Adam's interest was piqued. "Tell me in detail."
The devil hadn't expected a request like that. It stalled, stammering, "Th-this, this is something I was born knowing. I don't know either..."
Adam realized his question had been badly put. A living being's innate gifts could be unreasonable that way; without enough knowledge to prop up an explanation, words alone would never get there. So he switched questions. "Can you connect to my mind?"
The devil shuddered. It had heard the malice in those words, and it shook its head frantically. "No, no, no, respected and great master, how would your humble servant dare pry into your thoughts? I only picked up a little common knowledge from that idiot's brain!"
Then it grew excited. "Great master, I can hardly believe it—I've actually become a Mage's servant! Mages! In my broken inheritance memories, the Mage Plane is an enemy that must never be provoked. Neither devils nor abyssal creatures can even find the plane coordinates of the Mage World!"
Adam caught the words "inheritance memories." Abyssal creatures were flesh-and-blood beings, so they ought to have organs and tissues for passing on genetic information—but how did a being of will transmit that kind of information?
"Do you know what you actually are?"
The devil shifted its form until it was vaguely female, then put on an expression of disbelief. "My master, you really have no desire at all for the opposite sex?"
Adam narrowed his eyes and lashed the devil savagely through the contract. "Answer my question. Don't do anything superfluous."
The devil let out a shriek, its form blurring back into a chaotic smear, and begged, "Please stop, master, I won't dare again!"
Adam kept up the punishment. A creature that survived by deception was not worth trusting; it had to be taught a lesson. Sure enough, it was not long before the devil could not even scream, and its chaotic body began to show signs of coming apart. Only then did Adam stop.
The devil collapsed on the floor like a stain. It could no longer speak, and could only pass a feeble will through the contract: Energy... energy...
Adam tossed it a dozen-odd units of energy stones. The devil devoured them greedily and only then stabilized. It no longer dared play tricks, and said obediently, "I should be a devil, but I seem to be an abyssal creature as well."
"Should be? Seem to be?" Adam was thoroughly displeased with that sort of adverbial hedging.
The devil trembled all over and went on. "Devil, devil, I am a devil. But I seem to have been gestated in an abyssal creature's body. Their damned, chaotic, stupid beast instincts wrecked my inheritance memories—I've forgotten every method of signing a contract!"
As it spoke, the devil began to sob. "Master, can you imagine it? I want to eat raw flesh all the time! Eat those filthy lumps of body tissue!"
"Shut up." Adam cut off the devil's crocodile tears and continued. "If you've forgotten every contract, what use are you?"
The devil stopped short—not only its voice, even its thinking stalled. A long while later it said awkwardly, "I... I... I don't know either..."
Adam gave it a contemptuous glance. Abyssal creatures could give low-level Mages and apprentices a burst of fighting strength, and a devil's various contracts were often extremely useful, but this hybrid breed really was good for nothing: feeble in combat, and without a being of will's wonders either. Trash, plain and simple.
"I think..."
Before Adam could finish, the devil finished for him, dejected. "I think the only thing about me worth studying seems to be how I was born."
That was exactly what Adam had been thinking, but it would involve knowledge of other planes and of living things, and for now he had no channel to obtain either and no reliable assistant. Besides, his interest in that field was not great. "Go out. Don't leave the laboratory." He would let this devil fend for itself for the time being; perhaps it would prove useful later, once he was capable of studying souls.
The devil drifted dolefully out of Adam's room. It was a creature that instinctively chased after the thoughts of living beings; with a wet plop it flopped down beside James and Frank and startled them badly. They raised their defenses on instinct, and the crude psychokinetic barrier sent the juvenile hybrid devil flying. "What is this thing?!"
Adam's voice came from the room. "My slave. A useless devil."
The two looked at each other. Hadn't that egg belonged to an abyssal creature? How had a devil come out of it?
Adam left the devil lying around the laboratory as he pleased. William was terrified of it, while James and Frank often went to tease it in their spare time between training sessions. Crude desire-manifestation was useless against apprentices who were prepared, and the devil could only swallow their bullying in humiliation.
With Adam's permission, the two handed the construction method of the Psychokinesis Meditation Method over to the devil, and Adam was happy to have someone run all sorts of tests in his place. Perhaps this being of will would give him new inspiration.
One day Elliot Pierce came to the laboratory again. The instant he saw the devil, boundless curiosity burst out of him, and he kept using every method and every potion he could think of to do as he liked with the devil. Adam paid it no mind, and only asked curiously, "Why is it always you who comes to notify me?"
