As headmaster, and as the man whose rank and strength within the tower were second only to the Superdimensional Tower Master, Victor had authority enough to keep his laboratory independent of the tower's surveillance system. Nothing that happened inside his lab was transmitted first to the monitoring system; he was notified first.
When the alarm sounded in the laboratory, Headmaster Victor appeared before Adam in an instant. He reached out and lightly touched Adam's naked, floating body, and a projection of the soul sea appeared before him.
The observation instruments in Headmaster Victor's laboratory recorded every change in Adam's soul, one by one. Data like that was of enormous value for studying alienated souls and mutated creatures — which was precisely why he tolerated Adam's continued existence.
Time has different standards in different frames of reference. A powerhouse of Mage Victor's level had already gained a rudimentary grasp of relative time based on himself, so time in the broad sense no longer meant much to him. He had infinite patience to wait for anything that interested him to produce a result.
To Adam as he was now, time and every other objective factor of the outside world had been cast aside. He had even discarded his own reason, and single-mindedly fought the despair monster for sovereignty over his soul.
At first the struggle had been clear-cut: the two monsters kept tearing information from each other to fill themselves out and grow stronger. But later the contest grew murky — the two monsters showed a tendency to fuse.
What now unfolded before Headmaster Victor's eyes was exactly that kind of sinister scene: the two monsters' bodies had merged into one, and only the heads could still be counted as two. They were still tearing at each other, and one head had fallen into absolute disadvantage, on the verge of being completely devoured by the other.
"What will he become? Riding despair up the advancement path of ancient magic to become a Magefoe? Or destroyed?" Mage Victor stood to one side, murmured to himself, then quietly waited for the final result.
The struggle between the two monsters was not one of reason against the destruction of reason; their aims were exactly the same — each wanted to be the one through which this soul expressed despair. In Mage Victor's view, barring a miracle, whoever won, the existence known as Adam would no longer be tolerated by the mainstream.
About five hours later, one head tore the last wisp of information from the other and claimed final victory.
Adam's soul had become wholly a despair monster — and now began to turn monstrous.
Distortion and chaos had never been so clear and vivid. The metamorphosis spread even to his body: before Mage Victor, Adam's body went from withered to plump, a deep gray verging on black began seeping out of it, and his soul strength swelled until it surpassed the threshold of an apprentice and climbed toward Mage level.
Mage Victor did not stop the process. He wanted to see the final result, because whether Adam advanced or mutated or not, a life level of merely rank one was in his eyes an ant he could crush at will.
Thick gray drifted out of Adam's soul and into his brain, into every cell and every pore, and energy of a higher order rapidly raised Adam's essential nature. The energy was so savage that it tore apart the laboratory's restraints on Adam in an instant.
Adam hung suspended in midair. He let out a roar, and his soul spilled out through the crown of his head, ceaselessly radiating an aura of despair into his surroundings.
Headmaster Victor shook his head regretfully. "To actually complete an advancement on the strength of a single spell — such talent really is frightening. A pity, though. This path is not permitted in this world." Advancement through ancient magic would be complete only once the soul left the body entirely, drew in ether, and then fed it back into the body; what was happening now was already irreversible. Just as he was about to utterly destroy Adam's existence, something unforeseen happened.
The overflowing soul was dragged savagely back into the soul sea by a faint energy that was nonetheless tenacious and clear. The total remodeling of his body was forcibly halted; the cells and tissues already transformed by negative energy were severed by this energy and expelled through his pores. Under the extreme incoherence of his internal systems, Adam let out a scream of agony.
This was truly pain no human could endure.
Mage Victor stopped his erasing stroke in astonishment. Even with all his knowledge, he had never expected such a thing to happen. Forcing an advancement to a halt?
"The body's remodeling can be halted. But what about the soul?" Mage Victor was still not optimistic.
The light screens appeared once more, revealing an astonishing scene within Adam's soul.
A single spark of light rose wavering out of the gray, despairing soul — faint, yet incomparably steadfast. Under its glow the gray breath of despair actually kept retreating, as if it had met its natural enemy.
This was the power of Adam's conviction — a positive force he had comprehended through despair after despair, a force that could escape despair and overcome it.
When his mercy, his passion, his loyalty, his justice, his valor — every one of his convictions — had been defeated by despair in turn, he had instead comprehended the way to defeat despair.
That way was to never give up.
