Adam returned to the laboratory. James and Frank were still hard at work constructing psychokinesis.
Ever since he had gotten a lab of his own, Adam had stopped going back to the dormitory altogether, eating and sleeping in the lab. Paying the other two no mind, he went into his office and began hatching the egg according to the method in the book.
Adam opened a wide gash in his fingertip with a wind blade. Blood poured out in a steady stream; without so much as a change of expression, he pressed the finger against the eggshell and began writing the contract.
It truly deserved its reputation as a life form famed for chaos and evil: the egg devoured the blood greedily while instinctively rejecting the contract runes. And that rejection was about as blunt as could be—as the shell squirmed faintly, it kept wiping the runes away, which made inscribing them extremely difficult.
"Stay still." Adam's patience ran out, and his psychokinesis pushed out of his body to deal the egg a vicious blow. What Adam felt for this egg was mostly curiosity; whether his own power might rise because of it did not much concern him. External things like this had more value to him as objects of study, and a live specimen would be good—but a dead one would do just as well.
The egg actually gave off a will of pain. Adam clearly felt the shell contracting violently, and then a shrill shriek appeared in his mind. Still at the egg stage, and it already had an ability like that.
The egg's resistance weakened considerably. Having found this effective, Adam kept up the brutal attacks, entirely unconcerned about whether he might kill the creature.
Even so, inscribing the contract still cost him a good deal of time. Adam was in no hurry; the book said that inscribing a master-servant contract was a tug-of-war—the Mage had to repeat it endlessly, day after day, until the abyssal creature submitted.
Adam accelerated the cell division in his finger, and the wound healed at tremendous speed. Then he walked over to the workbench.
What he needed next was a vast amount of energy and flesh.
This sort of abyssal creature could grow to level two at best if it never got the chance to "metamorphose"—or, as the word also goes, "go pervert"—and needed nothing but energy stones to be fed. Higher-grade ones required ether crystals. Adam was not short of energy stones, but flesh and blood...
"Civilization and savagery, woven together," Adam sighed, all feigned feeling, and placed an order at the workbench—ten low-grade slaves from other planes, total value one hundred units of energy stones.
The slave business was hardly hidden; it sat brazenly on the trade list alongside every other resource, prices clearly marked, honest dealing for all. Adam had long been curious about it, but he had never needed any before, so he had never bought any. This time, for the egg's sake, he got to satisfy his curiosity as well.
Slave trading was a "legal" business in the Mage Plane. When great numbers of Mages warred across other planes, apart from plundering specific resources, the most valuable and easily obtained spoils were slaves. In a Mage's eyes, a plane that had never formed a social system had no value for exchange at all; Mages would slaughter and plunder such planes without the slightest compunction, and in the end sacrifice the entire plane through astonishing means, feeding it back to the Mage Plane.
Even for those planes that had, over long natural evolution, formed social systems, the Mages' methods were not necessarily any gentler. Such planes had to submit and become the colony and private property of some Transdimensional Mage, or even a true spirit Mage; from that point on the plane had to develop entirely according to the Mage's will, and the moment it dared to resist, only destruction awaited it.
Only when a being of a level equivalent to a true spirit Mage appeared in another plane did that plane even earn the right to hold dialogue with the Mage Plane.
Such was the posture of the plunderer.
The slaves Adam had purchased would not arrive at once; ordered now, they would be delivered to the lab promptly the next morning.
Adam spent the entire afternoon merging with the personal storage space. He tried to analyze the rune's structure, only to find that without knowledge and theory to support him the rune was like a sealed book from heaven, leaving him no way in. After repeated failures he had no choice but to merge it as it was.
The merging process was simple: peel back a patch of skin anywhere on the body, set the materialized rune on it, and the personal storage space belonged to Adam.
Light as a passing breeze, without a single ripple of energy or space—and Adam was fascinated. This technology was simply astonishing.
Adam could open the space in any manner he liked, from anywhere within a meter of any part of his body; it was only living things that apparently could not be put inside. After Adam had put in several contracts, some shattered ether crystals, and the magic items he had seized, he wanted to put the egg in as well—but the egg gave off boundless terror and refusal, as though to enter would be to enter a domain of death.
Since this egg still had a great deal of value that had not yet been squeezed out of it, Adam could only give up with regret, and resolved to find some living thing to put inside another day and see how it went.
Early the next morning, Adam opened the lab's main door. Test subjects were not permitted to remain in the lab overnight, so James and Frank waited outside the door early every day.
