The world of spiritual energy was now free of all noise.
After Alan's consciousness completed that leap-like transformation, his entire state of being fundamentally changed.
He still sat at the desk, fingers brushing over the piece of parchment imprinted with "garbled symbols," rough and ancient to the touch.
But his perception had already penetrated beyond the material surface.
The world before his eyes had shed all its distracting colors and sounds, leaving only the pure skeleton of logic and concepts.
Previously, these chaotic symbols had been an insurmountable wall of encryption before him.
They flickered. They twisted. They mocked any mind that tried to interpret them with countless logical traps.
But now, everything was different.
In the core of his spiritual energy, the concept he had named the "initial formula" shone like a star, radiating absolute rationality.
Under the illumination of this light, all the symbols on the parchment corrected themselves.
They no longer twisted or flickered; instead, they imprinted themselves in his mental perception in an unprecedentedly stable form.
They were not mere information.
Information is a carrier describing things, but these symbols were the things themselves.
They were rules.
They were not "encrypted symbols" that needed decoding.
Decoding implies they have another layer of plain meaning. But they did not. In themselves, they were the base-level plaintext.
They were the cornerstones of this magical world's existence.
They were the most fundamental physical constants and core variables.
In his mind, the halls of physics from his previous life opened with a roar.
Planck's constant, h, defined the smallest unit of energy.
The speed of light in a vacuum, c, locked the limits of information transmission.
The elementary charge, e, determined the strength of electromagnetic interactions.
These symbols before him were the h, c, and e of the magical world!
Together, they defined this world's existence and its operation.
"So… that's it…"
This realization struck like lightning across the heavens, cleaving all his old understandings.
Alan's chest heaved violently, each breath burning with heat.
His heart pounded furiously beneath his ribs, pumping blood that was being rapidly consumed by his mental exertion.
He no longer attempted to "decode" them.
That was an arrogant, misguided effort.
Instead, he adjusted his posture, adopting the humility of an apprentice.
With his newly acquired core concept embedded in his spiritual energy, he began to read them — not just superficially, but to truly understand them.
His spiritual energy, like an exquisitely fine probe, gently touched the first symbol.
The Ouroboros representing eternity.
In his perception, it was no longer a flat pattern. It came alive, forming a closed loop of energy flowing endlessly.
Energy circulated within it — no gain, no loss, its form changing but the quantity remaining constant.
This was not a mystical symbol.
It was defining the law of conservation of energy in this world.
His probe moved to another symbol — the one representing transformation in ancient alchemical terms.
Instantly, an even grander and more complex vision unfolded in his mind.
Matter decomposed under high temperature and pressure, releasing immense energy.
Pure energy, guided by specific models of spiritual energy, reconstituted into new matter.
This was the manifestation of the mass-energy equation in this world:
E = mc²
One symbol after another, under his mental illumination, shed its mysterious veil, revealing its cold, precise, and harmonious inner logic — as orderly as the stars in the cosmos.
He was completely immersed.
Time had lost all meaning.
Outside, the sky shifted from light to dark, then back to light again. Candles burned down, and new ones were unconsciously lit.
His body felt extreme exhaustion, yet his mind was more alert and exhilarated than ever.
He was like a traveler who had wandered for billions of years, finally finding a clear spring that allowed him to glimpse the very source of the universe, and he leaned forward recklessly to drink deeply.
Finally.
When he had exhausted the last ounce of his spiritual energy, and had re-sorted, linked, and organized all the seemingly chaotic "variables" on the parchment from this completely new perspective,
A theoretical panorama, though incomplete, unfolded grandly within his mind palace constructed from Absolute Rationality.
This treatise left no creator's name.
Yet its core idea could be summarized in four words:
All Laws Return to One.
Its concept was simple yet revolutionary.
All magic in this world — whether transfiguration that changes physical form, spells that release energy, or alchemy that alters the essence of matter — derives at its core from a single, most fundamental form of energy.
An energy that existed at the dawn of the universe, the vibration of the primordial "singularity."
The most fundamental "energy fluctuation."
All magic is merely the result of wizards constructing different models of spiritual energy and guiding this basic fluctuation through various forms of mana, producing different external manifestations.
Water can freeze into ice; water can evaporate into gas.
Yet its molecular formula remains H₂O.
This revelation caused Alan's understanding of all magic to collapse and reconstruct in a cataclysmic avalanche.
Everything he had done before — "modular spells," "magical programming" — had remained at the application layer.
Everything he had done had been merely writing applications on an already pre-existing operating system.
But now, for the first time, he had personally touched the core code of this world!
He glimpsed the secrets of the underlying "operating system" of this world.
A long-neglected memory fragment suddenly exploded in his mind:
The Fortress of Thought.
That ancient spellbook, whose final page had been torn away.
In an instant, all the clues connected.
The book had never truly been about "mental defense spells." That was only its shallowest disguise.
Its true purpose was teaching how to, through meditation and structured practice, transform one's spiritual energy into a stable system capable of carrying, analyzing, and reconstituting the underlying energy fluctuations of the universe — the ultimate spiritual space!
It was not about teaching how to create "shields."
It was about teaching how to turn one's brain into a central processor directly connected to the source of the world.
The torn final page likely contained the most crucial, core, and dangerous knowledge of this ultimate spiritual space.
That book may very well be the only known path to the legendary "initial formula."
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