Aethernea : Soulbound [Book 1]

Episode 40 - Alternate Trigger

It would be like giving the spell an apple and saying "If you see anything that looks like this - activate." The spell would hold that apple and when another fruit appears it would look down at the apple in its hands and compare the new fruit to it.

This method was the simpler and more commonly used method.

However, it had a drawback - a mage could inspect the main spell to figure out how the trigger spell should look like. (Everyone can see the apple the spell was holding and deduce "Oh! I should bring an apple!")

What if the magical artifact was important? What if no one besides its owner should be able to activate it?

In such a scenario, the second method was used. Instead of including the trigger in the main spell, the main spell is given a unique way to recognize the trigger spell in which the main spell doesn't know how the trigger looks like, but it would be able to recognize the trigger if it appeared.

It would be like telling the spell "If you see a fruit, bake it first and then add sugar and spice. If it tastes similar to this, then activate."

When someone inspected such a spell, he would see the recipe and how the end result should taste like, but he wouldn't be able to see the main ingredient - the trigger spell. Because of the complicated cooking procedure, in the end, it would be hard to recognize that the finished dish was once an apple.

However, what if someone managed to find a pear that when cooked had a similar taste to an apple? The spell, which recognizes based on taste, wouldn't know that it was given a pear and not an apple. If it tastes similar, it is the trigger. In such a scenario, the main spell would wrongly recognize the pear as an apple and activate.

This was exactly the way Elaru duped the testing apparatus.

Each year, Muni staff would dispel the old enchantment on the speedometer and enchant it with a new one that had a different trigger spell. That way, the people taking the exam couldn't practice the last year's trigger spell and use it to ace the exam.

The new trigger spell needed to stay a secret until the exam. And naturally, since the trigger needed to stay a secret, they had to use the second method.

This was never a problem because finding an alternate trigger spell wasn't something that was easy to do - rather, usually it took years of research, sometimes even decades were needed to decipher the activation trigger of a magic artifact.

However, how could all those other magic breakers compare to someone who possessed Aethernea of Sight? It was like a bunch of people smelling the apple pie without being able to take a bite, yet trying to make a pear pie that tasted exactly like that apple pie. How could they make a similar pie if they didn't know how it tasted like?

Granted, Aethernea of Sight wasn't enough. One also needed to have a vast experience and familiarity towards...fruit. Creativity and intelligence were also important qualities.

When brought together into a single body - what was born out of it was the ultimate magic breaker. Someone who could not only break spells, but also crack them - exploit a flaw in the spell to their own benefit.

When Elaru first saw the spell, she already had a few ideas about the possible trigger. The reason why she dared to gamble was 1) because she thought 5 minutes would be enough for her to find and alternate trigger and 2) because she was sure that the alternate trigger was actually easier to weave than the real trigger.

If she had used the trigger they were given, she wouldn't have been able to reach such a high weaving speed.

Alas, that high speed was useless if it ended getting her disqualified.