Chapter 30 Testing the New Meditation Method

James was still holed up in his laboratory. His research had reached a bottleneck, and there was not the slightest hope of a breakthrough in sight.

The academy had not cut off his funding, and funding was not his problem. What he lacked was assistants and research subjects.

Just as Elliot had said, the older batch of apprentices who had shared his problem had all unfortunately died off; the survivors had no faith in him, and the new apprentices could not meet his standards. Adam was the sole exception.

But a genius of that caliber probably wouldn't be interested in my research. James sighed as he thought it.

He walked through his dark laboratory, pausing now and then beneath the optical projections, looking at rune after rune — unfinished, or finished but never tested — and sinking into endless indecision.

"I'm already over seventy years old."

His lifespan was the sword of Damocles hanging over his head. His talent could only be called inferior, his total spiritual power pitifully small, and because he had spent these past decades endlessly testing new runes, his spiritual power to this day had never been structured according to any systematic meditation method. In that sense, he was simply wasting his time.

"Ah."

James slumped back against the wall and let out a heavy sigh. Then, unexpectedly, the laboratory's access panel lit up: "Apprentice Adam requests entry."

James's eyes blazed with a startling light. He leapt up from the floor and rushed out to the front room to open the laboratory door.

Following his memory, Adam arrived at the door of James's laboratory and swiped his identity token. He was not certain James was inside, but he had no better way of finding him, so he had come here to try his luck.

Bang.

The laboratory door was yanked open with brutal force. James stared at Adam, eyes wide, and asked urgently, "You've agreed to be my assistant, right? You've agreed, haven't you?"

Adam took a step back, then said, "If the pay satisfies me, then yes."

James seized Adam and dragged him toward the laboratory, saying, "Wait for me!" Then he dashed inside, and a short while later came back out and handed Adam a paper contract.

Adam looked down at it. The contract laid out the responsibilities of both parties, matters to note, and a confidentiality agreement; those parts were airtight, with no loopholes to be found. Only the payment section was blank.

James said magnanimously, "The laboratory gets two thousand units of energy stones a month. I need eight hundred to cover daily expenses. The rest is all yours!"

That meant Adam could earn as much as twelve hundred energy stones a month — an enormous sum, far more generous than the mission hall's pay for new apprentices, which came to less than one unit a day.

But James immediately changed his tone and said, somewhat embarrassed, "Only, we need to produce some results within three months at the most, or we'll be cut off. The Review Department has lost patience with my project. Three months is the final deadline they've given me."

Adam nodded. Three months meant at least three payments. He asked James, "Mr. James, what do you mean by 'some results'?"

James answered, "A complete, valuable meditation method that can be put into use among apprentices." He promptly added, "Actually, the laboratory already has a complete result, but no one can verify it. Building a rune group is no simple matter for me, after all."

Adam was confident about this. Projects that required massive computation to be empirically verified were exactly what he excelled at; building a rune group would only occupy a few more threads.

Adam told James, "If the research succeeds, I can leave my name off the results, but I want the right to use them freely."

James nodded hastily. "Of course, no problem at all."

Once he had James's agreement, Adam wrote that clause into the contract, then filled the payment section with one thousand units per month and handed the contract back. James cared nothing about the figure; he put the contract away beaming with delight, then, unable to wait another moment, dragged Adam into that dark room.

After a series of operations, he said to Adam, "From now on you have permission to enter the laboratory freely, but you may not take any materials out of it."

Half a month passed quickly after that. During those two weeks Adam all but vanished from everyone's sight, shuttling only between his dormitory and the laboratory each day; even his one daily meal was eaten inside the lab.

James was undoubtedly a decent man. Though Adam was merely an assistant and a test subject, he still looked after Adam very well. During that half month he did not ask Adam to construct any of those unverified, unstable runes; instead he devoted himself to instructing Adam in constructing the Basic Meditation Method.

In his words: "This Basic Meditation Method, created by the True Spirit Archmage Prometheus, has a stability far beyond every variant. At this stage that stability shows itself in this: no matter how apprentices experiment with new methods, it can protect their souls, so that they don't die from their spiritual power shattering again and again."

