With a new goal in mind—a fairly challenging one, to boot—I steeled myself with a deep breath and gathered my focus. Soon, my surroundings faded away, leaving me alone in my head with my thoughts.
First things first, I wanted to get a grasp on what I was trying to achieve. For that, I cast Angel’s Feathers, summoning four snow white bird wings on my back. They stretched to twice my armspan, painting an incredibly glorious image—especially since there were four of them instead of the conventional two.
But that was all this spell had to offer. I suppose it also granted me flight, but frankly speaking it wasn’t much compared to simply casting flight magic. One thing this spell did better than flight magic was looking flashy, but that never really mattered to me, so I hardly used it.
I only cast it again because I wanted to revisit a singular spell that could summon multiple things at once. It’s not all that rare, actually. With that confirmed, I undid the spell, and the wings disappeared from my back.
Next, I gathered my focus to visualize multiple lights. I imagined specks of dust you sometimes saw in the air, but smaller, and as particles of light. I tried manifesting one—and it worked. The speck of light floating in front of me was reminiscent of the fireflies you’d see on a summer evening, but much smaller and fainter.
Now to visualize forming four of these with just a single spell. By multicasting rules, I couldn’t cast four spells at a time. But the spell I used earlier summoned four wings instead of the conventional two, meaning it was possible to include four things into a single spell.
“Hrgh...”
Unfortunately, it wasn’t as easy as it seemed, but that was just par for the course when it came to crafting new spells. I used multicasting—an easy thirty-one casts, to start with—as I attempted to craft a spell that would summon four lights at once. None of it succeeded, though, so I tried again and again and again, and it wasn’t until I’d made over a thousand attempts that my spell finally reached completion.
Needless to say, this mission wasn’t accomplished just yet. If all I wanted was to summon four lights, then I could’ve just used my multicasting to cast the spell five times. My goal was to make a spell that would manifest as many lights as there were specks of dust in the air.
In any case, now that the spell itself had taken form, my next step was to start improving it—to slowly add more and more lights into the fray. Slowly, the lights grew in number—from four to five, then five to six. At each stage, the number of failures and retries grew exponentially.
Mana wasn’t a problem—after all, the spell itself was simple and the mana cost was minuscule. No, my bigger problem was that each batch of failures slowly but surely demoralized me. I’d succeeded in manifesting four lights in around a thousand tries, but five lights took me three thousand, and six lights took me ten thousand tries. I was currently attempting to reach seven, but twenty thousand tries in and I still wasn’t getting it.
This is so discouraging... Am I doing something wrong?
The gloom shattered my focus, and my surroundings gradually faded back into view. Overhead, construction on the ceiling was well on its way. Bright light seeped in between the beams and illuminated some parts of the venue, but that didn’t mean the other spots were pitch dark.
“Hmm...?”
That caught my interest. Sunlight wasn’t hitting those spots directly, and the venue didn’t have any other light sources at the moment—so how was the rest of the room still bright? Come to think of it, wasn’t this always the case? For example, it wasn’t necessarily all that dark even on cloudy days.
Light came from the sun—I knew this. But how was it that everywhere, even spots that weren’t under the sunlight, was just equally dim?
“Wait... ‘Equally’?”
Something about that word nagged at me. Everywhere is equally dim... Equally... With this new hint, I slowly organized my thoughts and finally figured out how to phrase it: I wanted a bright cloudy day.
There were no shadows on cloudy days, or if there were, they were negligible. With that type of lighting, everyone could see Amelia. No zither—or any other object, for that matter—would cast a shadow over her on the stage.
The problem was...I just couldn’t figure out why the rest of the venue was still lit up even when not directly hit by sunlight, no matter how much I racked my brain.
So I tried a technique I’d learned just recently: approaching it from a different angle. If I could figure out why it was bright despite the lack of sunlight, then maybe I could compare it to a scenario where it was dark despite the presence of sunlight.
I slipped into focus once more, searching for anything that hit the mark. But there was just no such—
“Wait... There is,” I muttered in realization.
The seemingly impossible scenario rang a bell—but which bell exactly, I couldn’t recall. When was it? When did I encounter such a thing? I’m sure I’ve seen something of this sort... My mind jumped from memory to memory as I struggled to associate these vague recollections with a specific instance. Sunlight... Brightness... Heat... Heat!
I hit the jackpot and finally remembered—and this time, I instantly knew what to do.
Turning my gaze to the incomplete ceiling, I flew between the gaps and up toward the sky. I ascended, higher and higher, until I no longer needed to consume mana to stay afloat.
Once again, I’d come to the height where I left some blue ant beads—where I was no longer pulled to the ground, and where the sun’s rays still reached. The light of the sun illuminated my body. When I raised a hand, it cast a shadow over me, so there was no mistaking it.
Despite that, my surroundings were dark. Sunlight exists, yet this place is dark... The complete opposite of a bright cloudy day.
And I knew one thing that made this place different from the surface.
“Is it because...the air is thin up here?”
The moment those words left my mouth, I had a feeling that I’d finally understood.