Initially upon discovering that the cultivator used Solaris, he instantly reviewed his memories and thoughts on the Solaris branch of sorcery. Sadly he never actually fought a Solaris sorcerer before, only read about them. This was because they were really rare to find in Mathias' original realm.
Which is why he decided to play it safe.
Mathias, a sorcerer from outside the Hua forest, beat the youngest son of the Hua Tai clan. If word of this spread, Hua Tai Zhang Li's position and reputation would be at line. When it comes to young masters in the realm of cultivation they are often supported by stronger elders, a situation more often true for firstborn young masters.
Hence, Hua Tai Zhang Li took Mathias Calypses to a more secluded part of the village to assassinate him. Since he lost the first time he challenged him to a fight, he decided to call an elder who was supporting him in the clan to do the job for him. This elder was called of course called by a hidden signal.
Mathias Calypses did not catch this signal.
Nor did he know that elder's position and distance.
Though Mathias did sense the feeling of a trap, he did not have any evidence for that but dealing with an Alchemist of Law has made him weary beyond his years.
He initially told Zhang Li about his strategies to beat him to discern his trustworthiness. In that explanation there were certain weaknesses Mathias Calypses revealed to Zhang Li.
He wanted to see if Zhang Li would identify those weaknesses and plan his downfall, if Zhang Li wouldn't identify those weaknesses and do nothing, or if Zhang Li would identify those weaknesses and not plan his downfall.
The first option revealed that Zhang Li had enough wit to make him his ally but couldn't be trusted to be his ally.
The second option revealed that Zhang Li didn't have enough wit to be his ally, in which case Mathias would leave and try to make an ally in somebody else.
The third option revealed that Zhang Li had enough wit to make him his ally and that he wouldn't instantly backstab him at the slightest sign of weakness.
The third option being the case did not mean that Zhang Li was a smart person, it meant that he was smart enough to be directed by Mathias Calypses. Nor did it mean that he was a trustworthy person, just either too timid to do anything or he suspected that Mathias' words about his weakness could be a trap in themselves, which in this case, was true.
In this way, a Zhang Li who selects the third option in this case is the smartest Zhang Li, no matter where his actual aspirations lie.
Using this logic, Mathias Calypses devised that Hua Tai Zhang Li was a witful person but not necessarily an intelligent one.
Realizing weaknesses that were purposefully hidden for him to discover but not thinking past that.
Mathias wondered how such a situation could be, how could someone have wit without having true intelligence? When he chose allies to fight against the Alchemist of Law with, he never encountered such a discrepancy.
Not soon after, he came to an appropriate realization: This was a debate between nature versus nurture, a concept he has previously read about in a book about psychology.
He suspected that Hua Tai Zhang Li's wit was a separately learned power, not a facet of his intelligence.
Mathias believed that this was similar to someone who rehearses answers from textbooks rather than devising the answer though thought.
This gave certain clues about the nature of this world to Mathias.
Mathias realized that someone surviving the elder's attack, if an elder did attack. Would put the entire village on lockdown.
Astris sorcery specialized in the aspects of stars: Space, darkness, relative distance, wonder, light and hiding. This makes Astris sorcery, out of all of the 27 branches, the strongest at escaping.
So Mathias Calypses wasn't at all worried about anyone catching him if he chose to use sorcery to escape.
But here lied the problem, Mathias wanted to use the least amount of aether as possible. Escaping like that would burn his aether.
In Mathias Calypses' knowledge, there are 7 levels of sorcerers: Initiate, Adept, Ascetic, Apostle, Sage, Evangelist, and God. This list of course goes from weakest to strongest.
Mathias himself was only at the second stage, Adept. Julien Watson, the self-proclaimed Alchemist of Law was someone Mathias suspected to be at the Sage stage, or maybe possibly the beginning of the Evangelist stage. He felt Julien too strong to be an Apostle.
Granted, Mathias Calypses had no idea about the strength level of any stage above Ascetic but seeing Julien Watson effortlessly suppress beings whose strength Mathias confirmed to be above the Ascetic stage, he concluded that Julien Watson was most likely, higher than Apostle.
