This story leaves me conflicted, I'm in love with the magic system as shown thus far, which seems to have great potential, but I'm unsure what our MC is supposed to be doing it. The worldbuilding of this setting so far seems very cool, and has a lot of potential, but I fear this is one of those "good setting written poorly" situations. The MC is unable to cast magic as of where I'm at because he's what's known as a "deficient mage", which are unable to cast spells due to "being unable to channel enough mana to form a spell", his main ability given to him by the system is "reader mage", which allows him to "deconstruct" spells, and that's it. The main problem for me is the main character himself, he doesn't even really seem to like magic, and I'm not really sure about any of his motivations. Normally, in these types of stories where the MC want to be a mage but is then revealed to have no magic talent, which he is ridiculed for, they are like prodigies on theory and are the perfect mage aside from being unable to actually use magic for whatever reason given, but here the MC is stated to have barely passed the theory exams and even with the system doesn't seem to really want to do anything with it besides become a mage. He has this whole moment where he doesn't want to use a sword to make up for his deficiencies because it feels like admitting to himself that he'll never become a real mage, which is fine, I'm not a fan of the spellsword MC trope anyways, but then he decides he'll just use his fists and goes to learn how to box, which, come on, are we serious. Speaking of the system, this novel very clearly takes heavy inspiration from the plot of ORV, where the MC was the only reader of a webnovel that ended, and then the author thanks them and gives them some power, with the MC here being given the system from the interactive webnovel he helped the webnovel's author with, and some things being the same in real life as in the book, such as the way some magic is used and a dungeon he goes in. The system itself is fine, not being too intrusive, but I really expected more from someone who will become "the greatest Mage to ever exist", he just relies on the magic deconstruction that the system can do for him, instead of anything cool with it. He just goes "use magic deconstruction" then the system will describes a bunch of details about the spell and the way to deconstruct it, and then just does it for him, he can help out by following the described way of deconstruction, but he can also just let it do it entirely on it's own. Deconstruction feels very inconsistent too, it's able to fail due to low intelligence(stat wise), and fails against his sister's novice tier II spells every time, but when he uses it on a necromancer's advanced tier III he has no trouble, not even a moment where he's like "everything's on the line, I can't fail here" and pushes past his limits. There's also a bit of a nitpick from me about how he tells other people he can do antimagic, how he's "the antithesis of magic", when all "he's" actually doing is interfering in how a spell works, causing it to fail, which is more "counterspell" than "antimagic", but I digress. He seems to be able to use mana externally to affect spells and coat objects, but can't do anything besides that, so I'm hoping he'll be able to use actual magic eventually. The writing itself is not that great, and I can't decide whether this is someone younger person's first book or something not translated very well, a lot of descriptions and conversations feel very off. The characters are also written pretty poorly, as an example, the MC has a sister, and most of the conversation come off like someone who doesn't have a sibling trying to write someone who does, where every conversation is them bickering but they still care for each other, but it always comes off more antagonistic than anything and most conversations feel very grating. I hope in the future he will gain the ability to use actual magic and be able to use deconstructing to figure out how spells work and then replicate them, and maybe actually find the drive to be a good mage, but I'm not sure I see the actual writing quality getting any better.