Adam concretized the very concept of despair, and the conclusion he reached was this: despair was nothing more than countless efforts that still showed no hope. So long as he paid it no mind, so long as he kept seeking new directions and striving in them, carrying the conviction of never giving up, despair could be defeated.
The light rose into the soul sea, and the gray receded like a tide. The despair information in his soul wobbled uneasily, terrified of that faint yet immeasurably powerful conviction.
The light settled back into the soul. The gray breath melted away bit by bit like frost and dew under sunlight, forced out bit by bit.
Mage Victor actually clapped his hands in admiration. "Astonishing wisdom. Astonishing conviction. But your soul has already fallen a level — how will you clear away the negative energy completely?"
Indeed, though the negative energy had been forced out of his soul, it still lingered in the soul sea, and Adam's essential nature had dropped in rank. Against energy at the full-fledged Mage level he had no ability at all to clear it away, and the situation seemed to have returned to where it began.
Once Adam again took possession of his own soul, he could not help letting out a moan of comfort. Even his battered body stretched along with it, and his ferocious, twisted face broke into a comfortable expression too, which looked utterly bizarre.
There was neither gravity nor panic in the soul's expression. Though the present situation looked like the same predicament as before, in truth it was completely different.
It was no longer a spell cast by Peter Om; it had become advancement energy that Adam himself had abandoned of his own will. Its master had changed from Peter Om to Adam.
"My own things should naturally be controlled by me." Watching the negative energy stir restlessly, Adam calmly transmitted the message.
Energy is conserved. On the Mage Plane that law might have a few flaws, but it could not be entirely contradicted. Since this energy could be absorbed by Adam, it could certainly be absorbed by something else as well.
The other humans and creatures had no connection whatsoever to Adam's soul, and it was impossible that they would or could accept such inferior energy. But Adam still held one card he had originally written off as trash — the devil. Given the traits of the devil race, it would surely accept this garbage energy with great ease.
It did not matter even if it wasn't enough to support the advancement of a pure being of will; Adam had only ever treated the devil as a garbage can anyway.
Adam summoned the devil into the soul sea. For more than a year the devil had been shivering inside a tottering thread, living in dread day after day. Now, seeing Adam at last, he actually burst into wailing tears and lunged at him.
"Master, Master! You're alive, you're all right! That's wonderful — I don't have to die, and I don't have to stay in that cramped little place anymore!"
Adam swept him aside with one kick, bound him through the contract, and said to the devil, "Want to get stronger?"
The devil went blank. Wait — isn't that a line a devil is supposed to say?
He looked at Adam, then at the negative energy beside him, and understood at once. He thrashed violently. "No, my master, you can't do this — I'll die, I can't hold that energy, I'll explode."
Mage Victor's eyes lit up. So that's it. The devil?
Adam was unmoved. "You are a being of will. Your advancement depends on negative energy and souls to begin with. Now here's a chance to evolve you a whole step at once — why would you refuse?"
Adam was lying to him through and through. Though he had lost his inheritance memory, he still knew his advancement could not rely on energy that someone else had already refined. The devil struggled even harder; he could feel Adam ceaselessly adjusting his consciousness frequency through the contract, matching his oscillations to the energy. "Master, I can't, I really can't. Please think of something else, all right? I'm really going to die."
"Enough nonsense!" Adam hauled the devil over roughly and stuffed him into the negative energy.
The energy found an outlet. Sensing a soul aura of the same origin, it immediately surged madly into the devil's will.
The devil let out a short, wretched howl. His chaotic form was smashed apart by the raging energy again and again and instantly reassembled; in that instant he was destroyed and reborn more than a thousand times.
The scream lasted only a second before the devil slid to the brink of having his will shattered. Adam passed his own soul power to him through the contract to help steady his existence.
The energy outside him grew less and less, and the devil's form grew more and more solid, gradually tending toward a change from a pure being of will into something corporeal.
Soon the energy had fully entered the devil's body. Adam threw him out of the soul sea as fast as he could, then voluntarily dissolved the master-servant contract.
"A clever solution," Mage Victor said admiringly.
The point of dissolving the contract was to sever the negative energy's tie to his own soul and transfer every claim of ownership onto the devil. From then on this energy had nothing whatsoever to do with Adam; it was entirely the devil's power.
Adam's soul finally took possession of his body once more. A vast weakness washed over him at once, and he could not help collapsing to the ground.