Harry's POV
It was at the end of the third week into his stay in Fenghuang Harry finally got his answer to the problem of belief vs knowledge, it was also when he finally figured out why he is the only one to do wandless magic.
As always, he had GAI organize and translate the knowledge SCAMER brought, and had it read to him as he did his daily work out.
The book that has been read to him at that point was talking about the reason schools (the book said sects but same thing) only start teaching at the ages of 10-12.
The reason the book gave was simple, it was the age in which most children lost most of their whimsical, dangerous beliefs, yet hadn't lost all of their beliefs, and became able to understand knowledge, and not just retain it.
The thing the book explained was that magic works on two main plains of existence.
The first is the physical, which works with the universe rules (once again it said heavenly dao, but same thing).
And the second which is the spiritual, which works around or even against the universal rules.
When children are younger, with less prejudice and knowledge their ability to connect to their spiritual side of magic is infinitely stronger, making it possible for their wishing to become reality- creating the so called accidental magic.
The thing is, no matter what kind of magic you use, magical energy is always needed, making their wishes dangerous, because, whether it's by wishing too hard and having not enough magic or using too much magic and not wanting too much, all kinds of accidents happen, most of them deadly.
The good thing is that as they grow, no matter what they learn or how innocent you try to make the child, reality weakens the child connection to the spiritual side of magic and connects them to the physical, making wishing extremely hard.
Yet, if a person lose his connection to the spiritual side he loses his ability to do magic entirely, therefore at the ages of 10-12, even spiritual magic weakens enough to control your magic is when's the best time to start learning magic.
Now, when you learn magic, the most important thing in the beginning is strengthen your connection to the spiritual side of magic as you learn control, so you won't lose one for the other, which can be done in two ways-
1) learning purely or almost purely spiritual magics, using them to make yourself closer to the spiritual side, this is the hard way, because your rational side, the physical side of magic would try to convince you to use the physical side of magic to achieve the same results, yet by learning to use it you would be able to perform miracles with enough magic.
2) use an object that connects you to the spiritual side of magic thus maneuvering around the need this connection.
When Harry heard GAI reading this line, he finally connected the dots about the most extraordinary magical feat he can perform- wandless magic.
The full reason as to why he is able to perform wandless magic is connected to two things.
The first thing is the memory wipe in his rebirth.
As a probably adult, most likely non-magical being in his past life, his connection to the spiritual realm was probably non-existent, the only way to reconnect it is to delete his connection to the physical realm a.k.a memory wipe, yet without any memory he would most likely become, personality wise, close to the original Harry.
Yet, the memories of the original books and fanfictions changed everything.
With only the books in his head, Harry would have most likely lose the connection to the spiritual realm, as the story and rules in it would have take place of the memories, yet the fan fictions made the difference, with the way each fan fiction has its own way to describe magic, some of which defies the original work, and all of which slammed together, Harry's way of seeing magic became just like that of a baby- anything is possible, yet it was the physical side that said that, not the spiritual.
The second thing was his Occlumency.
Because the fact that he created a defense that closed his mind to interference at the age of 3 ½ years old, at a time he wasn't let out of under the stars much and didn't open that closed mind since, let him keep his connection to the spiritual realm as it was at that point of time, something that probably saved his life by now as with his previous look on the world, the one he had till that book explained the two parts of magic, would have most likely cut all of his connection to the spiritual realm.
By having knowledge about magic and connection to the spiritual realm it made it possible for him to use magic without a conduct.
It took the next two weeks, in which Harry continued to listen to books GAI read to him and read western books on his own about the same subject for him to be satisfied.
The explanation in them was mostly the same with a few additions.
1) Magical feats, with the exception of few, always had the two kinds of realms in them. The few that didn't were either beginner level magical body strengthening and beginner level mind magics or high level Magics like soul manipulations or time manipulations.
2) Each person depends more on one of the two realms for their magic, thus making them better or worse in some.
Those two were the biggest ones he found, except the last one, the one that enlarged his worry about the path ahead of him in his magical studies.
3) Magical people progression.
Just as both body and magical energy has a few states of evolution, the connection to realms also has it.
While in body the stages are: 1) natural strengthening. 2) Magical strengthening. 3) transformation. 4) metamorphing.
And in magical energy the stages are: 1) gas 2)liquid 3) plasma 4) solid
Both of those ways work on the basis that the first two stages are natural progression, with workouts helping them reach it before the end of their life, the third stage in both of them works by forcefully evolving them in a direction that suits the magical being and the forth stage is about perfecting the direction before once again expanding your abilities.
The connection to the realms work in a different way, the first two stages are about maintaining the connection to the two realms in equal amounts, the third stage is perfecting your connection to one realm and forth is about perfecting your other realm.
In here lays the biggest difference in western and eastern magical paths.
The east went with the idea of physical realm first, creating the so called Dao, they understood that there was no need to understand everything in the world, instead they focused on one thing, and while it took a lot of time, some reached the forth stage, in which they used their connection to their object of knowledge to connect spiritually to the world slowly, thus perfecting their connection to the spiritual realm and becoming part of their object of study, becoming immortals.
The west, which is all about the belief in magic for it to work, starts with the spiritual realm, making it about perfecting spiritual connection, and spiritual connection, specifically belief, is the strongest in children, so, people in the west who don't have as king of life as the people of the east when it comes to the spiritual realm strengthening stage (as western start in the third while eastern start on the fourth) has invented, thousands of years ago, a way to overcome the problem of lack of connection to the spiritual realm- make people connect you to it forcefully.
By creating miracles, by telling stories about yourself, creating gods in your image, you can connect yourself to the spiritual realm, therefore, western who reached the forth stage are called Demi-gods, and those who perfected the forth stage, who even moved passed out to the legendary fifth stage are called gods.
Harry didn't want to leave behind some of his studies, he didn't want to become a god or immortal, he wanted to become something else, Harry wanted to become free
Hey, I hope it isn’t too much cultivation for you, I tried to show the other magical system and how they are basically the same thing the other way around