Using his knowledge of the ranking of sorcerers he also concluded that Hua Tai Zhang Li was Initiate. This conclusion could be created from two separate observations.
One, the easiest observation, which was the amount of aether control held by Hua Tai Zhang Li. Advancement from one level of sorcerer to another requires both gradual progress and explosive progress, the gradual progress can technically be obtained without completely mastering interior aether control but the explosive progress can't be.
Of course, they are exceptions to this rule. An Adept could purposefully wreck their aether control in front of another sorcerer to try to hide their level. This, of course, would be dangerous. Since a lowered aether control leaves one more susceptible to surprise attacks and ambushes.
Plus, an experienced enough sorcerer could tell the difference between real Initiate aether control and imitated poor aether control if they were to pay close attention.
Mathias himself doesn't believe that he's experienced enough to detect it with one hundred percent accuracy but he does believe that if it was the first time a sorcerer tried to hide their level or if a sorcerer relatively new at hiding their level and were to confront him, he'd most likely figure it out.
Two, the harder observation, when fighting Zhang Li the sorcery embedded into the cloth pouch Mathias used was at the level of an Initiate and the cultivator's incantation dealt damage but ultimately failed to break through the matrix.
This was due to the fact Astris sorcery and Solaris sorcery both embody light to a certain degree. Making it difficult for them to deal damage to the others' structure.
This was definitive evidence that Zhang Li was an Initiate, if he was an Adept it wouldn't have mattered that Mathias and Zhang Li sorcerous affinities didn't counter each other, the barrier would have just shattered anyway, such is the difference between an Initiate and an Adept.
Not wishing to burn his aether, Mathias decided to make a real body double.
In the world of sorcery there are numerous ways to create a body double and two main types that can be created, real and illusory.
Illusory body doubles are just that, illusions. One such example was the first body double Mathias Calypses used against Hua Tai Zhang Li. They cannot take damage without revealing that they are a body double. Illusory clones are another phrase commonly used to describe their existence.
Illusory clones are constructs of pure elemental aether, being composed of aether any attacks using aether destabilize their structure, causing the very delicate spell that incorporates all aspects of the body structure to fail. This is the underlying reason why illusory body doubles can't take attacks, even though they are illusory.
Real body doubles are different, they are real for all intents and purposes. Mathias is capable of creating these body doubles but doesn't like doing it because real body doubles are extremely tedious to create.
So instead, Mathias decided to make a hybrid of a real and illusory body double. A physical thing that can take a hit while being able to be created and deployed near instantly. The drawback to this specific sorcery was that any competent sorcerer would be able to discern the nature of the body double with a little deep observation of its interactions.
But it's different if that body double were to instantly die and have to act like a corpse. A feat like that, Mathias was very comfortable with performing.
It was not necessarily something found in a textbook but rather something of Mathias' own creation.
Not to say identical techniques didn't exist outside of Mathias' sorcery, such a notion would be ridiculous. As someone who came into contact with a sorcerer outside the realm of reason, Mathias would not for a second believe he's some kind of special sorcerer, in his mind that is reserved for the Alchemists.
The process involves taking a mass of resources and constructing them into a human body without fine-tuning certain processes of life and self-consciousness. In other words, the main difference between Mathias Calypses' decoy clone technique and the real body double technique is that while real body doubles' can hold full-on conversations independently of the sorcerer and think in an independent complex manner, being fully self-sufficient, Mathias' decoy clone technique is fully controlled by Mathias himself and doesn't create a full consciousness for the clone.
The problem with this is that it has insanely absurd distance requirements, having to stay within 5 feet of the sorcerer to work as intended. Beyond this range the time it takes for aether commands to reach the decoy, which causes a very noticeable delay in actions and speech.
This of course gets more and more extreme the further the decoy is. At one and a half moonshines the decoy would become completely inoperable.
The decoy's aether-based instructions could also be intercepted by a sorcerer, creating a telltale sign that the decoy is in fact, a decoy.
Mathias came to these conclusions when trying to improve the real body double sorcery. He soon found out that it was like this way for a reason.
That's not to say that Mathias Calypses' research was without use. Through a multitude of experiments he found out that this sorcery was most useful when faking one's death.
The reasoning was simple: you don't have to control a decoy if it's dead.