Marcus Flint's threat was like a grain of dust blown by the wind. It tried to settle on a polished mirror but was whisked away by an invisible current before it could make contact. It left not even the faintest trace in Alan's mental palace.
He understood perfectly well that the opponents he faced now, and would face in the future, operated on levels far above the childish duel-club posturing of the schoolyard. Flint was nothing more than an insignificant stumbling block on a road that led to far greater battles, battles that would be fought in the depths of thought, on the borders of logic, at the substratum of magical cognition.
A single maxim, branded into the core of his planning, guided every decision. It came from another life, from the mindset of his former career as a programmer. It was the creed he lived by: always upgrade your software before you worry about the hardware.
Wand wood and core, the vintage and purity of potions, even the natural ceiling of his own innate magical power, these were hardware. They were important, indeed foundational. But what truly determined how high a wizard could rise was not the wand in his hand or the brew in his vial; it was what drove those instruments: his mind, his logic, the architecture of knowledge that structured his view of the world.
Thus, when the massive influx of twenty thousand experience points, earned during that rescue in the Forbidden Forest, poured into his system-account like a rushing torrent of data, Alan felt no turbulence. He hesitated almost not at all. He invested the largest portion immediately and without regret into the most crucial project of his inner life: the construction and upgrade of his core "software", the conceptual foundations he called the "thinking kernel."
The special, hard-won reward, a permission to "refactor code", was rarer still. It was, for him, nothing short of miraculous.
On a night when the world was hushed and the stars scattered like pinpricks of light across the black velvet of the sky, Alan sat cross-legged on his bed and drifted into deep, controlled meditation. The rhythm of his breath lengthened and softened; the bustle of the real world receded as though pushed back by the tide.
Within his inner realm, a sweeping, system-level optimization unfolded, an overhaul of the foundational logic itself, guided by the inscrutable will of the system. The rough conceptual firewall he had constructed from his earlier, limited understanding now appeared crude, bloated, inefficient, riddled with fatal bugs. It resembled a novice's code: redundancies, fragile nodes, and wasteful loops everywhere.
And now the refactor began.
The system's intent was cold and exact, devoid of sentiment. It moved like an invisible, massive hand and shattered that crude wall without pity. Rune architectures, energy pathways, logic nodes, all were atomized in an instant and reduced to their primal elements. There was no lament for what was lost, only absolute, clinical analysis.
Then reconstruction commenced.
The rebuild arrived as something unprecedented, an optimization at a level that felt almost unnatural. Into the firewall's foundations were grafted innumerable information modules: advanced formulations of logical paradoxes, abstruse mathematical conjectures, and profound philosophical constructs. Each module was placed with surgical precision.
He saw the Barber paradox woven into a closed, self-referential rune loop: any attempt to define the self would be caught in an infinite inward spiral with no exit. He heard the Liar paradox transformed into an indecipherable, self-negating cadence that tore apart any mental probe seeking its truth value. He felt the structure of Zeno's paradoxes laid out as an infinitely elongating path of discrete, uncrossable instants, any intention to traverse it would be drawn into a perpetual, arrested process.
These were no longer mere textbook ideas. They had been instantiated as real, operative elements in his mental architecture, defensive works with ontological heft.
How long the refactoring took, he could not say. Time in that inner realm was elastic. When the final runic module clicked into place, the whole of Alan's inner world trembled and then settled like a machine that had completed a thorough, centuries-long clean.
A sense of purification and ascension washed through him. He felt his thought grow cleaner, more transparent than ever before, like a supercomputer that had been stripped of every junk file and redundant process and brought to an entirely new plateau of stability and throughput.
He had succeeded.
Outside his mental palace, he had erected the first true, passively functioning, impregnable conceptual firewall.
Its defensive mechanism had evolved to a new, astonishing plane. Any external magic that attempted to pry into his mind, Legilimency, probes, or other intrusive arts, would no longer be merely blocked or led into a simple linear maze, as crude defenses might have done. That approach was blunt and inefficient.
Now an intruder's magical force would be seized at the border and forcibly fed into an absolutely closed, self-perpetuating loop composed of the most classical and insoluble logical paradoxes. The invader's mental energy would be compelled to "compute" within an infinite, self-contradictory logical whirlpool, much like a frantic calculator trying to determine the final digit of π.
There would be no respite. The attacking consciousness would waste itself in unending cycles of irresolvable contradiction until, exhausted and depleted, it simply extinguished. The firewall did not explode outward in violence nor leave dramatic traces; instead, it eroded invaders quietly and efficiently. Attackers would notice only the inexplicable draining of their power and perhaps begin to doubt their own competence.
This, Alan understood, was the highest form of defense, not fortification by brute force, but luring the aggressor into his own undoing. It was, as he put it in a phraseless thought: invite the judge into the box.
He lay still, feeling the cool clarity inside his head like a new sky. The software had been upgraded; the hardware would have to adapt in time. But for now, with his firewall in place, he had a defense both elegant and merciless, one born of logic itself.
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