In his past life, while reading Harry Potter, Roger sometimes had a question pop into his head.
To Roger, the magic in Harry Potter was almost like a wish-granting machine, capable of anything.
Matter manipulation, time travel, spatial interference, soul division, eternal life, healing, altering life forms, influencing luck, memory modification…
While the destructive power displayed might not have been outrageously high, the power of magic in this world was definitely immense!
So why didn't wizards continue to advance, to the point of self-ascension and becoming gods?
Instead, under the International Statute of Secrecy, they hid in the shadows of human society.
And in the books Professor McGonagall had given him, Roger had roughly found the answer.
There were mainly two reasons why wizards didn't become gods.
The first was that the essence of magic surpassed wizards' understanding. Almost everyone who studied magic itself ended up with nothing to show for it.
In the end, they could only create the current, somewhat flawed, wizarding power system.
To put it metaphorically, if magic were like Doraemon's Anywhere Door, then the wizarding magic system would be the "Comprehensive Guide to Using the Wish-Granting Machine" that wizards had compiled over generations.
It didn't delve into the truths of the world, nor the essence of magic, but was purely a set of magic application techniques.
It was, in a way, akin to the beauty of the ancient traditional medicine's humoral theory and the theories of Yin-Yang, Five Elements, dampness, heat, and paralysis.
Doing it this way could indeed treat illnesses.
But the principle? It couldn't be explained, so they could only establish a system of summary and classification based on experience to explain it.
This kind of empirical system could sometimes lead to a situation where people believed that the effective components for treating illness and the actual effective components in the medicine might not be entirely the same.
This greatly hindered the wizarding civilization's analysis of the essence of magic.
The progress of human civilization, with observational tools for the microscopic world like microscopes, played a crucial role. Before wizards could observe the essence of the world at the scale of magic, it was unlikely that wizarding civilization could have successfully navigated this path.
The second reason was that magic was the result of the joint action of the mind and magic. When the "quantity" of magic reached a certain limit, the strength of the wizard's mind became the limiting factor for magical power.
It was like a computer; when the memory, temperature, and other operating environments were perfect, the computer's hardware became the bottleneck for its performance.
To enhance magical power and become a god, one needed to strengthen the wizard's mental power.
Wizards had come up with many ways to achieve this.
Some thought that just as bees couldn't possess human-level intellect, if human mental power was insufficient, why not stop being human altogether!
They wanted to become higher beings and embarked on the path of evolution.
Some people layered the bloodlines of magical creatures with their own, becoming various half-blood wizards.
This was indeed a path, but it only raised the ceiling; it didn't change the baseline after a human's birth. To gain stronger mental power, wizards still had to undergo self-cultivation.
And very few wizards could grow to that level.
It was like humans having the ability to kill large wild beasts unharmed with cold weapons; this was something humans could potentially do, but very few people nowadays trained their strength to that level. Most people were in a state of sub-health, unable to even lift a shoulder.
Lacking the pressure of death, very few wizards could cultivate to that extent.
Secondly, half-blood wizards only had a higher ceiling, not an unlimited one. Their ceiling was just stronger than ordinary wizards, still not reaching the level of gods.
Others aimed for Transfiguration, soul dark magic, and other methods of self-modification.
But they also failed.
The ultimate of Transfiguration, the Animagus form, could not transform into magical creatures, which provided only a limited boost to a wizard's potential.
And Voldemort, who was skilled in soul dark magic, was only as strong as he was.
Besides the modification factions represented by bloodlines, Transfiguration, and soul dark magic, there were two other major factions in the wizarding world that sought to break the limits of wizarding civilization.
One was the Ritual faction.
If one person's mental power was insufficient, then use the mental power of a hundred people, or ten thousand people!
The book "Ritual Magic is Far More Than Blood Sacrifice" detailed this faction's affairs.
"Ritual magic is omnipresent," Roger murmured softly, reading the sentence on the book's title page while sitting at the dining table.
Because of a significant debt from his inheritance, Roger hadn't inherited his parents' estate.
He didn't have a formal place of residence in Britain.
During this time, he had been renting a room at The Leaky Cauldron, one of the entrances to Diagon Alley.
The room Roger rented was very small, so the cost wasn't high, a price Roger could afford.
Entering the pub's main hall, Roger ordered some British food as usual.
While eating fish and chips, Roger flipped through the book in his hands without putting it down.
During this period, Roger had dedicated almost all his time to reading the dozens of books Professor McGonagall had mailed him.
Among them, Roger was most captivated by the seemingly ordinary book, "Ritual Magic is Far More Than Blood Sacrifice."
The principles expounded in the book were profoundly deep.
It used various data to argue that celestial bodies like the sun and moon possessed mystical attributes because people believed they held special power.
The mystical attributes of all things were endowed by intelligent beings who could perturb magic with their thoughts.
Potions, magical creatures, and even the existence of spells are all byproducts of ubiquitous and natural Ritual Magic! And the one dominating this incredibly grand magical ritual that covers the world is the sea of subconsciousness of all intelligent beings!
The book even explicitly provided a method for wizards to ascend to godhood.
Unfortunately, no wizard has ever been able to achieve it.
"Unifying the globe, manipulating the minds of all Muggles, all wizards, and all magical creatures, a ritual for creating gods..."
Those who can achieve this are inherently as powerful as gods and don't need this ritual. And those who need this ritual lack the ability to control the minds of all intelligent life on Earth. This reminded Roger of a picture he saw online before...
It's a dead end no matter which way you turn!
Besides the Ritualists, wizarding civilization has another, more niche faction.
The Externalists.
That is, the alchemists and potioneers. Their core idea is actually similar to the Ritualists.
But their method is to create divine artifacts or elixirs that everyone believes in, or, as a fallback, the various materials that make them up.
They have indeed created many extraordinary magical items.
Such as the Deathly Hallows, the Gate of Death, and so on...
Of course, there are also those who don't rely on the power of 'legends' but use their own knowledge to break through the wizarding ceiling, like Dumbledore and the alchemist Nicolas Flamel.
And the reason wizards chose to live in seclusion is that in modern times, the population has become too large. Who knows what the consequences would be if the existence of magic were revealed and the magical energy was disturbed? No one dared to gamble.
Except for the prophecy of a certain leader saint during World War II.
Bang! He closed the book.
Now, there are three paths to ascension laid out before Roger, but each is cut off halfway.
From ancient times to the present, countless wizards with exceptional talent and outstanding abilities have attempted them, but all have failed.
So, if he wants to achieve eternal life, which path should he choose?
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