There were more of them today. Before Adam opened the door, they had been talking with William. James knew William; he had never expected that this instructor of rune knowledge was now, like himself, willing to become one of Adam's test subjects.
Besides the senior apprentice, what shocked him even more were the ten slaves lined up outside the door, bound with rope like walking corpses.
They resembled humans in build, but their limbs were longer, their skin an eerie purple. They were completely naked, and judging by their physical characteristics there were males and females among them. They showed no intention of resisting at all, and gave no reaction even to William's curious touch.
James and Frank were not curious about any of this, but William was different. After signing his contract with Adam, he could not help asking, "Those—" He had no idea what to call slaves from other planes, so he let it trail off vaguely. "Are they test subjects too?"
Adam was just about to order the alchemy puppet to build some kind of blood-pool container. At the question he answered, "No. They're not test subjects—they're consumables."
Adam went on calmly, "First go try to construct the rune group yourselves. If there's anything you don't understand, ask James. Come find me once you've succeeded." With that he led one of the slaves off into the depths of the lab.
William looked at the nine slaves left behind and felt a bone-deep chill rise from the bottom of his heart, piercing through his whole body in an instant and stiffening his limbs. Consumables? They may look different, but their faces are as human as mine—and he's using them as consumables?
Adam paid no attention to what William thought. Low-value consumables these slaves might be, but they were also specimens such as he had never seen. Adam was keenly interested in the body structure of this humanoid race from another plane.
This room deep in the lab belonged to Adam alone. Inside were a few small precision instruments, and an operating table.
Adam led the slave over, meaning to lay him on the operating table—and the slave, who had seemed utterly unresponsive all this while, erupted in that instant with violent emotion. He let out a piercing scream, the sound shifting in clear fluctuations of tone, no doubt their language.
Adam guessed he was terrified, begging for mercy, or cursing him.
The slave struggled, turning to flee the lab, but it was no use. Fierce as his resistance was, his strength was negligible—all it did was pull the rope taut.
Adam bound him with psychokinesis and carried him onto the operating table. Mechanical arms extended from around the table and pinned him firmly in place.
Adam changed into a different set of clothes—a material that stayed spotless and would not take on bloodstains. At the same time he thought, they have language, so they have thought. Then what is the soul of a being from another plane like?
To Adam that question was more interesting than their anatomy, but for now he had no means of observing souls.
Shaking his head to drive off the other thoughts, Adam condensed his psychokinesis into ten tentacles, and with those and his own two hands he worked six scalpels at once.
Through all of it the slave screamed shrilly, his muscles twitching uncontrollably. Adam paid it no heed and kept cutting, until at last, after one particular stroke, the slave's life breath was gone, and the look left in his eyes was one of bone-deep hatred and terror.
"Death caused by the level of pain exceeding the body's self-protective mechanism; the will broke down," Adam recorded coldly.
"Brain structure simple; intelligence presumed low. No soul observed."
"Muscle fibers coarser and thicker than a human's; at full capacity it possesses greater strength than an ordinary human."
"Body structure differs: the 'heart' sits at the center of the chest cavity, the 'kidneys' below the 'heart', the 'stomach' on the right and very large; the intestinal tract is sturdy and strong, indicating powerful metabolic function. No other internal organs present."
"No respiratory tract found."
"Unidentified stone-like organ discovered; faint energy signature, energy level extremely low."
"Reproductive organs similar to a human's; it is a mammal."
The dissection proceeded at a swift and steady pace. Adam cut the slave open inch by inch, recording every piece of information he obtained, and two hours later the whole dissection was finally complete.
"Vitality stronger than a human's, but intelligence low." Adam ordered the alchemy puppet to clean the laboratory and dumped the unrecognizable corpse into the blood pool, then thought, as expected, intelligence is what gains one power. Mages have intelligence, and the power that intelligence breeds, and that is how they get to play the plunderer—while creatures like these can only endure it.
Adam changed his clothes and walked out of the lab. William had been staring at that room the whole time, deeply uneasy; when he saw what the alchemy puppet was carrying and Adam himself, he could not help shuddering. By now his feelings toward Adam—admiration, defiance, hostility, a whole tangle of them—had finally resolved into simple fear.
"This monster! This monster..." William bowed his head low to hide his fear, and screamed it in his heart.
Frank stood up. "Need a hand?" He knew what Adam was about to do, and it was plainly not a pleasant business; out of a certain sense of duty as an "assistant," he volunteered.