Elliot gave him a resentful look.
Elliot brought good news: in the previous mission Adam had single-handedly killed every invading Magefoe apprentice and spared the academy any losses, so the academy had decided to reward him—the third-to-last floor of the library would be opened to him.
Only now did Adam learn that full-fledged Mages never set foot in the academy library, because it stored nothing but apprentice-stage knowledge. The third-to-last floor was all rune knowledge. Real rune knowledge.
The free rune knowledge course James was in charge of was rune knowledge in name only. It only taught the rookies the meditation method, and never touched on why runes could appear at all or why they had to be expressed in that particular form.
Adam had asked that very question, and James's answer had been that he did not know either.
In that moment Adam found James rather laughable. He did not have Adam's computing power—could not brute-force an entire meditation method into existence from a single sample and countless complex calculations—yet he did not even know why rune lines had to be drawn the way they were, and still dreamed of blazing a new path. No wonder he had failed.
James answered with a bitter smile. "The upper floors are the core knowledge of the apprentice stage. An apprentice of my caliber isn't qualified to read them. And not just me—right now there isn't a single apprentice in all of Mordo Academy qualified to enter the upper floors. Only you. The first, since that batch of geniuses died in the tower war."
Under their resentful gazes, Adam went alone into the third-to-last floor.
When Adam saw the titles of the books on that floor—Extension of Rune Lines, Stability of Rune Shapes, The Application of Arcs and Curves in Runes and the like—he was taken aback. "This is... geometry?"
He flipped through the books at tremendous speed, his eyes growing brighter and brighter. The knowledge described in them fell within the scope of Euclidean geometry on Earth, but only from plane geometry up to solid geometry; of higher-level spatial geometry there were only a few lines of description, meant for combining plane and solid geometry within the mind. As for the more profound and obscure branches—non-Euclidean geometry, differential geometry and so on—there was nothing at all. (I'm just a slacker student. You overachievers can enjoy the show... only fools sweat the details.)
But that was already enough. Adam feverishly received the baptism of knowledge.
His problem was that his use of imagination was not yet as obedient as his own arm. In Adam's way of thinking, the part of him that belonged to a computer still held the dominant position: he was good at analyzing and calculating a given problem, but not at independently conceiving a hypothesis and then verifying it.
After returning to the laboratory from the library, Adam shut himself in his room. He found that the rune group formed by the nineteen runes he had created contained a great deal of redundancy, and could be cut down into a more optimized structure—more efficient and convenient in the use and refinement of spiritual power, and producing psychokinesis of better quality besides.
A month passed. William, James, Frank and the devil looked at one another; none of them had any idea what Adam was doing shut up in there.
"Master isn't going to starve to death, is he?" the devil murmured, and then shivered. A master-servant contract bound the two of them; if the master died, it had no way to live. "How about you go in and take a look?"
William and the others were anxious too. They had plenty of questions to ask; they had reached the middle stage of constructing psychokinesis, but their Mage Armor had begun to show a tendency toward inconsistency—and still no one dared knock on the door.
"Adam has a personal storage space, and an apprentice needs only a tiny amount of energy just to stay alive. He should be fine for now."
Another ten days passed, and the devil could already feel the weakness of the soul at the other end of the contract. It lay on the floor and said, "Is the master insane? Starving himself to death for the sake of research?"
William and the others exchanged glances. James stepped forward and set his hand against the door, then slowly lowered it. "Let's wait a little longer..."
Seven more days passed. Five days remained before the trial began, and the devil felt the other end of the contract weaken to the extreme, the flame of life guttering like a candle in the wind. It could hold back no longer. "Blow the door open, quick—the master is dying!"
William and the others looked at one another, and no one was willing to move first. Who knew whether Adam was at the most critical moment inside? If their interruption ruined his research, among Mages that would be a feud that ended only in death.
The devil's chaotic body surged, and it took on Adam's appearance. Gritting its teeth and stamping a foot, it charged at the door. "Damn it, get out of the way, let me try!" With that it lowered its head and rushed the door. It did not expect to be able to break it down—but as long as it felt pain, the master would sense it.
Instead, it hit empty air: the instant it came near, the room that had been sealed for nearly two months opened.
Adam walked out, gaunt and haggard. A psychokinetic barrier flashed into being and flung the devil back hard, and then he looked at them and asked flatly, "What are you all gathered here for?"