Genius Mage in a Cultivation World

"Everyone! Gather round!" Layn shouted, instantly drawing the attention of the few mercenaries that just so happened to just come back with a new shipment of logs.

"Sir?" Surprised by the sudden change to the routine, the mercenaries only looked up at the archmage, before dropping their jobs in a way that wouldn't destroy all their efforts so far before following his order.

"We don't need much more wood. What we have already should be enough." Layn pointed his hand at the massive piles of logs that the mercenaries busied themselves with gather for the entire day. "Because from now on, we have a new building material." Layn smiled before pointing his hand at a lump of clay that Irea brought with her.

"Clay? What, are we going to pave the roads with it?" Some of the mercenaries started asking around, in hopes of someone else understanding the intent behind Layn's words.

"No, we are going to turn this useless type of earth, type of earth that nothing would grow at, into a building material far superior to the wood!" Layn shouted, spreading his arms wide. "In other words," his tone normalized, making him appear as if he was talking about something as important as yesterday's dinner, "we will be making bricks."

Layn smiled before stepping down from the small hill he used to make himself more visible. To his side, both Irea and Pavrien were trying to make a sense of just what he was talking about.

"First, we take this clay." Layn went for the practical showcase rather than for the theory alone. "Then, we crush it." Not bothering to give his mercenaries any time for the message to sink in, Layn used a bit of his cultivation-given strength to crush the lump of clay he held in his hand.

"Great, now we have smaller pieces of it," Irea rolled her eyes, slightly disturbing the archmage.

"Just stay with me," Layn smiled in response, before dropping all the small bits of clay to the ground. "Now, we need to add water." Rather than walking all the way to the shore, Layn simply used a bit of his magic to grab hold of a small ball of water before dropping it at the crushed bits.

'Well, it's not how it was made back in the future, but it should still work,' he thought to himself, forcing the clay pieces around the puddle he created. Once the mixture turned relatively even in color, Layn squeezed.

For a moment, the water continued to fall out of the suddenly condensed mixture, only for its flow to quickly slow down before turning into a measly drip.

"What you have right now, is what I like to call a brick-paste," Layn claimed while breathing a sigh of relief. In a normal scenario, bits of clay would be gathered in a container, before a small quantity of water would be added. Then, the workers would tirelessly work to crush the mixture evenly, before adding a bit more water or clay, just to ultimately bring it to a viscosity similar to the paste Layn created with his magic.

'In the end, it's all about the simple, physical processes, isn't it?' the archmage thought to himself, before focusing on his magic a bit more. Because this time, it wasn't about simple crushing or mixing the mixture.

At first, Layn created a set of four, flat barriers. Ones that simply blocked its two sides from ever interacting. And right in the middle of each of those barriers, he placed roughly a fourth of the mixture he prepared.

"Now, when this clay and water thingy is around as thick as what we just did, we add some straw." Layn kneeled down before doing something with his hands for the very first time since the show started. Yet, he didn't do anything great or heavy. With a single swipe of his hand, he pulled out a bit of grass along with the earth it had its roots in, before splitting the dirt into four roughly even pieces and placing them in the wet clumps of clay mix.

"Then, we mix it all once again!" Layn shouted joyfully, repeating all the steps from before. Once again, a bit of water was added to the mix just so that the mixture wouldn't turn any more vicious than it already was. Given how the Archmage didn't bother to separate the grass from the dirt, he had no other choice but to counteract this addition of stable mass with a bit of water.

"Now that we are done, we form it," Layn explained, changing the shape of his barriers. At first, he drew imaginary lines in a shape of a square, with the lump of clay in the middle. Then, along the lines from before, he bent the barrier at the right angle, and then he did it again to turn it from a single sheet of barrier into a cubical one.

The lay was trapped inside the barrier now. Yet, rather than being satisfied with his results, Layn started to condense the barrier. The smaller it grew, the stronger it became given how the same amount of magic now had to create a smaller surface of the barrier.

Pressured by the barriers closing on it, the evenly-mixed pasta started to fill up all the blank spots, before turning into a perfect cube. At some point, Layn's magic could no longer compress any further as the resistance of the matter inside became greater than the energy the barrier had at its disposal.

"In theory, we could use cubic bricks like that…" Layn pointed his hand at the four, grey cubes hanging in the air in front of him before shaking his head, "but it's impractical. That's why we make them longer," he said, before changing the orders for his magic a bit.

This time, rather than trying to condense the shit out of it, Layn allowed one of the sides of the barrier to stretch, while the others started to contract once again. And soon, the former lump of clay turned into a shape that Layn could finally recognize.

"There is a lot more that can be done about the shape. Depending on the use, we can drill holes in those bricks, we can leave only the walls, we can drill geometric shapes or even geometry of our dicks." Layn used crude words to emphasize the point he was trying to make. "All that matters is that we are now before the very last step."

As soon as he finished his words, Layn dismissed all four of his barriers, allowing three of the fresh bricks to fall to the ground, instantly deforming back into a lump of clay. The only surviving brick rested on his hand rather than falling to the ground.

"What I'm going to do now, is the speed-up process. While it will make for bricks of slightly lower quality, we can just leave them on the sun and let it dry them for us." Layn smiled when noticing the looks of hesitation on the faces of his mercenaries. Inducing this kind of feeling was the very reason why he decided to drop three out of four examples he prepared.

"Now, watch what happens." Layn smiled, before covering his hand with fire.

The spell of burning was one of the earliest offensive techniques any mage would learn in the future. Given the simplicity of the structure that made up this spell, only requiring the user to induce three different phenomena with mana, it was also considered to not only be the most researched spell, but also the one that was the hardest to develop any further.

Just like the saying goes, the better is the opposite of the good. And yet, Layn spent an uncountable amount of time while trying to defeat this saying. Yet, just like with all of his childish attempts at creating a Perpetuum mobile before, he failed.

'But all this training and testing I did still allowed me to pass the class with the flying colors,' Layn thought while watching how the fires spread from his hand to all over the wet brick. Given his expertise at the spell of burning, he could freely set its temperature, even if it was too wary between different parts of the flame.

'Dang, I got immersed in it again,' Layn scolded himself in his thoughts, before regaining his focus. 'In the end, I'm not here to flex my magic, but to create a damned brick!' he added some insults to his mental injuries, before suddenly retracting his spell.

The brick turned slightly reddish. Its color wasn't as saturated as Layn expected, proving that his method of creating this brick wasn't as effective as he hoped it would be.

'Well, it doesn't matter. We will improve the technique as we will go,' Layn thought to himself before throwing the brick towards the mercenaries.

"Here. Try breaking it." Layn smiled. In the end, there was one more trick that he did to the brick, something that required humanity over two hundred years more in the historical development to figure out.

He added a powdered form of a crystal that was almost fully exhausted of the mana stored inside.

"Sir?" The mercenaries looked at the pinkish piece of former clay with clear hesitation. "Are you sure?"

For the mercenaries, the solid piece of brick was nothing but a burned clay. And just like with mud, if someone burned mud, it would turn solid… But who would even have any trouble at kicking a piece of earth away or apart?

"Auch!" Irea, who didn't know what Layn had planned, volunteered. Yet, as soon as she kicked the brick, her face twisted in pain. On the other hand, the brick simply rolled a bit away.

"Now, try to do it seriously if you dare," Layn smiled. This time, Irea didn't dare to step forward. Sensing the opportunity to prove himself, Pavrien stepped forward before driving his cultivation to its meager limits and striking the brick with his hand.

"ARGH!" The sound of pain that instantly came out of his throat quickly announced the expected result.