Chapter 19: CPU
Aegis continued where it left off in response to Zephyr. ’As part of my duty to be of assistance to you, I’ve been observing how you cast spells to see how it could be done better, and although I have no access to your mana core directly, I can already make some assumptions based on some observations.’
"What assumptions?" Zephyr slowed his walk in anticipation. The way he was walking absentmindedly and muttering to himself would have made anyone watching him suspicious, but thankfully there weren’t any soldiers patrolling the area right then, so he was safe.
’Whenever you try to cast magic... it’s almost like your intent has to wait in line to be understood before it is shaped and then finally released... That process is very similar to something I know very clearly...’
"Which is..?"
Aegis paused in what seemed like deliberation for a second or two before eventually responding.
’A CPU... It’s also used to carry out commands, but compared to your mana node, it handles information step by step, breaking big tasks into small, defined parts, handled by things called transistors.’
’Another loss in translation,’ Zephyr thought. He didn’t want to point it out when Aegis mentioned that ’CPU’ thing — in his mind, it translated to something like a processor or an executor — but this... ’transistor’, there was totally no frame of reference for it in his mind.
Surprisingly, Aegis expanded further. ’Think of them like tiny little gates. And each gate only decides one thing- Yes or No. But when many of them are working together, they can take huge, complex commands and break them down into fast, clear actions."
"...So like a mana node, but with smaller specific processes..." Zephyr was starting to see how this could help him. Imagine his mana node had even smaller sub-nodes.
"Well, that’s great and all, but how would I go about creating these ’transistors’ at all?"
’...There should most likely be a way. I believe it is very likely that other people might have also noticed the multi-purpose-like structure of mana nodes and tried to break it down into separate clear sub-structures.’