Casual Heroing

I’m sitting at the desk in my room, with many sheets of paper on it. They are filled to the brim with numbers, deductions, and hypotheses. Even with [Single-Minded Focus], my head feels close to exploding. There are many items on my list, and we need everything on the list to cure Antoninus’s mother. Her name, by the way, is Lucia. The Latin equivalent of Lucy, I guess.

This is going to be a bona fide medical procedure. Before even thinking about irradiating the body of Mrs. Lucia, we need to develop a guide. That would be your standard ultrasound that doctors use during some procedures where they can’t actually see inside the body.

Lord Juler, thankfully, is more than up to the task of studying this with me.

“Lord Juler, how is the guide coming along?”

The spell matrix for this thing, Joey Luciani, will take a few days even for me. Without my skills, I’m limited to what I can put on parchment. And the theory behind such a spell might be as complicated as the radiations you talked about. The only difference is that I already know everything I need. It’s just about melding several spells together and removing the kinks from such an inelegant solution.

We are building a 3D projection of the body using magic. It’s similar to how an interventional MRI works. I watched a few documentaries on how medical TV troupes had to learn some medical stuff. And I remember laughing at how a director couldn’t wrap his head around how an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) worked. Its principles are extremely simple.

An MRI doesn’t use ionizing – read as ‘damaging’ – radiation. It’s a safe procedure that employs a signal from the nucleus of an atom. This signal is electromagnetic in nature and, by the laws of physics, can start ‘resonating’ when several factors, such as frequency, align. This resonance is the fundamental principle of an MRI.

Now, the actual precise physics of an MRI is beyond me. It’s not the kind of stuff you study in AP Physics. You need to be highly specialized and know a lot of quantum physics to replicate such a phenomenon. It’s much more complex than creating radiation.

But I’m working on something together with Lord Juler.

Do you remember the soul-shroud?

Well, different parts of your body have a different ‘soul-density.’ Can you guess the rest? We are having an invisible, non-ionizing, overcharged light go through the subject's body. Said light will naturally pass through your body.

“The postulate of Sziezais has been reproduced, Lord Juler. I have run some quick tests. The nature of magical fire and normal fire are not the same. Therefore, the nature of magical [Light] and normal light shouldn’t follow the same principles either.”

That means that [Light] will indeed ‘go through’ a body, even if it projects shadows. The matrix is granular enough to have ‘residues’ of light impact a denser block of Mana and recreate a 3D projection of a body.

I rub my forehead.

It’s not that easy, in reality. We are working with the very fundamental properties of magic. And we are also assuming that Rottenbone would have a different density. On top of that, we are not even sure that this projection will actually work. It can only work if Lord Juler can recreate a computational algorithm that will reproduce the 3D image. The entire matrix of the spell will have eight different equidistant special [Lights] that should help with that. We’ll use the ‘crossing’ of those [Lights] to reproduce a high-resolution, zoomable projection.

I look at the clock. It has been several hours since I glanced at it. I’m dead tired, and my brain hurts, but the amount of work needed to be still done is terrifying. Eight, that’s how many hours we’ve just spent to make the ‘guide’ part of the whole spell remotely doable. No, wait. To make it so that we could believe it would work.

I start sketching some equations to compute the angles for the [Lights]. Lord Juler can’t do everything on his own. Thankfully, the ridiculous hat on top of my head helps me visualize the geometry – and it also makes me better at math, I think. Whatever.

…

I look at eight angled [Lights] that are projecting toward a point where a fake matrix I placed is. Two of those rays are interfering and distorting another one. Plus, the feedback is too shaky.

I created a Mana sheet that will record how ‘clean’ the signals are after going through the shroud of my matrix. And this one has too much noise. I look at my [Light] matrixes and start tweaking the intensity, trying to find the optimal setting. After a while, I note down some numbers and shake my head.

“Eight [Lights] are too many, Lord Juler. Five is the optimal number. I’ll jot down the optimal angles. Eight create too much noise. I just ran the numbers – I’m sure this is the best configuration.”

I don’t hear a reply for almost five minutes. But I’m not surprised – Lord Juler is in the middle of creating a very complex matrix that is way beyond what I’m capable of.

The reconstruction ‘algorithm,’ as you call it, will take me even longer, Joey Luciani. I have rarely faced such incredible calculations. Whoever came up with this is an insanely brilliant genius! Give me two more days, and it will be completed. At first, it will be raw, but once the main matrix is done, we should be ok. Mind you, Joey Luciani, it will consume a lot of Mana. This is not just Light Magic. This is a veritable formation inside a spell. Unless we adapt it to work with catalysts, it will cost you every time you cast it.

“I know,” I say with bleary eyes.

Rest, student. I’ll be working through your sleep. Souls need no rest.

I don’t even know what time it is when my head naturally falls on the desk, and my body strangely levitates to the bed.