"Come and go as you please—nothing in this world is that cheap." Muttering to himself, the Mage turned into a streak of crimson neon and gave chase in one direction. After Peter Om's grievous wounding, the nauseating stench his soul gave off could no longer be hidden, and the Mage could track his position with ease.
A thousand kilometers away, space spat Peter Om out. His teleportation scroll had broken through the runic barrier's blockade successfully, but his situation was not good.
What space had torn apart was not only his body, but his soul as well.
He had prepared himself to lose this body and a portion of his soul, but when the moment actually came he still had never imagined the pain would be this bad—especially the pain in his soul. He would have gladly abandoned this portion of his soul right then and there, but when he thought of the long convalescence that would follow and the vast resources recovery would demand, he could only give up the idea.
Yet the greatest crisis facing him was not the pain. The coordinates recorded on the scroll he had just used were that coastline where he had made landfall; if no one had interrupted him, he could have slipped off the Mage Continent without anyone the wiser. Now the teleportation distance had been drastically cut short, and he had no choice but to face a full-fledged Mage's pursuit.
An ordinary person probably could not imagine how a man with only half a body ought to go on living, but a Mage is a Mage—they always have their own methods.
Peter Om took a corpse out of his personal storage space, reached out a finger and precisely sliced off half of it, then slapped it onto himself with a smack. As he chanted an uncanny incantation, that portion of the body actually came to life and grew joined to the half he still had.
He had barely finished the work when he saw that smear of red glow on the horizon, and the undisguised surge of energy that came with it.
"Damn it, damn it, damn it!" Cursing, Peter Om took flight and raced for the coastline.
A full-fledged Mage of Moldo Tower disdained to conceal his energy fluctuations at all. The elemental body unique to elemental Mages gave him a power and speed far beyond flesh and blood, and the thousand-kilometer distance was gone in an instant. Within his fiery red eyes, the Magefoe's gray, hideous soul was clearly visible.
"Why run? Once a hunter has his mark, how could the prey ever escape the chase—especially when the prey is as weak as you?" The Mage murmured softly to himself, yet his voice carried clearly to Peter Om's ears.
The despair facing Peter Om now was probably much like Adam's a moment ago—except Adam had been saved, and there was absolutely no one who would come to his rescue at a time like this.
A pillar of liquid fire rose before Peter Om. He knew he could no longer escape the Mage's pursuit, so he had no choice but to halt in midair, his half-naked, mismatched body glaring viciously at the fire-elemental Mage.
"Not running anymore? That's more like it. You rats always find some way to scrape by anyway, so why not just hand this portion of your soul over to me." The tower's full-fledged Mage was much like Blake when he had revealed his power: half his body elementally transformed, stirring vast mana, every movement, every word, every gesture conjuring phenomena whose power far exceeded any apprentice's magic.
"Blasphemers of magic, one day you will bring destruction upon yourselves!" Peter Om's hoarse voice was full of hatred and curses. He pointed a finger at the Mage, and the Soul Rend spell appeared once more.
The full-fledged Mage watched the gray pillar of light with amusement, not the slightest intention of dodging, and let the spell strike his body.
The magic Adam had been utterly unable to withstand seemed like a joke to a full-fledged Mage. The pillar of light burst apart in front of him and was at once annihilated by his activated element; the full-fledged Mage was unharmed.
"The same cheap trick, unchanged for tens of thousands of years. Look at this—this is what comes of rejecting knowledge. You style yourselves masters of the soul, yet you don't even know what a soul is. Honestly, if not for having to respect the will of that great being, if not for the little use you still have"—the full-fledged Mage waved a hand casually at Peter Om as he spoke, and torrents of flame easily pierced through his energy defenses—"any few Transdimensional Mages could wipe you out completely."
Peter Om simply gave up dodging, letting the flames follow him like a shadow and burn the body he had just pieced together into ash.
This was a rank-two full-fledged Mage, absolutely not someone Peter Om could match. Magefoes were weaker than mainstream Mages, at a disadvantage even at the same rank, let alone against a higher-ranked tower Mage.
He viciously tore away the carbonized tissue of his body and said to the Mage, "Great being? Pah! He's a traitor—a traitor to the ancient nobles and the noble Mages! He, and all of you, will be abandoned by the ether sooner or later; sooner or later you will all meet your doom..."
The flames grew thinner and thinner, the temperature higher and higher, but that heat did not completely destroy Peter Om. Instead it formed a seal, utterly isolating his maimed body and soul from the outside world.
