The common room was bustling as various illusions were filling the area from those who won them during the auction with the exception of Flitwicks that I keenly noticed were all the devices that created potentially combat oriented illusions. It was a clever way to control the potential chaos of the devices being in student hands while not ruining the fun of the impromptu auction. Anyways while Mike and Terry happily counted their profits over and over again I found an unoccupied seat and cracked open the illusion magic tome.-
(Book excerpt start)
What are illusions truly? Are they just petty tricks or is there a deeper truth to them? Theres no way to say definitively. To me illusions are freedom, the ability to manifest my imagination to the world. I wanted to share this joy with others as well and created this tome as a guide to illusions. Within these pages I have recorded a series of increasingly complex spells of my own creation and others discovered in order from easiest to hardest as well as three occlumency spells focused on strengthening the creative aspect of the mind.
(Book excerpt end)
It was short, sweet and to the point but got it's purpose done. I flipped to the next page and was surprised to find not only the first spell's description and wand movements but also it's arithmantic formula. This was no different from laying every part of the spell bare with nothing held back. This first spell was Perversa Via, or the wrong way spell. According to the description the spell was a subtle one that much like the perversa mundi spell I used earlier messed with the way the surroundings were perceived. Unlike the one I used however discovering this manipulation was not easy at all. -
It didn't work on your sight or hearing or anything like that but a deeper part of the mind, your sense of direction. I easily figured out that this spell was mostly noncombative in nature. Good for pranks or setting a trap to keep people away from an area but otherwise that was it. Learning the spell took me at most five minutes as it was eerily similar to the spell I had already learned, like a branch from the same tree almost. I wouldn't be surprised if that was actually the truth either.-
I flipped to the next page and like promised a more complex spell was filling both sides of the book. This spell, was one I already knew however as it was Falsa species, obviously I immediately flipped the page again as a result. The next page threw me off because it was the first of the occlumency spells mentioned. Clara mens, the bright mind spell according to the description. What it did was in a way fill your mind with a rainbow of myriad colors based on the principle of reinforcement that all occlumency used to defend the mind.-
That particular piece of information I filed away for later review as I carefully memorized the information presented to me. Apparently the point of this spell was to sort of condition your mind into being able to create vivid images in a split second. It does this by exposing your mind to this explosion of color at set intervals to eventually pull it off. I figured out on my own the unspoken piece of information that this spell was a crutch, training wheels basically for learning occlumency. Mind magic after all was notoriously difficult to learn so crutches to ease things didn't surprise me.-
One thing I admit had me curious was how my haki would effect learning occlumency. Haki required a firm will and occlumency was much the same so it sounded like a match made in heaven but it was equally possible this was a one or the other type situation as well. If I had to choose between the two haki would always win hands down because at it's peak a wielder of it was basically a humanoid natural disaster. Occlumency was merely a magic that made your mind into a fortress/library. For anyone else it might be the best choice since they wouldn't have the one piece physique to compliment the haki but for me haki won hands down.-
I was hopeful that the two would compliment each other though and memorized the spell and arithmantic formula. That last bit in particular was a real prize because it contained part of the formula for mind based magic in general, I just had to find it. If I could reverse engineer the formula then I could at least in theory start creating my own mind magics and I had some ideas. For starters accelerating my minds information processing speed.-
Much like the pika pika no mi the goro goro no mi's biggest flaw was that the user couldn't mentally match the theoretical speeds theses fruits should allow movement at. In the one piece world Admiral Kizaru who had the former fruit cheated slightly by setting end points when he used that kind of speed so he didn't need to be able to react at that speed. It was as simple as him moving from point A to point B. I could do something similar but wanted to try getting true lightning fast reaction speeds instead.