The devil was curled up inside Adam's mind, trembling; it did not dare move a muscle. Against apprentice-level negative-energy magic it could still devour and absorb, but the aura coming off Peter Om was of the same origin—it did not dare so much as touch it.
Adam was facing the greatest crisis since he had awakened.
By virtue of talent countless grades above the rest, he had sailed through the past year and more without a setback; among apprentices, absent some freakish genius, he already counted as extremely strong. But now it was a child meeting an adult—every asset he had prided himself on had turned into a joke.
He could not help turning on himself. If I'd prepared a little more thoroughly, bought a teleportation scroll from the tower, how would I be stuck in such a passive spot now? Sure enough, humility makes one progress, and the arrogant are bound to destroy themselves sooner or later.
"A pity—a pity you're on the Mage Continent now, and I have no time to let you savor the most beautiful of torments. But never mind; I'll draw out your soul and torture it day and night until the end of time." Peter Om had recovered his composed look and spoke softly to Adam. At the same time he raised a finger; a short syllable sounded, and a crimson line of fire shot at Adam's body.
"Look! This is what magic truly looks like—communing with the ether through the mind, sensing the elements through the soul, then igniting the magic with an incantation. How exquisite, how mysterious. And you sinners who profane magic actually try to explain magic with benighted knowledge and laughable runes—what makes you worthy of comprehending magic's splendor and grandeur!"
Adam countered head-on with a line of water, easily crushing Peter Om's magic, and said with difficulty, "Which is why you've become the dregs of the era, able only to eke out a living in the darkness."
Adam was not a man who enjoyed trash talk, but right now all he could do was pray Peter Om would be foolish enough to keep talking with him. As things stood, there was only one way out: calculate gravity.
Magefoes were no less sensitive to mana fluctuations than mainstream Mages; there was no magic with a large mana fluctuation that Adam could possibly construct in front of a Mage. Only knowledge and computing power were territory these ground rats could not understand.
The greater an object's mass, the greater its gravity; when gravity grows great enough, it interferes with space. Space is not smooth—it is covered in wrinkles, and each wrinkle is a fold of space. If we could stand on such a wrinkle and spread it flat, we would find ourselves instantly crossing a vast distance.
This was unstable teleportation.
What Adam had to do now was calculate—gather countless gravities far too faint to observe onto his own body, raising his mass that way, until his mass grew great enough to affect space. But that took a very long time; Adam did not possess the knowledge that pointed straight at the essence of gravity. For now he could only wield gravity inefficiently through the most cumbersome mathematical operations.
"Dregs of the era?" To Adam's surprise, Peter Om showed no anger; he merely repeated Adam's words in a low voice. "Look at that—a mere apprentice, and already so full of himself. No reverence for magic, no reverence for the ether; in the end you will all be cast aside. Time will prove that we are right. Benighted knowledge will run its course, and our road is the true essence of magic!"
Adam pressed on: "Time is a relative concept. It has no absolute scope of application. You don't even understand the concept of a frame of reference, yet you dare prattle about time?"
Peter Om uttered several short syllables in quick succession, and spell after spell struck Adam. Adam had reached the most critical moment; he gave up his defenses everywhere but his vital points and let the magic punch through his body.
"Flying into a rage because you've been shown up? Ignorant fool." Adam kept using words to stall. The capture of gravity had reached its final stage; he needed only a rough solution and he could teleport out of there.
"Flying into a rage? No—this is merely punishment for words that profane the essence of magic." Peter was in fact not unfamiliar with such talk, but it still grated on his ears.
In this transcendent world, idealism and materialism were locked in irreconcilable conflict. Materialists proved phenomena through knowledge—they knew how things worked and why; idealists described phenomena through day after day of observation and sensation. A man ignorant of all knowledge might, if he watched fire and the sun for hundreds of millions of years, perhaps come to grasp fusion—but he could not explain it. He would know how, and never why.
The most absurd part was that they would then feel knowledge had profaned their faith.
"Perhaps pain will sober you up." Peter Om kept striking Adam with magic, leaving countless wounds on him. His eyes were cold, yet he smiled. "In circumstances like these, what use is your knowledge? It hurts, doesn't it? You despair, don't you? Rest easy—I won't kill you so simply, not before your soul reaches its most fascinating state."
Adam had cut off his sense of pain; his cells, bolstered by psychokinesis, kept knitting his wounds closed. He ran his calculations at overload, throwing everything into solving for the one answer that would let him escape.
