Chapter 1662: The gift of fire
Arrays used the energy of the universe to power themselves, but drawing the character required the user's own spiritual energy. Back when Lex started out, he had two great obstacles - his drawing speed, since each character needed to be perfect, and his energy reserves.
Neither of those had been a problem for Lex for a long time, yet as he began to draw the character from the Book of Changes, he found that the energy was practically pouring out of him as he drew it.
"Yeah, these are probably super normal characters," Lex said as he completed the character. Fortunately, he didn't need to draw an entire array just yet - simply identifying the correct character was enough.
After a long time of observing and monitoring the situation, Lex eventually discovered that the wrongness seemed to have a certain flavor to it. As it happened, the description of the characters in the Book of Changes described the perfect character to correct it.
Resolving the situation wasn't difficult - it was more about identifying the problem to begin with.
Once the character was complete, it resonated with the land, pulling energy that Lex immediately recognized as Chaos Energy. The result, however, was not massive. The wrongness simply faded away, just as the character did.
At first, Lex thought that was it, and was about to move on, but then he noticed movement. It wasn't in the city - rather the mural seemed to be moving. The characters in the scene were rearranging themselves, and the serpent man sat up straight in his throne - as if his mother had told him off for his bad posture.
Suddenly, the meaning of the mural changed. Instead of an overpowered being holding court, attending to his subjects, the scene depicted the serpent man as a great sage, teaching his disciples with the universe itself as the drawing board.
Lex did not look too closely. Getting the general gist of the mural was enough. What was most important was that… the initial meaning of the mural had been deceptive. Only after correcting the wrongness did the truth reveal itself. Was this what the challenge meant by looking through reality and fantasy?
His curiosity about the changes to the mural once again reminded him of the first mural, and he wondered what the real mural might have looked like. But curiosity did not mean that he would stray off the path.
He investigated the scene once more, trying to determine if he could sense any other abnormalities. The only wrongness he detected was still coming from the theater. Though he had no intentions of returning, he tried to see if he could correct it from where he stood.
Since he had already analysed the wrongness, all he needed to do was draw the correct character.