Knight Wynn's standing in the estate and in the Count's heart was so high that no one dared let his words go in one ear and out the other; the servants had no choice but to accept with bitter faces.
"Sir Knight, which great personage is coming to visit the Count?" Someone could not hold back the curiosity in his heart and called out loudly from the crowd.
Knight Wynn swept a cold gaze over them. He had no wish to answer, but then he considered that this lot was the laziest of the lazy at the best of times. Better to tell them and overawe them than keep the mystery. After all, even he was stirred at heart by that personage, who might or might not actually come.
"If nothing unexpected happens, the one about to grace us with his presence is a Mage. So whatever you do, don't go looking for trouble." With that, Knight Wynn turned and left; he had other business to attend to.
"Did Sir Knight Wynn say Mage? Did I hear that right?"
"Unless all our ears went bad at the same time, you heard right. A Mage."
The servants were blown senseless by the news. Mage — a word that, to them, existed only in legends — had today reached their ears in this fashion, filling them with the illusion of having walked into a legend, with an inexplicable sense of nobility, and with every kind of groundless fantasy: if a Mage took a fancy to me... if only I could become a Mage...
Adam had not heard the news. At this moment he was wandering quietly through the estate, and the more he saw of it, the stronger the nameless emotion in his heart grew.
Most of the buildings were of wood; even the quarters of the nobles and their families were merely piled up from rough stone. Motive power was limited to human muscle, animal muscle and water. There was no sign of electricity in use — not even a steam engine.
Technological level equivalent to medieval Europe.
In the shadows, slaves were loading barrels of the night's filth into carts to haul off the estate. In the deep autumn of the North, the clothes on their backs barely covered their vitals; their exposed skin was a mess of welts and frostbite, and their bodies, thinner even than Adam's, looked like one walking skeleton after another.
Social formation is slave society, but no church-like structures found; conclude this is not a theocracy.
That emotion grew ever stronger. When Adam reached the training grounds and stood beneath a tree looking at the dust-choked yard, at the stone locks and other equipment scattered about in disarray, and at the hundred-odd musclemen swinging greatswords and spears with all their might, the second emotion since the joy of his new birth took shape.
Its name was disappointment.
In a single instant Adam knew what he could do in this world. If the world really was only on this level, then he could do whatever he pleased.
Become a knight?
Once his body returned to normal, the crude martial techniques this crowd was practicing would take Adam no more than one look to master completely and thoroughly; backed by super-CPU-level computing power, with a weapon sharp enough and stamina enough, Adam would be invincible.
Become a noble? Or go contend for the world and make myself its king?
All right, that option is a bit more complicated. First, raise an army. Second, find some remote mountain forest and farm like mad up the tech tree. Third, steamroll everything.
A poet? A man of letters? A merchant? Or spend my whole life as a stable groom?
What kind of joke is that?
Adam longed to be an independent life; he absolutely did not want to do any of those dull, trivially easy things.
The pursuit of knowledge and energy — that was his purpose.
But if this world really was this backward, then all of it was a delusion.
From the moment Adam became human, along with enjoying creativity he had also to accept birth, aging, sickness and death. A human might live a hundred years; there might be special ways to live two hundred; but immortality was absolutely impossible.
Which meant that Adam's one life might simply be wasted.
Even if Adam ruled the world and steered it onto the path of scientific development, building from nothing was too hard a process, and one lifetime too short. He could not possibly even reach Earth's level, let alone anything deeper.
Disappointment filled Adam's newborn soul. Amid that violent surge of emotion the special energy appeared once again, a flash and then gone, whipping the fallen leaves up off the ground in a flurry.
The knight in charge of training was named Wright. In that instant he jerked his head up, and at the sight of Adam arriving his brow furrowed. What did Wynn bring that fool here for? The thought flashed past, and then he paid Adam no more attention. Adam never took part in training; everyone knew Adam's body was weak, just as everyone knew he was an idiot.
Before long the servants from the mess hall drifted into the training grounds one after another. The bearded man Joe walked past Adam with a heavy, contemptuous snort. Having heard that a distinguished Mage was about to arrive, he was wallowing in fantasies and had, for the time being, given up any plan of making trouble for Adam.
Knight Wright signaled the knight-squires to carry on, then strode to the front of the servants' ranks and bellowed, "Starting today your training is doubled. Maybe you've already heard the news, so don't go looking for trouble. Begin now!"
