Each repetition altered the original lines slightly, switching again and again. When the switching speed reached dozens, even hundreds of times per second, and he paired it with controlled changes in Magic density to emit light, the result finally appeared.
Belial achieved his goal. He was watching shows in Otherworld.
This made Belial far more interested than before. He began using his control of Magic to display images, replaying all the shows he could still remember from his previous life. Because everything was under his direct control, he could edit scenes and dialogue at will, changing bad endings and unresolved plots into outcomes he preferred.
Relying on strong learning ability and the recent days of practice, he at least managed to avoid drawing everything into a mess. The only flaw was that he had to blink to fill in frames, and even at his current operating level, the frame rate was still a bit low for his powerful dynamic vision. Another flaw was that the image quality was black and white.
He actively stitched scenes together and even put on major works like Dragon RiderSymphogear, stage mago, Sakuya Izayoi vs Platinum City Guard, and Mobile Orga. His level of control over Magic kept rising and became extremely precise, to the point where Belial could proudly say that his current precision was enough to hand-build a lithography machine. That was how exaggerated his control had become.
This level of fine manipulation was originally meant only to improve frame rate and resolution, yet it turned out to be unexpectedly useful. With the powerful support of Energy Field and his own solid foundation, his control of Magic grew even more refined and steadily pushed toward the microscopic level. Then one day, while Belial was working on increasing the pixel density of his display, he discovered something even finer within Magic.
Elements. The reason for noticing them was simple, his microscopic precision had grown high enough to reveal them, and before that, the scale difference was like cells versus viruses. Missing them earlier was completely normal.
But why had he only noticed them now, when elements were such a fundamental part of Otherworld? He had not sensed them while absorbing energy before, so were they just too small, mixed into large amounts of Magic, and ignored by instinct? Either way, his interest was sparked again.
"Red, yellow, blue, cyan…" Belial carefully thought it over and sensed the traits of these elements, noting that under refined control, they emitted different colors of light. This seemed like a very standard set of four elements.
On a microscopic level, elements could exist as particles so small he could not see them directly, relying instead on indirect perception through Magic. Among them were some much more noticeable and larger ones in purple and ice blue, likely variant elements like lightning and ice. He then tried to use Magic to control the elements, which turned out to be much harder than expected.
Elements could not be controlled as directly as Magic itself. He could only influence them indirectly through Magic, and his level of control dropped by several steps. Luckily, time was the one thing he had plenty of, so he could simply grind familiarity.
Before long, though, he ran into a wall. The elements were far too dense, and controlling them felt like mixing black and white sesame seeds together and then picking them apart one by one, except there were many kinds of elements at once. The difficulty rose exponentially.
This was no longer a problem that practice alone could solve, even if his brain really were a supercomputer. It was like trying to repair a hammer, not by attaching a piece of wood to a block of iron, but by finding every atom that made up the hammer and placing each one back in its original position. There were no large fragments to work with, only particles crushed down to near molecular and atomic scale.
"So what do I do now…" The solution, however, was unexpectedly simple. It was Energy Field.
Under the control of Energy Field, he could use a single element particle as a seed to attract others of the same type. This allowed him to easily gather large quantities of a single element. With repeated use, he could quickly classify and organize different kinds of elements.
Once the scale of a gathered element grew large enough, his control over it with Magic increased in turn. Previously, when using Energy Field, Belial had only released and canceled it, along with basic functions like absorption and amplification. Whenever he deployed Energy Field during earlier practice, the Magic he was controlling would collapse and be absorbed into the Energy Field cycle.
The Magic he released with his own control simply could not withstand the intense energy reactions within Energy Field. Thanks to his diligent practice using Magic to draw pretty girls, his control had unknowingly improved by a large margin. Now he could not only maintain the form of Magic within Energy Field, but also freely enlarge or shrink Energy Field and change its direction and shape.
It was no longer just a simple expanding circle. With Energy Field in use, his practice efficiency became even higher, especially after he learned how to control elemental frequencies and effects like brightening and dimming. He released Energy Field fully, forming a box-shaped area in front of him, filling it with elements and Magic.
As long as he controlled the emitted light and frequencies properly, the effect followed naturally. As mentioned before, elements of different types emitted different colors of light, and these colors included the three primary colors. That meant that as long as he balanced the proportions and let the light merge properly.
The shows he played became fully colored. "Hehe…" This useless dragon rolled around on the ground without any dignity, watching the shows playing straight from his mind and smearing across the stone floor like a worm.
The solid rock floor was torn up by the back spines that had grown on his body, but clearly, a certain dragon did not notice. After finishing another full watch, he started thinking about more possibilities. For example, what would happen if he added a large amount of a specific element, like fire, into the previous Magic cycle?
What would happen when Magic merged with elements? Once the thought came up, Belial acted immediately. The result was a simple ring of fire.
There was no difficulty at all, and it came together with ease. So what if he added water next? Belial tried running two elements in the same cycle, fire and water, two fundamentally opposing elements that should produce a violent reaction.
A ring of water and a ring of fire appeared at the same time under his precise control. As the two Magic cycles containing different elements overlapped under Belial's expectant gaze, the result was very normal. He got water vapor.
"..." If the result was normal, then why did he feel a bit disappointed? It felt like he had failed to pull off something impressive.
If that was all, there would not be much else to say. But Belial was curious about something else. Even elementary school students knew the principle of water electrolysis and reaction processes.
But when water here was made of water elements rather than H2O, and lightning was made of lightning elements without positive or negative charges, did those principles still apply in Otherworld? If they did, he might be able to start growing mushroom clouds very soon. Then again, he already had a biological reactor, namely the Nuclear Reactor, so if those principles did not apply, what exactly was he running on now?
He decided to put the idea of trying one vaporizing three hydrogens aside for the moment. Belial thought of the old man who had fought him before, whose spellcasting speed and quantity were far beyond what he could manage now. There was no need to think deeply to know he was missing many things in between.
After sorting out elements, Belial could finally try creating real magic. "Let's test what this does…" Following the magic circle drawn in that very small book in his hands, he casually fed in fire elements and reproduced it exactly.
Nothing happened. All he got was a magic circle pattern made of fire elements, with no effect at all. "I really can't figure out the principles…"
After thinking for a bit, Belial began breaking the complex magic circle down into simpler circles made of geometric shapes and runes that he was more familiar with. He started reproducing them one by one again. It still did not work, but Belial did not get discouraged and kept testing each one.
He could not be sure that any single piece he separated out still had an effect on its own. It was not until the fifty-fourth attempt, a magic circle made of the simplest circle and a few symbols, that something finally changed. "Gather."
Belial carefully sensed the flow of elements and Magic within the circular magic array in his hand. Under the influence of Energy Field, this simple Magic circle produced a strange effect, causing nearby elements and Magic to faintly move toward the central rune. In other words, these shapes and runes, in specific ratios, produced certain effects.
With a rough understanding of the effect, even if he was not fully certain, he could continue experimenting. "Gather." "Disperse." "Stabilize." "Flow." "…"