“One other thing,” Sunders kept up, “you placed so much nightmare energy in this part of the section just so that you can make people fear and even respect it, am I right?”
Angor nodded rapidly.
He defined a “theme” for each section when creating the illusion, and the theme for Witch’s Town was “respecting your fear”, which Sunders just pointed out.
“Nice idea.” Sunders approved before giving his harsh opinions, “However, YOUR fear will only work on mortals and some of the apprentices with weaker mentalities. Wizards or stronger apprentices can easily see through your trick. They might regard your work as something interesting, and that’s about it. Your emotion manipulation would have worked fine, if not for this easily-deciphered illusion. This is where you failed.”
After going through the Witch’s Town in Angor’s illusion, Greya understood Angor’s intention because she wanted to. Sunders meant to point out that she chose to follow the “story” constructed in the illusion rather than being forced to.
This meant Angor’s illusion wouldn’t work well on other people.
Even if it was intended to enlighten Greya, it would work better if the elements in the illusion fully affected her, thus allowing her to gain heartfelt awareness.
Angor looked down as he finally understood Sunders’ judgment.
The illusion of Witch’s Town only appeared to be good, but it was far from achieving its original goal.
“There are two ways to mend this. One is to improve your mind-manipulation capability as well as your own resistance to it, which means ‘what appears to be fearful’ in your view will eventually apply to others. The other method is to further perfect your illusions, in which case even if someone discovers flaws in it, they won’t be able to escape from it easily.”
He then left Angor alone to think about those words and entered the lone house mentioned by Greya.
As expected, the “bus stop” was placed inside an oil painting hanging on the wall.
While sitting in Cat Bus, Angor stared at his knees to rethink the lesson he just learned, and he failed to notice that Sunders had a slight grin on his face.
Despite the lecture he gave Angor, Sunders was generally satisfied with the illusion.
It was obvious that this illusion was not designed to harm people, but to satisfy Greya’s “order”. As long as the illusion met the requirements, some minor flaws didn’t matter too much.
He came to the illusion to check “how well Angor’s studies turned out”. So far, Angor did a good job. Most of the logic shown by the illusion seemed intact, and the many interesting elements had shown Angor’s brilliant imagination.
Illusions needed great imagination to achieve potency. As long as no extra demands were concerned, Angor had amazingly finished the job. It was just that Sunders was not the type to praise people easily. He preferred nitpicking.
...
Cat Bus allowed them to see more of Angor’s illusions.
There were different characters that represented important clues or stories in various sections. It was not so impressive as there were many books that used similar ways to tell their tales, yet Angor did a better job compared to common novelists by presenting the best part of the stories for others to see.
If the illusion was a book, Sunders would believe that it was one of the collectible ones worth reading many times.
Instead of telling stories, Angor allowed anyone who saw his illusion to become part of the stories and experience them on their own, following behind the characters they preferred.
Sunders neither disapproved nor commended such a way of telling stories, but he was glad his student made it possible.
Anyone with time to kill or was resting between burdensome jobs would enjoy such a relaxed way of “reading”.
As a former gentleman from a noble clan, even if he had spent a long time on the path of truth, Sunders would occasionally enjoy a storybook on his sunlight-blessed armchair. Any book was fine. Mortal novels, wizardry fictions... They were all about entertainment that kept his nerves from straining too hard.
Sunders would admit that Angor’s illusion was top-class “entertainment”, and this was probably why Greya asked the boy for the illusion.
Next, Sunders began glancing over the other sections like how Greya did.
The more he looked, the more surprised he was regarding Angor’s potential in illusions.
Angor might have “cheated” his level by absorbing nightmare energy, yet the proficiency in illusions was completely gained through hard effort. Even with enough effort, an apprentice Illusionist wouldn’t learn to create such a refined illusion within three years.
While traveling through different sections, Sunders took a brief stop at “Monument Valley”.
This area did not have the ordinary logic as the other sections. Instead, there were strangely-colored shapes and objects placed randomly around.
When Sunders entered the area, he suddenly realized that this was an extremely interesting place, not because Angor slacked off.
He was looking at a flickering shadow, which seemed to be connected with all the strange structures around him.
Together with him, a character named “Ida” also entered the valley.
After some small tests, Sunders noticed that he had to move the shadow to manipulate the valley and help Ida escape.
“So I’m in charge of Ida’s fate now?” Sunders raised an eyebrow and decided to play the little game.
With each of his movements, the structures in the valley would drastically change their orientations. Following these changes, the strange girl, Ida, began climbing over them like traveling through a mountain.
At first, Sunders didn’t understand what he was supposed to do. From the shadow in front of him, he could see a giant gap on Ida’s path, which would discourage any mortal from proceeding.
He believed “carrying Ida over the gap by himself” was definitely not the answer. It was a puzzle, and he needed to solve it.
He turned around and saw Angor trying to hold back his laughter as if the boy was happy to see his professor getting stumped.
Truth was, Angor was troubled by the puzzle just like this when he started playing the game on his tablet. He copied the game into the illusion because he found it to be interesting enough.
It didn’t take Sunders very long to figure out the answer—the broken path was, in fact, an optical illusion created by a unique isometric view. When viewed from another angle, it became whole, thus allowing Ida to walk through.
The puzzle was all about seeing things from different perspectives.
“Now... this is interesting.”
After solving the first puzzle, the next ones didn’t seem so hard.
Sunders never had to move. By using the shadow within his reach, he helped Ida reach the exit of the valley and leave.
The valley suddenly disappeared and gave place to a pink castle, from which Ida showed up.
The shadow in front of Sunders also changed into a smaller castle. Apparently, another round of puzzles was waiting to be dealt with.
Sunders didn’t continue and left the Monument Valley with Angor. He did like the game, but he decided to visit the Mysterious Mountain because it was almost time for it.
He wondered where Angor found so many weird yet awe-inspiring ideas.
There was a monument placed at the entrance of Monument Valley, which had a line written on it:
[Journey to forgiveness]
So there’s another story about that Ida too? Sunders thought.
...
Angor was still giggling when Cat Bus took them away.
Sunders gave him a poker face. “The illusion of Monument Valley is more problematic compared to the rest. The colors and structures, none of them should exist in common sense.”
The gentleman spent several minutes pointing out the “flaws” until Angor began to wonder if it was a bad decision to place the game here.
However, Sunders suddenly changed his attitude. “Once we’re back, make another Monument Valley illusion so that I can get a better look of it, and hopefully give you some instructions accordingly.”
Angor almost face-palmed himself.