The Daily Life Of A Cyberpunk Magician

Chapter 372 - 222: Come on, let me perform a Resurrection Magic trick before we continue the duel_2
Chapter 372: Chapter 222: Come on, let me perform a Resurrection Magic trick before we continue the duel_2After all, spiritual bodies are just a special product of death and there’s no direct evidence to prove they’re a type of organism. If kept strictly secret, there wouldn’t even be accusations of ”insulting the ancestors” or ”desecrating the corpse.”

Beta: Hey bro, my phone died yesterday, so I used your mom’s ashes to charge it. You don’t mind, do you?

Jiang Shu: ”...”

He silently kicked it to one side.

But then again, although it’s still just speculation whether Tang is able to resurrect and command the resurrected, one can’t be too careful. Without mentioning anything else, just Clo alone is a headache enough.

Maybe...

Should I try resurrection magic myself?

Jiang Shu stroked his chin, put down the electronic screen, and headed towards the kitchen while pondering. He was getting hungry, and thinking about these things required a lot of energy.

When in doubt, use magic...

No, not magic, magic.

He’s not like Clo or Tang or Liu Tingruo; he doesn’t have all kinds of knowledge and technical support, but with the Deception entry, he’s capable of achieving what those people can’t through magical means.

Jiang Shu tried to control the black card in his pocket. He could clearly feel its responsiveness, meaning his derivative entry was functioning normally.

In other words, the new Black Wall couldn’t isolate the Character Card system. It’s unclear whether this is because it can’t block the influence of the Main Brain or if the source of the Character Card system wasn’t the Main Brain at all.

Perhaps the Main Brain is merely a guardian, a macro management program.

Anyway, he’s still able to rely on magic performances to obtain a resurrection ability, or the ability to manipulate dead spirits, similar to Tang’s. Then he also would acquire the capital to confront Tang directly.

He couldn’t always hide behind the two technicians, Liu Tingruo and another, could he? Liu Tingruo was fine; she liked having Jiang Shu behind her...

To a certain extent, relying on her.

Maybe it’s because Liu Tingruo always felt insecure, always fearing that once Jiang Shu’s wings were strong, he wouldn’t need her and would then cast her aside.

But this kind of mentality...

It’s only because Sister Ruo was slightly affected by ”love brain,” prone to unnecessary worries and anxiety. Fortunately, she was normal in every other aspect.

So now there’s only one question left: how do I perform resurrection magic?

Jiang Shu took six eggs from the fridge, cracked them one by one into a mixer, and beat them.

The difficulty of this type of magic is definitely not simple. It’s like the Split Man or Big Transformation magics; it’s not hard to achieve the effect of the magic, but the difficult part is to not let anyone discover its secret.

However, both Split Man and Big Transformation focus not on completely fooling the audiences’ brains, but on giving them a novel and thrilling sensory experience.

This is evident from the fact that most assistants used in such magic performances are attractively curved women.

But resurrection magic won’t be that simple. He must ensure it can’t be debunked in a short time, which is crucial.

Even though Tang won’t know that the loophole in the Deception entry lies in publicly debunking his magic, it’s not entirely impossible for the guy to uncover it.

And then there’s Clo, that crazy fellow – who knows what he might do.

Firstly, the most obvious method would be to stage a death and then ”resurrect” the pretender.

But this approach also has big problems. The audience will definitely consider staged death, so how to prove convincingly and simply that the pretender was really dead is a tough question.

This magic could only be performed outdoors, on the street, and he must avoid Tang’s line of sight – at least prevent Tang from interfering with the process of the magic.

So, swiftly, simply, plainly, improvisationally – these are the essentials that the magic must achieve.

And this also creates a problem. If the magic isn’t performed on a professional stage inside a theatre, it’s easy for the audience to heckle, like having a professional doctor volunteer to come forward and determine if the person is truly dead, etc.

At the same time, due to the special nature of this magic, to make the audience believe it’s a real resurrection, it inevitably needs to be improvised, or at least appear to be, otherwise it looks too staged.

To the point where he would feel too embarrassed to continue the performance, especially with street magic – if there’s no audience to build the atmosphere...

That would be too shocking.

The hypnotic techniques of a fox can put someone into a temporary death-like state, but a staged death is not really death. On close inspection, there’s still the risk of exposure.

Being exposed on the spot would be utterly absurd.

Or say, use twins, kill one and keep the other, then swap them using the Big Transformation technique.

That would be the simplest method, but it broke the law and was also unethical.

He was not Zhang San, of course, he couldn’t do something illegal and immoral.

So...

Jiang Shu searched his mind for magic related to resurrection. His brain housed a repository of magical examples, thanks in large part to his research on various magics in the past.

He could only think of two related magics in a short time.

One was a stage magic, the Headless Revival.

But this magic’s effect was less resurrection and more so a disassembly of a living person.

Fit a guillotine on stage, then put the masked magician on it, the blade drops, and the head falls off.

And the magic assistant could place the masked head on a table, which would even open its eyes animatedly upon hearing the audience’s call.

This was a simple mechanical magic, and the reason the magician wore a mask on stage was mostly to accomplish a switch at a certain moment, using two people to perform the magic for that effect.

Of course, the magician hadn’t been beheaded, but if one wanted to pursue the ultimate magical experience, it wasn’t impossible either.

The second magic would have to mention a legendary figure in the magical world, a great magician from a century ago, Max Marini.

In the movie ”The Prestige,” there’s a magician who carries a fish tank with him for magic, but this Marini managed to carry a block of ice the size of a head with him, producing the ice block from a Magic Hat at the end of the magic performance to reach the magical climax.

In an era without refrigerators, no one knew how he hid a sizable block of ice on his person, nor how long he had carried it with him.

Every outing required him to bring along an ice block; this was the preparation for magic, as well as a sacrifice.

And once at a dinner party, perhaps in a rush, he brought neither playing cards nor an ice block, but knowing someone would ask him to perform magic, he resurrected a chicken that was served on the dining table right there and then.

After resurrection, the bare chicken simply ran away in front of everyone.

This simply utilized a characteristic of birds—held upside down and pressed for a while, they enter a ”deathlike stupor.”

And that poor chicken was stripped completely.

Feathers, that is.

He then sprinkled it with various seasonings and secretly instructed the waiter to bring it forth, only to awaken it in public, thus completing the effect of the Resurrection Magic.

It was almost completely improvised magic, and Marini had only visited the kitchen before the dinner party.

And such magic had been used in ancient times in Jiang Shu’s homeland as well, having a specific name called ”Fixed Chicken.”

That was a fairly famous folk witchcraft.

Not just birds, some animals also enter this ”deathlike stupor,” such as sharks.

Of course, under current conditions it didn’t seem to be of much use.

Surely he can’t just master the resurrection of poultry in derivative terms?

Does he have to rush to a poultry slaughterhouse for a Dead Spirit Resurrection Night, then march against Tang with thousands of chickens, ducks, and geese?

Jiang Shu imagined that scene for a moment, standing above a million lives, raising the banner of rebellion on behalf of the birds and beasts...

It wasn’t impossible, and actually quite stylish.

But it definitely wouldn’t be very useful is the thing, those animals could only defeat humans with a virus, and that had but a slim chance.

These two magics could only serve as references, the specifics still required careful thought from him.

Not only did he need to contemplate the secrets within the magic, but also how to carve out a street performance space that Tang wouldn’t disturb.

Jiang Shu flipped the egg in the pot, his expression somewhat troubled, as he had not anticipated having to work in Fifth District.

There’s no avoiding it, after all.