The plan was set into motion immediately. As soon as August awoke once more, he began to try to contact his soul and the magic it was composed of. He managed nothing for days on end but finally met with success on the fifth day.
Tuning out the physical world in its entirety is an exercise in futility, which retarded his early efforts, but ridding his mind of enough stimuli to make contact with his soul was not entirely impossible for him. On the fifth day, he meditated for such an extended period that he fell into a state between consciousness and unconsciousness, floating between cognizance and incognizance. In this state, he retained enough of his mind to recognize his purpose for being there, and he made contact with his soul. It stirred and finally awoke. Another eye had opened.
His soul acted like skin, allowing him to touch the magic it was composed of and that it had direct contact with, but it did not innately possess the ability to allow him to see anything else.
As Damon had explained to August, his soul was like an invisible membrane containing liquid. That liquid was the neutral magic that his soul was composed of. The membrane wasn't magic but was more like the natural separation between affiliated and unaffiliated magic. Like oil would not mix with water, the magic of a soul would not mix with unaffiliated magic. They might touch, but they would never mix.
It would sometimes appear as if they mixed because unaffiliated magic could pass through the same space that the soul occupied, but they knew that it didn't mix because they never interacted. The soul was contained inside the skull, but when kinetic energy passed through that same area, it did not react. Normally, neutral magic would simply push it aside, but the kind of magic associated with kinetic energy instead passed through it, inert. They had yet to name this phenomenon.
Of course, this didn't apply to other affiliated magic. Affiliated magic that was taken outside of the soul interacted with magic in unique ways, which is what they exploited when they made spells.
"I got it!" he yelled at Damon. "I don't see anything, though. I can feel the magic in my soul and what it touches, but I can't feel or see anything else."
"Yes. You won't be able to see anything until you begin to create your first structures. It is only through my own machinations that I can see."
And so, Damon began to teach August how to manipulate his soul so that he could create structures of magic. When he became competent enough to proceed to more complex structures, Damon taught him to see.
Damon called these structures 'feelers'. They resembled tentacles with a fixed circumference and fed information on the magic it touched back to them, including quantity, concentration, and type of magic. This version of a feeler was composed of two 'pipes', one that sensed the magic and translated the information into a usable format and one that fed the information back to them.
Of course, the 'usable' information was still difficult to use, but it was an improvement. It was like trying to figure out what a computer program did by only looking at the code the developers wrote. Even if you knew the language, it was still complicated and irritating. Their primary problem, of course, was that they didn't know the 'language' that magic was written in and had to teach themselves. To get familiar with it and become more adept at reading it, August closed his eyes, only looking at the ground in front of him through the feelers before opening them to try to associate the information from the feelers with his sight.
Damon provided the light for him to see by, of course. Damon knew many more spells than he did and could use the feelers just as well as August could use his eyes and ears. Damon was far more proficient than him and they expected that he would always remain so because he had no choice but to interact with the world through magic alone. It was like the difference between a person who learned a language through school alone and a person who grew up speaking that language and whose family spoke that language alone.
Then, Damon taught him to create a third 'pipe' on his feelers. This third pipe allowed him to transport his magic to and back from any point that his feelers touched, which allowed him to construct more advanced spells that required greater control to create.
When the feelers were stabilized and 'capped' — meaning that they would not return back to his soul if left unattended — he would typically extend his feelers so that they would feed everything within 50 centimeters (~1'8") of him — excluding everything in the ground — back to him.
To summarize most of the rest of Damon's lectures, structures (spells) have three forms and must take one of these three forms to achieve the desired result, as Damon explained to August. They had to follow the active design, the nexus design, or the interlooping design.
In the active design, the spellcaster had to actively promote, or activate, each process in the spell. It was only useful when used with certain spells, such as feelers, that had to be actively monitored to produce any result. A positive, however, was that it used less magic than the nexus design. These spells could be 'capped' so that they didn't return to the soul and would keep most of their form whether attended or unattended, but they would be useless if the spellcaster did not pay attention to them.
With the nexus design, the spell was built around a central hub, or core, that promoted each process without the need for input from the spellcaster, completely automating the process.