"A pack of ungrateful fools, beyond saving." He beckoned with his hand, and that ball of sealing fire shrank and shrank until it rested in his grasp. Having said this, the Mage turned and flew back toward the trial grounds.
The other full-fledged Mage felt some regret.
Since he had not captured or killed the Magefoe with his own hands, the merit and reward for this affair would be sharply reduced; and because the Magefoe had slaughtered so many tower apprentices in the trial grounds, all within his own area of responsibility, the tower would call him to account when he returned.
At best his gains and losses would balance out. Looking at the unconscious Adam, he said, "Boy, may the ether keep you safe and sound. And then—hmm—you'll probably be so grateful to me for saving your life that you'll pay me a handsome reward, won't you?"
The fire-elemental Mage bounced the fireball in his hand and could not help laughing. "He's just an apprentice—what fine things did you expect him to have? And this unlucky kid got hit by Soul Rend; whether he can even keep his soul is still up in the air."
"No, look at this." The Mage lightly flicked a finger against Adam's forehead. Adam's whole body shuddered from head to toe, and then the Mage's finger withdrew from his brow, drawing out a faint strand of psychokinesis—and a shivering devil.
The fire-elemental Mage blinked, slapped his own forehead, and said, "Still alive? Huh, what's this...? Oh, I know this one. Psychokinesis, Moldo Tower's finest research achievement in the last few decades. So that means he's that..." The Mage could not recall Adam's name and glossed over it. "...that apprentice?"
The Mage nodded. "That's right, that's him. This little fellow is quite wealthy..."
The fire-elemental Mage shrugged. "Then I wish you luck. But within Moldo Tower—even within the whole Fifth Elemental Tower's domain—there aren't many Mages who specialize in the power of the soul. That kid's problem won't be easy to solve."
"There's always hope, isn't there?"
The last thing Adam saw while still conscious: an instant before the Soul Rend spell struck him fully, a torrent glinting with metallic luster appeared in front of him and blocked part of the spell's force—but before he could breathe easy, the rest of the magic slammed him into darkness.
After being struck by Soul Rend, all of Adam's thought threads crashed into a down state. Control of his body reverted from complete manipulation to the inefficient state in which cells and organs ran themselves—but strangely, he could feel his own soul.
What exactly was a soul?
On Earth no one knew; no one could even prove whether it truly existed. But in this world the soul existed beyond doubt, and it was separate from thought.
Adam's thoughts had crashed, but his soul was still at work.
This was the first time since awakening that Adam had seen his own soul, and the pure white space it inhabited—a space he had named the "soul sea."
In this space Adam had once fought ten billion viruses and won. Now he had a second battle to fight.
Gray negative energy formed from souls of despair appeared within the soul sea, rushing to invade Adam's soul at breakneck speed.
Faced with this, Adam actually relaxed. It was just another virus invasion; their numbers were far smaller than the ones that had come across with him, and though their quality was superior, Adam was no longer in the frail state he had been back then, so solving the problem should be even easier.
That was the theory. In practice, it was not as easy as he had imagined. Adam had forgotten one variable: the power of magic.
If what had come across with him back then had been an ordinary DOS attack, one that only seized bandwidth and burned computing power, then the Soul Rend spell was a far more advanced code virus, written by that great programmer, magic, and constantly exhibiting its 'mutating' properties.
So wiping out the viruses became a grueling process.
Adam could not destroy the viruses with the same mechanical psychic attacks he had used before. He first had to come into contact with them to understand how they operated and their 'core code,' then find their weak points and whittle away their power step by step; only then was there any chance of destroying them.
This negative energy, born from the despair of human souls, could not be measured by any ordinary logic at all. It was filled with a drive toward destruction—not only destroying Adam, but constantly destroying itself as well. The worst part was that, with Adam's current approach, neither destroying the viruses nor the viruses' self-destruction would weaken their power; on the contrary, it only made them stronger and more intractable.
It was like a knot that could not be untied, and for the moment Adam was helpless against it. At least he was in no danger of his soul being annihilated, so he did not despair—in fact, he found it rather interesting.
The Magefoes—or rather, the ancient mages—had their own unique system. It had been phased out, but archaeology was a form of research too. Moldo Tower held no material on the subject, and now a ready-made laboratory and a ready-made specimen had been laid before Adam. He was very interested in doing some research.
Except that this research skipped the stage of exploring theory and went straight into empirical testing—and the test subject was himself.