The servants were commoners who had come to the estate to work for the Count in exchange for pay, while the knight-squires were outstanding commoners chosen for their potential to become knights; having signed a contract with the Count, they were trained by knights and enjoyed better treatment and higher standing than the servants.
Take the present training: for the servants, Knight Wright gave one shout to assign the task and then ignored them, going back to the squires to correct their technique one by one.
Techniques like these Adam could grasp perfectly after a single viewing, and would automatically optimize them so that they better conformed to human biomechanics.
As for control of the body, that posed no problem at all for Adam: it was simply a matter of compiling movements into programs and activating the program when it was needed. Adam's soul was the processor, and the instructions the processor issued would be carried out scrupulously by every tissue of the body. If damage to the body did not matter, Adam could even twist himself into any posture no human body was ever meant to make.
If this world is only on this level, it's far too boring.
But that can't be. If I've landed in the Middle Ages, then what kind of creature was that warhorse?
Just then Knight Wright clapped his hands and gathered all the knight-squires around him. The bare-chested bruisers were steaming with sweat, and the heat bent even the sunlight into a shimmer.
Knight Wright clasped his hands behind his back and said, "For a knight, what is the most important thing? You — tell me."
The squire called on answered loudly, "The breathing method."
Wright nodded. "That's right, the breathing method. It's also the reason you could become squires while they can only be servants."
At those words, envy and jealousy spread across the servants' faces.
"The breathing method?" Adam pricked up his ears, eyes fixed hard on Knight Wright. He sensed that he might be about to hear something interesting.
"Now, adjust your breathing to the rhythm of Knight Johnson's breathing method, take control of your body, then let your consciousness spread outward and empty itself. Sense the transcendent energy that exists outside your body; try to accept it, guide it, and make it resonate with your body."
Adam caught several keywords: rhythm, consciousness, transcendent energy, resonance. Those words were far too specific; no one could speak them out of thin air. In other words, this was a world where supernatural power existed!
When he finished speaking, Knight Wright stood where he was and began to breathe at a bizarre frequency. His muscles quivered with every breath, his body now swelling, now shrinking, and the sight was profoundly uncanny.
Special Energy No. 1 detected.
Adam observed that Knight Wright and all the knight-squires were giving off a faint special energy. Although there were more than a hundred of them in all, the total quantity of that energy could not even reach one-fifth of Adam's own.
Adam did not act rashly; he kept recording everything before his eyes. After the knights had breathed on for nearly a quarter of an hour, Adam made a new discovery.
New energy detected. Properties resemble Special Energy No. 2, but its grade is extremely low. Tentatively designated Special Energy No. 3.
Adam found that Special Energy No. 3, guided by No. 1, was being drawn into Knight Wright's body through the resonance triggered by that special breathing frequency. Knight Wright's face jerked in uncontrollable spasms — presumably the process was not a pleasant one — but what followed was a soaring of his aura: Knight Wright was actually radiating red ripples!
At the same time, pain showed on all the knight-squires' faces. Their muscles no longer rose and fell in rhythm but locked rigid, and a few even had threads of blood surfacing on their skin.
Knight Wright kept breathing, and the process went on for half an hour. During it the last of the knight-squires also stopped training; he stood trembling in place waiting for Knight Wright, his eyes full of worship and hope.
The breathing method builds the program; No. 1 energy forms the channel, Adam continued to analyze.
In the final second, Knight Wright exhaled heavily, his breath blowing the dust up into the air. At this moment he looked exhausted, yet his spirit was soaring.
"Remember, in the cultivation of the breathing method there is no surpassing of limits. The only thing that can surpass its limits is the body..."
Knight Wright went on shouting his instructions, but by now Adam had already collapsed his threads back into one and begun practicing this transcendent power himself, which was why he did not hear the knight out.
"...If there is no sufficiently powerful body to support it, forcing the practice of the breathing method will only hasten your deaths. It is suicide."
Adam began breathing according to the cultivation method. The vast special energy he had named No. 1 radiated out in an instant and precisely captured No. 3 energy. Unlike the near-inert manner in which the energy had behaved while the knights practiced, under Adam's breathing No. 3 energy poured madly into his body at a nearly berserk rate, crudely forcing its way into his cells.
For Adam's frail body and fragile cells, No. 3 energy was of far too high a grade. Rather than cultivation that improved him, it was a continuous slaughter of cells — and the regeneration rate of those cells could nowhere near keep pace.
And so...
Body operating beyond capacity. Activating self-protection program. Forcibly severing the channel.