However, these spells weren't entirely superior to active spells. For one, the structuring required more magic to create because the nexus resembled a ball of pure magic. It was actually an intricate system of spells, but the density of the spells made it seem as if it was solid through and through. Another unfortunate detriment was that nexus spells were harder to design and create than active spells because the nexus was unbelievably complicated to those of us that are not magical savants like them.
However, nexus spells did allow for the building and automation of more complex spells because it was built off of a stable platform that made certain that there would be no variations in the magic. This differed from active spells because they would sometimes change while being cast because they required precise control to be kept exactly the same.
Even though a spell may be capped, the magic would not be static, and because of that, the spellcaster had to adjust it in order to keep it stable, which would produce minor variations that would sometimes interfere with the spell and cause it to either fail or produce another effect. In the worst-case scenario, it might even cause the severance of the spell from the soul. It could be retrieved, but retrieval was always a delicate process.
If caught immediately, they would normally find it in one piece and could reattach it through their feelers, but they always had to be careful to make certain that it remained in one piece. If it didn't, then it would crumble, at which point retrieval was nearly impossible. They didn't know if part of that magic would return back to the energy of the three dimensions over time, but they theorized that it would, even if they didn't have evidence.
Although Damon had already created two, designing a nexus spell was more complicated than even modern computer science, where input and output could be specified and results could be directed. Creating a nexus was more like Newton's cradle that used several marbles from different directions to achieve a goal, where each output of a reaction is directed back to the core and reacts with the core to create an input for another process.
Inside the core are microstructures that specify what reaction occurs inside the core and perform auxiliary processes. All of this magic still cycled through August's soul, though. It couldn't exist without being associated with it, so it still took up a portion of his capacity.
Damon had developed multiple methods for getting magic back from and to a nexus spell. One of them was the tether method - in which a tether of magic ran from the nexus to his soul - and the other was the catapult method - in which magic would be catapulted back and forth from the spell. The catapult method was unreliable and unfinished, but the tether method was, while simple, consistent and reliable.
The final and most complex design of spells was the interlooping design. Despite his superhuman intellect, Damon had yet to create even a single one of these designs, so they remained purely theoretical for the time being because of their complexity.
In an interlooping design, each process would directly feed into the next without being translated by a nexus. If he could develop one, then the structuring would, theoretically, use just as much magic as an active spell but have all of the benefits that a nexus spell offered. It would, however, require each and every process to be in perfect equilibrium — each output would have to perfectly match an input, and the processes would have to execute in the correct order. This presented a challenge to even the most advanced unerring artificial intelligence, never mind an actual, fallible mind.
Regarding the usage of magic, each spell would use magic in a minimum of one out of three ways. The first possible usage was the structure itself. The structures were composed of mostly neutral magic. They would consume magic only once, during their creation, but they would remain a constant drain because that magic was still part of August's soul. What this meant was that he would be permanently limited to only a portion of his maximum capacity. For example, if he created enough feeler spells to consume 25% of his maximum capacity, then he could only use the other 75% of his soul for his other spells because the structures acted like an extension of his soul.
The second usage of magic was through the auxiliary processes. Similar to how no machine existed that was 100% effective and used 100% of the input energy, spells that used 100% of the input magic were either rare or served a purpose so simple that any expenditure of energy qualified as serving its purpose.
This magic was lost in one of two ways: it could be lost when a part of a spell accidentally severed its magic from the soul; or, it could be lost when magic is converted into another type as a waste product and expelled from the soul. They theorized that magic lost this way would return half of its energy to the three dimensions over time by way of diffusion, but they weren't certain.
The last kind of loss was when it was purposefully expelled from the soul as part of its purpose. The best example of this kind of expenditure was the nexus spell that Damon was trying to design while August trained.
He was trying to design a weapon that expelled magic associated with heat on demand in large quantities and converted half of that magic into heat, thus blasting the target with a wave of superheated air. Magic lost this way would return to the rest of the world and be lost forever.
Damon knew that this was a crude way of going about it — he could concentrate the energy instead of letting it hit a wide area, for example, but he only wanted it to serve as a basis for future inventions. He planned to use parts of this spell in new creations later on so that later spells were easier to create.
He didn't plan to use it as an actual weapon, either, because he knew that even if he used his entire soul as ammunition, it would only barely have an effect, depending on how far away the target was. It was too energy inefficient.