James stood where he was and watched Adam leave. In a voice only he could hear, he said to himself, "Adam, you underestimate me. As long as there's a single thread of hope left, I'll fight for it with everything I've got. This is my own choice. Resent you? Not a chance."
From the psychokinesis Adam had just displayed, James had already seen both how extraordinary it was and how hard it would be. Even if that materialization was a property granted by the meditation method, it would still be impossible to achieve without a sufficient quantity of spiritual power. He had studied spiritual power for decades; he was not so blind as to miss that. To James, staying was an all-in gamble—staking everything he had, even if it killed him.
"Dying on the road to becoming a Mage beats living out my remaining years with nothing to show for it."
Adam arrived at the former spiritual power laboratory. After he showed the token Mage Irene had given him, the seal on the lab was lifted. The tower's work efficiency was extremely high—this month's funding had already been transferred. Adam summoned an alchemy puppet through the control console. He needed to renovate the lab; the old one had too many rooms, far too many to be useful, probably because too many apprentices had taken part in the research.
But Adam had no need for that many people assisting his empirical work. With his multi-thread working ability, in a project like spiritual power that required no large equipment, he alone could match an entire team.
What Adam needed was test subjects, not assistants.
Having received its orders along with the energy stones, the alchemy puppet set to work. Adam once again saw the silver torrent he had glimpsed back at the docks: nanoscale robots flooded the lab like a tide, breaking down and reassembling the original structure on the spot, and within seconds they had met Adam's requirements.
If these puppets hadn't been the academy's property, Adam would have loved to keep every last one of them. This ability to directly reshape matter was simply mesmerizing.
Next came buying equipment. Only after becoming the laboratory's owner did he learn that the tower could supply so many marvelous things.
The optical projector was merely the most basic of them. Spiritual power amplifiers, materialization assist devices, energy amplifiers, energy fluctuation recorders—every instrument with an impressive-sounding name was available. Correspondingly, the prices were all steep.
Frowning, Adam bought a batch of instruments and found that the funds the tower had allocated were exhausted in no time. At last he understood why, if energy stones weren't worth much, apprentices would still duel over them—apprentices were simply too poor.
He couldn't help thinking of those red war missions in the mission hall and their enormous rewards. Originally, as a researcher who liked nothing better than holing up in his lab, Adam had had no interest in them, but now he found he might really have to take a few on.
But now was not the time. He needed to deliver the meditation method to the library. Books in the library that contained concrete runes were not paper; they took the three-dimensional form of light screens. Adam recorded the Psychokinesis Meditation Method into the optical projector, then took the information case out of it. The complete rune group was stored inside the case, and the library would form a "book" from the case.
Early the next morning, Frank arrived at the laboratory at almost the same moment as James.
"I'm willing to join the laboratory," Frank said outright.
Adam was not surprised. Judging by yesterday's behavior, Frank's agreement had been all but inevitable.
"I'm honored. But what I need isn't research assistants—it's test subjects. Can you accept that?" Adam was blunt. In the research on the Psychokinesis Meditation Method, neither James's intelligence nor Frank's could help him; their significance to Adam was as sources of data—data from cultivation with ordinary aptitude, and data from a half-mechanized body.
Even though both men had long since taken the measure of their own abilities, hearing Adam say it still left them a little awkward. But soon Frank said firmly, "Yes, Mr. Adam, I can accept it."
Adam nodded and produced two contracts for them. The contents were formulaic; neither of them even read the contracts before signing.
Adam clapped his hands and said, "Then—welcome aboard." No morale-boosting speech, no celebration; Adam simply assigned tasks: "James, you can start constructing the meditation method. If you find it difficult, you may use the amplifier and the materialization assist device. Your entire construction process will be under observation. If you have questions, organize them and give them to me. Mr. Frank, come with me."
Frank had more research value than James, and Adam was very interested in him.
"Mr. Frank, I'd like to know whether your soul and your spiritual power changed after you lost half your body."
This was a question Frank dwelled on every day in his misery. Hearing Adam ask it, he answered without thinking: "No change. It's just that after losing the body, I can no longer sense the elements."
Adam recorded his words, then asked, "Then do you know the situation of the other apprentices who use mechanical bodies? Can they not sense the elements either?"
