Reader Mage-Stubbing August 10! Chapter 187: 187-Reader Mage Variation II

Read chapter 187 of Reader Mage-Stubbing August 10! by A_Random_Turtle on NovelPedia.

The world stretched out before Merlin. His eyes pulsed like they each had hearts of their own, and the color of everything before him shifted into a warped blue. The murmurs raining down from the crowd were both muffled and clear to him in a strange manner, like he was listening to their words from a pipe stretching across rooms. The whole feeling was bizarre and disorienting, and yet he felt quite accustomed to it. Most of all, he felt significantly more powerful than he had been just a second ago. Merlin locked eyes with Marcus, and the boy smiled, his stern expression breaking about like a mud wall rammed through by a tractor. Any other person might have been confused as to why Marcus seemed excited, but Merlin came to a quick inference. The boy was obsessed with his abilities, and now that Merlin had just showcased something even more fascinating, it excited him. Regardless of how they both saw each other at this moment, though, they were in a duel. Marcus raised his hand and snapped his fingers. Merlin felt the arena quake, but no one else did. He noticed that Marcus had manipulated sound once again, but unlike before when he didn’t notice it until it hit him, Merlin saw the waves move through the air as it approached him. He took a deep breath and calmed his heart, waiting patiently to see if his newest ability functioned in the exact way he hoped it would. He had not had the time to test it out previously, as the whole sequence that had led to its existence wasn’t a straightforward one. After his training duel with Lee Jaehyun, he had come to a realization that trying to channel out his mana to deconstruct spells while manipulating it at the same time to use his other Perks or skills, was almost impossible. He had likened the process to how Mages manipulated more than a couple spells in quick succession, but last night as he went through the whole process in his mind once again, he realized that he had been going about it the wrong way. He was not like the others. He wasn’t a traditional mage like they were. He was different. And that meant the way he used his abilities would differ too. For the mages, even though the spells they were casting were technically different, they were cut from the same cloth. Chima, for example, no matter the spells he cast, it would be a fire spell in general. It always would. Basically, he was manipulating the same element, just giving it different forms. If there was anything the System had made clear to Merlin ever since its inception to him, it was that his Perks differed. His Reader Mage ability was not the same as his Dungeon Artist Perk. They functioned differently and were bound by different and distinct rules. This was also true in Singularity Mage. Even though Kieran had never been burdened by the same problems as Merlin, specifically being restricted by the time Reader Mage needed to be activated, he had never managed to use it at the same time as he used his other abilities. It was one or the other. But Merlin knew he wasn’t as powerful as the protagonist, which meant he had to find a way to bypass the restrictions that came with Reader Mage. A cheat. His saving grace had come in the form of Maid Eun-Wol’s brief lecture on attunement. He shouldn’t focus on his mana as a whole, but each molecule and how they were bonded. Which brought Merlin to a question. What if he could manipulate those bonds? Tweak them to fit his own ideas? At first glance, it seemed risky, but he had lived his whole life taking risks, so Merlin didn’t hesitate. He fell into a trance immediately, and unlike the first and consecutive times he had tinkered with his ability to attune with his mana, he took a different approach. Instead of heading straight for the nucleus of his mana and boring into it, he instead focused on the particle chain around it. They were numbered in the same amount as the Perks and Skills he possessed. The molecular structures bearing the knowledge of his Perks were of a lustrous blue