To find a way to counteract this magic, the first step was to understand its underlying principle.
This was a process from zero to one, and also the greatest obstacle to wiping out the virus; Adam needed a point of entry.
Then Mage Blake's words surfaced in his mind: "The Magefoe must torture humans and souls countless times over in order to observe despair, and thereby complete the soul's ascension..."
"What exactly is despair?" Adam murmured quietly to himself. He thought of the feeling he'd had while being hunted, with no road to the sky above and no door into the earth below; a vague understanding stirred in him, but it was not enough. That despair had not been deep enough, and it had merely been an emotion his mind produced under those circumstances—an emotion that even then had been constantly suppressed and cut to pieces by logical thought to keep him calm. Its intensity had never been enough for Adam to engrave it in his memory.
Adam looked at the gray tide on every side, shielded his body with psychokinesis, and walked into it.
Once inside, in close contact with the gray, Adam found that this magic was not a manifestation of energy at all, but another sort of concept that he did not yet know how to define. Every point within the gray was a soul; they had no sentience and no fixed form, twisting and shifting at every moment.
The negative emotion they ceaselessly emitted formed the gray's fundamental tone, and every point was forever trying to expand itself and devour the rest.
Adam was like a drop of water falling into hot oil, instantly setting the whole pot seething. Countless souls surged madly toward him; a boundless aura of despair wrapped him completely and tore viciously at his psychokinetic barrier, and twisted face after twisted face showed him the agony its owner had suffered in life.
Adam was reminded of abyssal creatures, those entropy-reducing, disordered beings. Ancient magic had simulated an entropy-reducing system—no wonder this magic could never advance, no wonder it had been eliminated by the mainstream and abandoned by ether. This was a system of no benefit whatsoever to the world, to the plane.
Adam found that this was of little use. He could see the suffering of the 'points,' but he did not know where that suffering came from, or what kind of despair it would turn into.
"Observe despair, or experience despair?"
Adam gently extended a thread of perception and tried to touch those points. The despairing souls gnawed at him madly, utterly without reason.
His soul felt pain, but Adam paid it no mind. In the next second he did something astonishing: he dispersed the psychokinetic barrier, keeping only his own reason intact, and let the gray gnaw at his soul.
Adam's soul received countless pieces of information. They could not form complete memories—only the deepest and most despairing fragments from before those souls died.
A home destroyed before their eyes.
Parents and children slaughtered while they stood by, powerless.
A beloved humiliated, then dead by her own hand.
A lifetime's effort turned into a ridiculous joke.
Believing hope was right before them, only to cross over and find that nothing had changed at all.
The cruelest torture, pain beyond what life can bear.
Despair after despair washed through Adam's soul; countless fragments ran riot inside him, gnawing, devouring, and little by little a monster born of despair took shape within his soul.
Adam felt his own consciousness begin to twist toward self-destruction. The monster was still weak; he could have worn it away with psychokinesis, but he chose to stand by and watch coldly, letting it devour despair, letting it grow as a parasite inside his soul.
The monster had no form, but Adam still felt its hideous maw open in a soundless roar. Then the whole gray tide began to converge on him.
Adam's soul was split in two: one half the last shred of reason, shielded by psychokinesis, the other half the twisted body of the parasitic monster.
It launched its first assault on Adam.
Adam found himself in a ruined city, dressed in rags that could not cover his body, surrounded by broken walls, thick with smoke, corpses strewn everywhere. In the shadows many people were hunched over the bodies; those sprawled carelessly on the ground wore numb faces, as though they no longer cared at all whether they themselves lived or died.
Adam walked slowly along the street, his feet constantly crushing severed limbs whose owners he could not know. Suddenly he sensed a deep malice: a gaze hidden behind a wall gave off a cruel, dim light. He turned his steps toward that wall.
Behind the wall someone flinched, seemingly not expecting that Adam had spotted him. But hunger fed the madness inside him; he burst out from cover, raised an arm thin as a stick of firewood, and lunged at Adam. His gaping mouth dripped no saliva, only blood from his cracked skin.
Adam stood where he was without moving and let the man's fist land on him, but the man was so feeble that Adam's body flung him away on its own reflexive defense.
"What are you trying to do?" Adam asked softly, then kept watching behind the wall.
The man crawled across the ground toward Adam, mouthing words that were not sentences: "Hungry, hungry, eat, eat..." He bit into Adam's foot; his teeth were shattered and sent flying, blood spattered, and he greedily drank his own blood, a perverse satisfaction on his withered face.
