Lord of Arcane

Chapter 3253: The Limit of Artificial Spellcasting
Xia Duo summoned these Alliance mages for no other reason than to assist him in completing a large spell - [Peak Cutting Spell], which was a new spell invented by the Seven Towers only a few years ago.

When he created the floating city as a war magic platform, the Seventh Tower also wanted to follow suit quickly. However, the Seventh Tower's idea for building the floating city was not to transform materials, but to directly cut off the mountain and turn it upside down as the base of the floating city.

Doing so can effectively save time, and there is no risk of the transformed materials being reversed. For example, the azure stone transformed from pure water in Xiaduo's Chang'an City will be in an unstable state for at least several months.

During this period, anyone who casts a [Dispel Magic] on the stone can turn the stone back into water. This is an ancient transformation spell that Shado obtained when he analyzed the [Sarruk Witch Statue] (actually a fossil).

It is far more effective than the spells of the current era. Most of the modern spells used to transform materials cannot achieve permanent transformation. Even if they can, it will take decades or even hundreds of years to settle.

For example, the stone bridge west of Savile Town was originally transformed by magic, as evidenced by its one-piece molding. It took nearly thirty years for the bridge to become truly stable, and it would no longer turn into its original transformation material because of a [Remove Magic] spell.

If it was just a bridge, thirty years would be nothing. After all, few people would be interested in a bridge and would specifically attack it. But if it was a strategic weapon like a floating city, it would always be in the sight of all countries.

This naturally includes enemies from Netheril or the Seven Towers.

Therefore, Shaduo could fully understand what the Seven Towers did at the time, but doing so would undoubtedly set a bad example. With the popularization of Misera in the future, I am afraid that every great arcanist would want to build his own floating city.

By then, no matter how many mountains there are in Netheril, they will not be enough to cut, and this kind of natural environment is easy to destroy but extremely difficult to repair.

So Xia Duo joined forces with others to persuade the Seventh Tower to withdraw on the grounds of sustainable development. This matter is complicated and not as simple as attacking the Seventh Tower or sustainable development. It also involves the ownership of the Sweet Water Trinity and even the legitimacy of the Seventh Tower's rule. Anyway, the Seventh Tower finally compromised on this issue, gave up the plan to intercept the mountain, and returned and repaired the intercepted mountain.

Of course, Shado also made some compromises, such as providing spells for transforming materials that were more advanced than those in the current main plane, so that the Seven Towers could complete the infrastructure construction of the floating city.

And the [Peak Cutting Technique] was also obtained at that time.

This is not a regular spell. Before today, Xia Duo had never even thought that he would use this spell one day, but such a need did arise.

This spell is undoubtedly a 10th-level spell, reaching the limit of the magic network, but this is not the limit of the caster. There can be spells equivalent to 11th level or even higher above it.

The same goes for [Peak Cutting Technique], which can be improved as needed.

What Shaduo is preparing now is an equivalent to an 11th-level spell. The magic network cannot directly provide the magic network strings for constructing 11th-level spells, but needs to be expressed equivalently through the tenth-level elements.

Similar to how 11 can be written as 10+1, it raises the spell by one level beyond the limits of the magic network, making it much more difficult to cast than a normal 10th-level spell.

Depending on the spell, the difficulty may only increase by three times, or more than ten times.

This also means that the equivalent spell ring level cannot be increased indefinitely. At least at the level of manual casting, there is an operating limit that can be roughly estimated.

However, if the spell is cast by a machine, there will be no such limitation.

For example, war spells, if cast manually, are certainly more flexible, but the prerequisite is that a group of mages need to undergo long-term training first, which is extremely costly.

If it is activated through war instruments, it is relatively rigid, but the power of the war spell itself exceeds the ability of individual spellcasters to resist. Generally speaking, only war spells can be used against war spells.

In this case, even if it is a war spell activated by a war weapon, as long as the opponent does not have an equal existence, it is not much different from a war spell cast manually, and both are of the crushing level.

But in the future, the level of equivalent spells will almost certainly exceed the limit of manual spellcasting. By then, the war may really be decided by a weapon.

And now, 11th level and even 12th level are not the limit of manual spellcasting. Even without using the method of coordinated casting, it is possible for a single caster to complete these spells.

For Xia Duo, with his current spellcasting ability, he could indeed complete the [Peak Cutting Technique] which he had never even practiced before, but it would only consume a huge amount of his energy.

And during this period he had no time to pay attention to anything other than casting spells, which did not fit his plan, so he had to ask someone for help.

As long as there are enough people to help, and coordination is done well and redundancy is arranged, he can easily focus on things other than spellcasting. Currently, most high-level mages in Netheril use this model in their daily experiments.

It's just that Shado is now asking the Alliance mages and Evereska mages for help, while most of the Nether mages provide voluntary help to their teachers during the apprentice stage, and after they accept apprentices, they start to ask the apprentices to help on a voluntary basis.

The main focus is on passing on the torch.

In the most extreme cases, the leader of the collaborative casting can assign more than 90% of the casting tasks to the assistants, and he only needs to do a series of summarizing tasks, which can really save a lot of energy and allow more experiments to be carried out.

Therefore, just looking at how many apprentices a Nether wizard has does not indicate how open-minded he is. Perhaps his apprentices are all his spellcasting supply packages!
Xia Duo is not pursuing the ultimate now, but he has allocated more than 50% of the spellcasting tasks to other mages. This is a relatively reasonable ratio, which is equivalent to reducing the difficulty of spellcasting by nearly half.

If you want to improve the ratio, the leader and the auxiliary equipment need to have a very good understanding of each other.

Generally speaking, 50% is already a state of tacit cooperation between teachers and students. The biggest shortcoming is that the apprentice's own spellcasting ability is very limited.

The Alliance mages and Evereska mages chosen by Shado this time are each at least elite mages, and are mages under the elven magic system, and are easier to achieve coordination than Nether mages.

With the assistance of the spiritual connection state of the Lingsi network, Xia Duo dared to set a 50% outsourcing ratio when casting the spell for the first time. If it were a group of Nether wizards, he would not dare to do so.

……

A simple test of the synergy effect was conducted. During this process, Xia Duo had used the computing power pool to complete the decomposition of the [Peak Cutting Technique] and set up sufficient redundancy.

The synergistic effect of this group of elven wizards really exceeded his expectations. As long as no one deliberately did something bad, this joint spell would definitely succeed!