seeing, or feeling something different.

'Okay, I'm ready,' Evin thought at he put the paper down and nodded at Rith.

"You ready?" the Cosmic asked with a smile and Evin nodded.

"After she attacks me, I need to snap my fingers and then focus on flying. Okay! Snap and then float. Snap and then float," Evin started chanting under his breath and hyping himself up.

Patiently, he awaited the attack. Rith looked at him peacefully, no trace of intent apparent from her eyes. 

'Come on, hurry up' Evin grumbled in his head, but then he suddenly felt danger around his feet. 

Instantly, he snapped his fingers and an imaginary jolt of electricity ran from his fingers to his brain. Like a horse that got whipped, his brain cells were jolted awake and hurriedly began constructing the spell from its base. But this time, Evin felt something different, like he just got into the zone, or something.

Evin didn't try to lose his focus like he used to before, but observed the process like a bystander inside his head. It was a very weird experience, like his consciousness had split into two, and one was looking at the other. At this point, he didn't care about the seconds and the impending danger, he instead witnessed how his mind began to visualize himself weightlessly bouncing from the ground, with a number of invisible air throttles appearing from below his body.

This 3D-model-like image appeared before his eyes and then, like suction pipe, his mind began to greedily draw World energies from the Channeling artifact and constructing it in such a way that it filled the imaginary model in his head. 

And just like that, Evin was floating in the air with countless tiny portals swimming under his body. If Evin was a bit slower, the portals would rip at his skin one by one, bringing him endless pain and torture. Evin knew that Rith wouldn't kill him, but who wanted to be cut into pieces by those portals?

Evin looked at the Cosmic in question and saw her looking back with a slight smile.

"7 and a half seconds. Not bad, considering that your personal best was a bit more than 10 seconds yesterday," Rith complimented with some admiration.

"I can cut it down even more," Evin said, trying not to forget this feeling in his head. If Evin's brain would fill the image with World energies as it was being constructed, he could save even more time on this process. 

"How did you manage it?" Rith asked curiously. She had struggled greatly with the problem of gestures in her past. 

"I'm not quite sure. When I snapped my fingers and tried focusing on the process, I could somehow 'see' my subconscious, or whatever it was, building the spell from scratch. It was using a kind of real-life model which depicted the spell's effects on my body and applying World energies to relevant parts," Evin explained clumsily.

Evin also realized that his endless training method was giving its fruits, since if Evin tried this method from the beginning, it wouldn't be any different from normally casting it. But thanks to this past month's training, Evin's brain learned to perform the spell automatically, albeit a bit slowly. Evin could only observe the process from the sidelines since his mind was able to work automatically like that.

"I think that's pretty impressive, to be honest. Most opt to plow through muddle-headedly with the previous method that you used. But I've heard some stories about World of Thought mages completely restructuring their minds to become the perfect spell casting machine. I seriously can't imagine how one would go about doing that" Rith murmured softly.

"What?" Evin asked.

"Well, I really don't know much about it. I only heard some stories," Rith waved her paws cutely.

"Please tell me, it might be useful for me," Evin insisted.

"Well, I heard that some people set up their brains in such a way that it constantly has a spell ready, like literally at all times. And supposedly, they have a lot of trouble functioning in society, as they were prone to randomly casting their spells, since it's very likely that they've triggered their gestures somehow. This is why, most mages prefer to have very specific gestures," Rith finished explaining. 

Evin nodded thoughtfully at this. 

"Then I guess my gestures can't be super obvious, but they also can't be too general" he muttered. After trying out the snaps, Evin realized that they were a bit too obvious. If he kept on using different snaps or different things, in a real fight, he would be like a video game boss, who very politely indicated to the enemy exactly what kind of move he was going to do next.

After a while, he decided to worry about it after he was finished with the floating spell. As he was training and thinking about more low-key gestures for his other spells, his mind suddenly thought of a very daring idea.