Chapter 200

Chapter 200: Chapter 200

Marshall had always wondered whether there was some fundamental difference between a Mage at the level of the Ten Wizard Saints and an ordinary S-Class Mage.

A domain, perhaps.

A Bankai.

Haki.

Some kind of special ability that only became available after crossing that threshold.

Now that he had finally reached the level of the Ten Wizard Saints himself, however, Marshall discovered that the answer was disappointingly simple.

There wasn’t one.

As it turned out, a Wizard Saint-level Mage was not fundamentally different from any other Mage.

They simply possessed an extraordinary amount of Magic Power.

If Marshall absolutely had to identify one distinction, it was that someone with reserves that enormous could suppress an opponent whose Magic Power was vastly lower through sheer output alone, but even that was merely the result of hitting harder.

It wasn’t the kind of qualitative transformation that came from accumulating enough quantity to produce an entirely new level of power.

Marshall thought that was wrong.

Fine, this world didn’t have something as convenient as Conqueror’s Haki for instantly clearing out everyone below a certain threshold, but how could it not even have some kind of ability that allowed a higher-level Mage to completely dominate someone beneath their realm?

Wizard Saint-level Mages had so much Magic Power that they could barely use it all.

Why had nobody developed some kind of absolute suppression ability that ordinary Mages simply couldn’t reproduce?

That didn’t feel magical at all.

In the past, Marshall wouldn’t have known where to begin solving that problem.

After coming into contact with the Dragon Seed and the Heart of Time, however, he had begun developing a few unusual ideas.

First of all, there really was a form of "space" inside a Mage’s body: the space belonging to their Magic Origin.

The size of this space depended on the Mage’s total Magic Power, and under normal circumstances, the First Origin possessed a larger internal space than the Second Origin.

Through a technique somewhat reminiscent of hiding Mount Sumeru inside a mustard seed, it was apparently possible to place physical or magical objects inside that internal space.

Marshall himself was the most obvious example.

Neither his Dragon Seed nor the Heart of Time had been inserted by literally digging holes into his body and stuffing them inside.

Both had been placed directly into the space of his Magic Origin.

Marshall had actually verified this theory quite seriously.

After developing his X-ray vision, he had gained the ability to scan the interior of a human body.

When he compared Natsu and Laxus, both of whom were Dragon Slayers, he discovered a clear difference between them: near Laxus’s First Origin was a physical Dragon Slayer Lacrima, while Natsu’s body contained no such object at all.

That strongly suggested that Natsu’s Dragon Seed, much like Marshall’s own, was hidden inside the space of his Magic Origin rather than existing as a physical object embedded in his flesh.

Laxus’s Dragon Slayer Magic, after all, wasn’t quite as orthodox.

More importantly, the internal space of a Magic Origin was fundamentally different from the personal storage spaces created through Spatial Magic.

A personal space created by Spatial Magic existed in another dimension and remained connected to the Mage’s body through what could be imagined as an invisible line.

When the Mage retrieved something from that space, they were essentially using their own private "network cable" to pull an object across dimensions.

In actual physical terms, that storage space could be extremely far away from the Mage themselves.

The Magic Origin space was different.

It genuinely existed inside the Mage’s body and occupied the same spatial plane as the Mage.

No matter where the Mage went, the Origin space remained with them.

In other words, while both could be described as separate "spaces," the Magic Origin space was physically extraordinarily close to the Mage’s actual body.

And that possibility led Marshall to a particularly interesting conclusion.

A Mage might genuinely be capable of performing something resembling a Technique Expansion.

The basic idea was to construct a complete Jutsu-Shiki barrier inside the Magic Origin space beforehand.

Then, during combat, the Mage could expand that prepared formula outward and drag the enemy into a battlefield where every rule had already been arranged in the caster’s favor.

Among academically trained Mages, Jutsu-Shiki barriers had always been regarded as some of the most unfair, troublesome, and outright broken applications of Magic.