Adam suddenly smiled, and Peter Om froze in astonishment.
"Knowledge is useful, of course. Under any circumstances."
Adam shattered the armor plates formed by the Psychokinesis Meditation Method and in an instant burst out every scrap of his spiritual power, breaking through Peter Om's suppression and communing with the ether to form mana. Under the work of that mana, the fuzzy solution Adam had wrung out with all his strength took effect: a vast sea of gravity threads wrapped his body layer upon layer, and the wrinkles of space were no longer mysterious but had come within reach.
Then Adam took one step forward, onto the wrinkle of space.
In Peter Om's eyes, Adam's body began to blur and space began to fluctuate abnormally. He recognized the precursor of teleportation magic and found it incredible—under his energy pressure, Adam could not open his personal storage space, nor use magic items; and among Magefoes, it was impossible for an apprentice to master space magic. He waved a hand and sent out a black radiance, a half-moon slash toward Adam—but it was too late. Adam vanished from the spot; the magic struck empty ground and turned a large swath of the surroundings into nothingness.
Peter Om walked to where Adam had just stood. The spatial fluctuation had already smoothed back to normal. He carefully sensed the position of the death mark, then sighed in admiration: "A true genius. But so what? You still can't escape my palm."
Far away, space "spat" Adam out. His clothes were in tatters, and besides the wounds Peter Om had dealt him, his whole body was covered in dense, fine lacerations—what his body had suffered for being unable to withstand the teleportation.
"Cough—"
He collapsed to the ground and vomited blood. Once he lifted the pain restriction, pain flooded back like a tide, drowning him from the inside out—this time even his internal organs were badly injured.
The devil came out of his mind and looked at Adam with worry and dread. "Master, you're not going to die, are you?" Because the master-servant contract's overbearing one-sided restriction meant that if Adam died it would certainly die too, it had no choice but to care about Adam.
Judging by his surroundings, he had not left the trial grounds—which meant the threat from Peter Om was still right there before him. Adam painfully propped himself against a tree and took new clothes and a large pile of energy stones from his personal storage space, racing the clock to recover his spiritual power. He had no time to wallow in self-pity; his will to live was fierce—he could not die, and he was not willing to die. Knowledge and energy were both within sight of his eyes; how could he bear to leave such a wonderful world by dying?
"I don't care what method you use—don't let anything near me."
He had not been this weak since the day of his new birth. Right now even an ordinary magical beast would be enough to take his life. The physical injuries did not affect Adam much; the one thing to be thankful for was that before the trial his research on the meditation method had made a major breakthrough—with a little time he would be able to use magic and draw the attention of the overseeing Mages.
"Keli, be careful. I'm sensing abnormal energy fluctuations—who knows what magical beast is nearby." Not far from Adam, a three-person apprentice team was advancing cautiously.
The one in front seemed utterly at ease; his magic could control the surrounding plants, which greatly raised their odds of surviving the rainforest.
"Relax. As long as we don't run into those terrifying swarm-type magical beasts, the three of us are strong enough. No problem."
The other two could not help shivering. They could not forget how the little bugs they had once paid no mind to, once they formed a swarm, had blotted out the sky in numbers beyond counting—those dense, packed columns crawling over apprentices and every other living thing and leaving heaps of white bones in their wake. It was a horror beyond words.
"Damn it, stop talking, I don't want to picture that again," one of them cursed—then suddenly went blank. "Run, run! They're here!"
Keli, the plant controller, turned his head stiffly and saw a sky-filling tide of white ants crawling toward them, eating everything that could be eaten, about to reach their feet.
"No!"
After the scream he fled like a madman in the opposite direction; he only wanted to go faster, faster still—at least faster than his "companions."
The last of them was just as terrified and wanted to run too, but at that moment a pendant hanging at her neck gave off a blue light, and she felt a comfortable coolness in her mind. She could not help squinting her eyes in comfort; when the coolness receded and she opened her eyes again, she found that there was no magical beast swarm at all.
"You two idiots, get back here—we've been hit by an illusion!"
She flicked her fingers and lashed the two of them hard with a stream of water; jolted by it, they came back to their senses. They were in no state to be ashamed of how ridiculous they had looked, only gasping for breath like survivors dragged out of a disaster.
Only after catching their breath did they roar in furious embarrassment: "Damn it, whatever magical beast it was, I'm going to skin it!"