Frank knew Adam was a greenhorn—supremely gifted, but ignorant of much common knowledge—so he told Adam straight out what he wanted to know: "Correct. Every apprentice in my situation can no longer generate elemental perception. We can only walk the path of the alchemy mage. But that path consumes vast resources, and the Mordo Elemental Tower is not strong in alchemy."
"Then do you know what the cause is?"
Frank nodded. "At the apprentice stage, the body is the soul's physical manifestation. A half-mechanized body doesn't affect daily life, but it causes a deficiency in the soul."
A deficiency in the soul? Adam flagged that as a key point. On Earth, research on the soul had stopped at theology; at the scientific level, its very existence couldn't even be confirmed. If Frank was right, and an incomplete body caused a deficiency in the soul, then why was thinking unaffected?
Could it be that at the apprentice stage—or at the mortal stage—human thought isn't determined by the soul? Then what is it based on? The brain?
Adam filed the question away in his mind. This sort of knowledge probably wasn't classified; maybe there were related materials in the library. He would look them up when he had time.
He said to Frank, "Yesterday you told me that a mechanized body brings pain. How is that pain produced?"
"I look like one person, but really I'm two bodies. Every trait of flesh and blood takes place in only half of me; the other half can't feel it. But the mechanical side has to take part in it anyway." Frank stripped off all his clothes, exposing his mechanical body, then gripped the joint with both hands and forcefully pulled it apart from the flesh-and-blood body.
It was obviously agony. Sweat poured off Frank, but he didn't let out a single sound. With a calm he was straining to keep, he said, "Like this."
It looked horrifying. On the flesh side, tiny granulations kept growing out of the severed surface, trying to close the wound; the mechanical side simply severed those granulations. Every blood vessel was connected to a tube, and that was how the blood circulated. Even the internal organs were mechanical. Frank's whole body was failing at a rapid pace.
"What keeps it running is mana."
Adam understood at once. Perhaps the worst part was not even physical: a flesh-and-blood body that had never undergone body refining was constantly exposed to mana, and its cells could not regenerate fast enough to keep up with the rate of death. At this rate, what awaited Frank was watching himself die. That psychological pressure was the true agony.
Adam placed his hand on Frank. Frank twitched uneasily. Adam said, "Don't move. I need to run a test."
Could psychokinesis construct a membrane between the mechanical body and the flesh, letting the two combine into one harmoniously? Spiritual power is itself a carrier, and psychokinesis surpasses spiritual power—so could psychokinesis act as a neutralizer between different substances? That was what Adam wanted to study now.
Psychokinesis flowed out, gentle and smooth, covering the severed area. Adam gradually controlled it to materialize; once it had covered the area perfectly, it formed a thin membrane. He said to Frank, "Join them."
Frank let out a breath. Tearing himself apart like that was more than he could bear, even accustomed to pain as he was. Then he tensed again: if Adam's experiment worked, it would mean he might no longer have to endure such pain in the future.
Adam removed his hand and asked Frank, "How does it feel?"
"The pain is reduced, but not noticeably." Frank frowned; he had spotted a more crucial problem. "And the growth of the tissue can't be suppressed."
Adam nodded and recorded it, then altered the psychokinesis, strengthening its force to keep the tissue from growing. It was not easy—too much force would kill the tissue, too little couldn't suppress it. Fortunately, Adam had an absurd level of computational ability, and in a short time he found the optimal output.
"And now?" Adam asked again.
Light burst in Frank's eyes—not a figure of speech, actual light, the sign of emotions churning too violently for him to control his spiritual power. He said excitedly to Adam, "It works! It really works! Compared to before, it hardly hurts at all—I feel lighter than I ever have!"
Frank had reason to be excited. This display of psychokinesis gave him tremendous hope. His original application for a research project had been about nothing more than easing his pain; now that goal had been achieved.
Adam had wanted to try using psychokinesis to construct blood vessels as well, but Frank's current state was not suited to further experiments. He withdrew the psychokinesis, and Frank's expression twisted at once. Adam pretended not to see it and said calmly, "That's all for today. You can go back and rest, or go find James and work on constructing the meditation method together."