This was a great help to Adam. Compared with grinding away in isolation behind closed doors, James's guidance, backed by far more experience, spared him many detours. In less than half a month the Basic Meditation Method was roughly complete, and Adam could feel a layer of armor wrapped around his fragile soul; the amount of ether it could neutralize had grown.

James was very pleased. Adam's talent had once again surpassed his expectations. To bring a meditation method to initial completion required at least a thousand armor plates, while an ordinary apprentice — himself, for instance — could construct only three to five a day at full effort.

James did not know that this was not merely a gap in total spiritual power, but also a gap in computing power. An ordinary person could construct only one rune at a time, whereas Adam had the gift of multitasking: several threads worked at once to build a single rune, and afterward he needed only to merge the threads back into one.

Half a month later, having confirmed that Adam could withstand the negative effects of runes shattering inside his spiritual power, James switched on an optical projector and said to him, "Now try constructing this rune set and let it replace the Mage Armor. Be careful not to force it — if you feel spiritual power conflict or your soul fluctuating, stop at once."

Adam turned his eyes to the new rune group. It was still composed of nine runes, but each one was now more complex than before. That complexity betrayed no harmony, however; Adam felt that even without testing it, this rune group was bound to be a failure.

But empirical verification could not rely on feelings; only testing it in person would uncover where the problem lay. So Adam began constructing without hesitation.

James said nervously from beside him, "Compared with the original Mage Armor, this set adds an enhancement of spiritual power's properties on top of the base. If it works, the Mage Armor will become aggressive."

"Step by step, dissolve the original armor plates bit by bit... Stop! Good God, what are you doing!"

To James's horror, the spiritual power Adam had only just begun to condense collapsed in an instant, and the escaping energy swept through the laboratory like a gust of wind, sending every sheet of paper flying!

James had no time to spare for the shambles of a laboratory. Regret filled him; Adam's calm had misled him, and he had assumed Adam would take it slowly. But what was happening now was clearly Adam shattering the Mage Armor all at once, and that would do enormous damage to the spirit.

He bolted for the door in a panic, meaning to apply for medical treatment. Adam was his last hope; nothing could happen to him!

Just then Adam's voice came, utterly unconcerned: "As a single rune, it has a higher complexity than the original version, but the connections between runes are crude, there are redundant structures, and once they're combined the thing cannot be self-consistent..."

James's headlong flight froze. His body went still, and his head turned slowly toward Adam. "You... you're fine?" he said stiffly.

Adam said calmly, "Don't worry, this isn't hard for me. And this testing method is too inefficient — I can probably..." He thought for a moment about how best to divide his computing power and spiritual power for the optimal result, then said, "construct four different meditation methods at the same time."

"F-four? Different ones? Constructing meditation methods you've never touched?"

"Yes, exactly. That's mainly because I'm unfamiliar with the new runes; otherwise I could go a bit faster," Adam confirmed.

James stared at Adam in astonishment. "This is multitasking?" He had every reason to be astonished: multitasking was a talent, one not automatically gained from a greater total of spiritual power or a higher Mage rank; those two things only made a Mage think faster about a single matter.

"Yes," Adam said.

This monster. How enviable — if only I were the one born with that gift. James thought to himself.

The whole time he was speaking, Adam had kept constructing rune groups. A problem found in one isolated combination did not necessarily apply to the whole; it was possible that, placed within the whole, the problem would resolve itself.

James quietly set three more optical projectors beside Adam. Watching how earnestly he worked, James felt a hope unlike any he had known before. Maybe this time it really can succeed!

Experiments were tedious, and empirical verification was one blow after another to confidence and conviction. In the blink of an eye another two months flew past. Adam and James had both gone mad; neither returned to his own quarters during that time. James still had his weekly class to teach, while Adam had turned into a complete shut-in.

And yet they had still not obtained even one meditation method that was harmonious, self-consistent and universally applicable.

With only the last ten days left before the three-month deadline, James looked countless years older; the young man of their first meeting had turned gray-haired.