Adam did not attack him, but the man could no longer stand. Adam silently stepped back a few paces.
The others hiding behind the wall came stumbling out and flung themselves madly on the fresh corpse, biting with their teeth, tearing with their hands, using every method available to them, and divided that still-living body among themselves until nothing was left.
Adam suddenly felt somewhat weak, and a thread of hunger began to take shape inside him.
He paid it no mind and kept walking through the city.
He saw starving parents trade their own children with others, then eat the other people's children they had traded for. He saw people gather severed limbs from the ground and stuff them haphazardly into their mouths. He saw men still strong enough to act pick up dry bones from the ground and kindle a fire, join forces to kill the old people and children and cook them; they watched one another warily, snatched food from the pot, wolfed it down greedily, and then vented themselves without restraint on the women behind them.
He saw soldiers in armor drive the starving people back with blades and spears, cursing loudly without pause; he saw women who were somewhat cleaner seized and carried off, while in the mansion at the very center of the city the lights blazed and song and dance carried on as though all were well.
As time passed Adam grew weaker and hungrier, until at last he came to an empty piece of cover and sat down in silence.
Then night fell, and from every direction outside the city came the shrill howls of magical beasts; as a towering blaze of light burst in the sky, they launched a mad assault on the city.
The soldiers appeared again and drove everyone out beyond the walls, forming them into a wall of human bodies, and let the beasts tear them apart without lifting a finger.
Then the Lord Mage appeared. He rode up onto the city wall in a palanquin borne by eight men, and all those not yet dead looked at him full of hope, expecting the Lord Mage to act and save them.
The Lord Mage acted: a blood-red orb of light took shape before his staff. But in the next second they discovered that the Mage's magic was falling on their own bodies; their flesh burst apart and, driven by the magic, hurtled at the magical beasts.
Hidden in the dark, Adam saw the whole thing.
For an entire night, the Mage used the common people's blood and flesh to beat back the beasts' assault.
At first light the next day the beasts withdrew; the soldiers appeared once more and drove the common folk back into the town.
Adam had grown weaker still.
The trial would not stop just because a few apprentices had died. The one-month limit had been set by Headmaster Victor; in all of Moldo Tower no one but the Tower Master could defy it. The two Mages carried Adam back into the mobile house, tossed him carelessly to one side, and went on with their leisurely lives.
Suddenly the two of them fixed their eyes on Adam at the same time. The fire elemental Mage said, "Kino, looks like the little guy isn't going to make it."
Gray breath began to seep out from Adam's body. To the Mages, this was the result of a soul being devoured and then assimilated; the fire elemental Mage reached out regretfully, intending to annihilate Adam completely.
The Mage named Kino did not stop him. Only a living Adam could bring him profit; a dead Adam was worth nothing.
Just as the flames were about to burn Adam's body away, something changed: a transparent, substantial psychokinesis activated of its own accord, bit by bit contending with the gray breath for space.
Mage Kino waved forth a torrent of metal to block the flames and said, "Wait, Ryan. He's still fighting back."
Mage Ryan dispersed the flames and said, "It's only a rat's magic, sure, but a big rat was the one using it. Do you really believe an apprentice can hold out against it?"
Another force of psychokinesis, stronger and more concentrated, rose from Kino himself. It lifted Adam gently and set him down at a distance. The aura of negative energy made the Mage deeply uncomfortable; then he said to Mage Ryan, "You've never looked at his Psychokinesis Meditation Method, have you?"
Of course Mage Ryan had not. Given the gap in accumulated knowledge and breadth of vision, research produced at the apprentice stage could at most serve a full-fledged Mage as reference; its practical value was very low. For that reason, Mage Ryan had never bothered to learn anything about psychokinesis.
"Oh?"
"This power is quite good. Its significance isn't in using it directly, but in control." He took out a piece of metal and wrapped it in psychokinesis; the metal instantly broke down into smaller pieces, then smaller and smaller, until it was completely disintegrated. "See? Like that. This ability will be of great use to my research."
Mage Ryan watched Kino with interest. In a laboratory this would be nothing remarkable—experimental apparatus could accomplish it easily—but Kino had done it with pure spiritual power.
"Spiritual power is a force that comes from the soul. An ordinary apprentice's spiritual power is poor in quality and cannot withstand the curse of despair, but perhaps this little guy can. And you know he's an apprentice of the academy, while we are contract Mages of the tower. If he can survive and keep developing his meditation method, it will benefit every tower Mage."
Mage Ryan shrugged noncommittally and said, "Then let's wish him luck."