The Undying Magician - Book 1 - Chapter 39 - First Spell Attempt (Patreon)

                                                                                Nathan

                                          Year 2849 | Month 5 | Day 20 | Thursday

As soon as I enter my room, I close and lock the door behind me with a frown on my face.

I should ask Leo about it tomorrow.

Although I doubt he will actually answer my question. Not considering how he usually acts.

Anyways, I step towards the center of the room whilst taking off my blazer and the rest of my uniform’s top beneath it and tossing them on to my bed before taking a deep breath. I then put my weapons on my bed and grab the magic circle device out of my pocket.

“Here goes nothing,” I mutter out loud before placing the device on my wrist, grabbing the code I had written and printed out from my bag, and placing the bag itself onto the bed with the rest of my stuff.

To start things off, I reread through all of my code to check for any missed spelling or typed mistakes. Because even just a single major mistake in this could end up with me having to regrow my arm, and that’s not something I want to feel right now, no matter how ‘used’ to it I’m getting.

Once I finish rereading through it once, I do it again, except this time focusing on possible mistakes in the code.

“The object class for the membrane scanner is initialized, and so are the variables for my membrane’s location and my mana’s specific signature…” I mutter out loud as I read through.

The variables for my units of mana seem good as well, and the barrier itself – on the printed paper at least – is currently hardcoded to only cover my right forearm, so as to not cause any noticeable damage to my room if something were to go wrong…

And something probably will go wrong, if what the instructor said before about no one ever getting their scripts right on the first try had any truth to it.

The only reason why he’s letting me – or forcing me to, if I’m being more specific – try it on my own is because of my immortality, instead of making sure it is labeled as good on the simulator in class first.

I continue going over the code for a few minutes before nodding my head to myself and activating the device, causing a magic circle to appear in front of my hand.

After taking another deep breath, I begin to carefully insert the instructions into the script.

The process of doing so feels really weird. Kind of like every time I insert a line of instructions, a muscle in my brain twitches or something, without actually twitching.

It’s rather uncomfortable.

But that aside, it’s really fast. To the point that all I have to do is skim over the words and it instantly moves them into the script. And since the circle doesn’t actually activate until the button on the device is tapped once, I can be a bit more reckless with it and enter the script with abandon before going back and checking it over a few times.

Although that’s only for when I’m actually using the device. When I’m not, I have to make sure to keep my mana out of the magic circle no matter what. Otherwise, the mana will try to flow into the circle and begin whatever script is inside.

And that’s bound to end poorly when the script isn’t done.

Despite the speed of entering in the script, it still takes me over a dozen minutes to enter it all in and make sure it all was entered correctly. Which makes me understand just why most magicians practice entering their scripts of code and deleting them from their magic circles over and over and over again until it’s basically muscle memory to them.

Because spending fifteen minutes casting a single basic spell will get a magician killed on a battlefield.

I stare at the finished script for a few seconds before shaking my head and going over it once more to check for any mistakes.

This takes a few more minutes before I finally take a deep breath and tap on the device to activate the spell.

“And now to watch…” I mutter as I watch my mana enter the magic circle, lighting up the star within as the lines of code flow through it.

I narrow my eyes as I attempt – and fail – to read each line as they fly by at a barely visible speed.

A couple of seconds pass by, letting the circle get through over half of the script before my eyes begin to widen at the sight of a fatal error I had missed as a gray barrier begins to form over my right forearm.

Shit!

I raise my arm up higher above the ground right before the code reaches the fatal error, causing the gray barrier that was forming to suddenly flicker and shrink, forcing my arm inwards and crushing it with a disgusting, muffled grinding sound.

Almost immediately, I push through the extreme pain to cancel my mana flow to the magic circle. At the same time, the usual, strange force emerges from where my arm is being crushed, forcing the neutral barrier to blow outwards from my arm, causing a loud popping sound to echo from it before it shatters, leaving my arm to repair itself.

I sigh in relief as soon as my arm returns to normal before falling to my knees on the ground.

The magic circle in front of my then vanishes, leaving my room in complete silence until I let out a groan and fall the rest of the way to the ground, lying on my back against the carpeted floor.

That hurt.

After lying down for a few minutes, I reach forwards to grab the printed code before focusing on the part that had the error.

One major problem with magical scripting.

It’s extremely difficult to debug. Without killing yourself that is.

I reach for the bag on my bed to grab a pen before correcting the error on the page and lying back down onto the carpet floor again whilst placing the page on the ground.

At this point, I wish I knew a way to just turn on and off my ability to feel pain. But if I tried to damage it, then it’d just heal right back even if it was possible.

The only reason the doctor’s equipment works is because it uses magic and constantly acts on my body, making sure it can’t heal itself from the numbing effect whilst running.

Or at least, that was what the doctor said is the reason it works.

I take in another deep breath before letting it out and getting back to my feet again.

Time to take advantage of my immortality to debug the spell, I guess.

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