If you could lure an opponent into a properly prepared Jutsu-Shiki trap and force them to fight inside it, the battle was essentially half-won before it even began.

The problem was that Jutsu-Shiki barriers came with equally obvious weaknesses.

They had to be arranged in advance, their deployment was painfully slow, the preparation process was cumbersome, and they placed extremely strict demands on the space in which they were constructed.

On top of that, Jutsu-Shiki was not truly invincible because another sufficiently skilled Mage could rewrite the formula.

Those limitations were precisely why Mages had never collectively rushed to specialize in Jutsu-Shiki despite how powerful it could be.

Naturally, people had tried making the system more convenient.

Some had attempted to inscribe complete Jutsu-Shiki barriers onto scrolls or cards beforehand so they could simply pull them out during combat.

Marshall and Cana had experimented with the same idea in the past, repeating the process many times before eventually giving up.

The reason was simple: Jutsu-Shiki barriers were extraordinarily sensitive to spatial conditions.

Even if a complete barrier could successfully be sealed inside a card, taking that card out and activating it somewhere else effectively meant moving the entire barrier from one spatial environment into another.

Every Jutsu-Shiki barrier deployed that way failed without exception.

Apparently, there was no convenient way to combine the excellent mechanics of Jutsu-Shiki with the portability of Card Magic.

That road had already been proven to lead nowhere.

But now Marshall had discovered that the Magic Origin itself could store things, while its internal space and the physical world belonged to the same underlying spatial system.

Naturally, his overactive brain immediately started working.

If he constructed a Jutsu-Shiki barrier inside his own Magic Origin beforehand and then, during combat, poured an enormous amount of Magic Power into that Origin to forcibly expand its internal space outward, could the prepared barrier spread with it and form a kind of domain-like space where the caster possessed a permanent home-field advantage?

Theoretically, it seemed entirely possible.

More importantly, the enormous quantity of Magic Power required to sustain something like that meant it might be an ability that only a Wizard Saint-level Mage could realistically use.

The reason Marshall had suddenly begun thinking so seriously about all of this was the Heart of Time, that supposed "gift from fate" he had recently obtained.

If the mysterious person responsible for leaving it behind believed that, at some point in the future, Marshall would encounter an enemy he simply could not defeat—someone so dangerous that he might even need to escape through time itself—then Marshall had absolutely no reason to become complacent merely because he had crossed the threshold of the Ten Wizard Saints.

He needed to become stronger.

Much stronger.

Whatever unknown enemy was waiting for him, Marshall intended to be ready.

In fact, the thought had made him somewhat anxious.

After spending an entire night tormenting himself over the possibilities, he had drawn up several different plans for increasing his strength before sunrise, with the development of a domain-type ability being only one possible direction.

He had become so absorbed in it that he barely had enough attention left to investigate Simon’s condition.

After spending several more days obsessively turning the problem over in his head, however, Marshall finally came to a different conclusion.

The mysterious person had been right all along.

Marshall opened his status panel.

[Mind: 15,365 / 15,553]

[Vitality: 10,577 / 10,895]

[Magic Power: 100,203 / 102,011]

A few days earlier, Marshall had looked at those numbers with considerable pride.

Now, all he wanted was the ability to manually type a few more zeroes onto the end.

His real limitation had never been a shortage of inspiration or ideas.

What Marshall lacked was time.

The nature of his cheat meant that the longer he had to develop, experiment, accumulate experience, and improve his abilities, the stronger he would inevitably become.

If that was the case, then using spacetime travel to obtain more time for growth really was the path best suited to him.

Once Marshall finally understood that, he somehow became even more depressed.

He could practically imagine some mysterious person hiding somewhere beyond his perception, watching him agonize over the problem for days while laughing maliciously at him.

There were few things more frustrating than exhausting yourself trying to solve a problem only to discover that you would have been better off looking at the reference answer from the beginning.

’Fine.’

’Mysterious person, you win.’

Since that was the case, Marshall decided that all the hard work could be left to his future self.

For now, he was done trying.