(A note before we begin: everything in this chapter is the wishful fantasy of a lousy student... if you must flame, please flame gently.)
Adam was silent for a moment, then looked at Mage Irene and said, "In that case, may I conduct electrical element research on my own inside the spiritual power research laboratory?"
"Of course. That's your freedom. But the academy will not provide any support for projects you add on your own — meaning every material and piece of equipment your experiments require must be purchased from the tower at full price, and you will bear the experimental costs yourself."
Adam let out a breath of relief. That much was not unacceptable. In his estimation, the early experiments would need no large instruments and would not rack up much expense; if all went smoothly, he would produce some results before moving on to deeper experiments, and by then the academy surely would not reject his application again.
This was where the benefit of being a laboratory's founder showed itself. If he had not chosen to establish a laboratory back then, the problem facing him today would not have been so easily solved.
After returning to the laboratory, James and Frank accepted the outcome readily enough — the lab's skeleton would still be that of the spiritual power research lab, at most a bit more floor space to set out the new instruments.
Adam paid no attention to what the two of them thought. He hired alchemy puppets to add another room to the laboratory.
It was a silver room built entirely of metal that worked as an excellent conductor — a magical conducting metal called mithril. In ancient times it had been priceless, but nowadays it was an ordinary material; not only did it have superb malleability, it could conduct most forms of energy with low loss. Adam chose it because, back on Earth, silver had the strongest conductivity.
That job carved another slash into his already strained account.
The days that followed were peaceful enough. The spiritual power research laboratory did not change just because its director had brought in electrical research — at least, James and Frank felt no difference.
They had been inside that silver room and found Adam sitting there performing operations they could not understand.
"What is Adam doing? Rubbing glass with cloth, rubbing rubber with fur? What's the point of that?" James was baffled.
Frank could not explain it either. In his impression, research into an element ought to come with a mass of elemental phenomena — which was exactly why elemental laboratories had accidents so often — yet inside Adam's laboratory he could not sense the aura of the electrical element at all.
The two of them had no idea what Adam was doing, but Adam kept up that monotonous, tedious process for two whole months. In those two months, the discarded scraps of cloth and fur alone piled up until they filled the room. Adam rubbed, and rubbed again, day and night without rest, as if possessed, and from time to time he recorded everything he learned completely and in full, never letting a single detail slip.
Over those two months, Adam discovered that his earlier idea had been far too simple. Theory was not something you could understand and then simply use. He could, for instance, reel off a whole pile of basic formulas and theorems about electricity, but this world did not acknowledge them. To gain power through theory, he had to bring ether and mana into it step by step, and make his own soul acknowledge and understand the knowledge he was putting into words.
It was extremely difficult. Friction-generated electricity alone took him nearly two months to verify.
Two months after that, Adam finally wrote his conclusion at the end of a thick stack of experiment reports: under an ether environment, frictional electrification still holds. He made a further deduction: since the world is composed of ether, and ether exists in a canceled-out state unless stirred by spiritual power, then what influences the elements is the secondary energy formed when spiritual power interacts with ether — mana.
The devil had been living very comfortably these days. After absorbing that vast mass of negative energy, its body had gained partial corporeality, and with that came the sensations of a flesh-and-blood creature; so it followed Elliot almost every day to linger in one pleasure venue or another.
Ordinary apprentices could not see through it, and the mages all knew it was a contracted creature — as long as it did not use its bewitching ability inside the academy, no mage bothered with it. If it had not occasionally come back to Adam to show off its presence, Adam might well have forgotten it existed.
"Master, you've already wasted almost five months." It looked contemptuously at the experiment Adam was doing. "What is the point of this? Fine, I admit friction can produce the electrical element. But what use is that? There's no power in it whatsoever."
Adam corrected it earnestly: "It's not producing it. It's transferring charge that was already there."
The devil snorted, and actually pulled a cigarette out of somewhere and started puffing clouds of smoke. "Fine, fine, it was already there. But what is it good for?" It drifted forward, put out a hand and gripped the glass rod and the rubber rod, then said to Adam, "See? Completely useless."
Adam did not argue. He simply took several materials out of his personal storage space, built two simple Leyden jars, stored the two kinds of charge in the jars, and then called James and Frank inside.
"Dispel your psychokinesis defenses, take hold of these two jars, and point them at the devil."
The two of them had no idea why, but as an assistant and a test subject, helping the director of the experiment run his tests was their duty. The devil, though, sensed something was off — but its contemptuous words were still hanging in the air, so it braced itself and stared at the two.
With a faint crack and a flash of spark that vanished in an instant, a bolt of electricity struck the devil. The devil had been prepared, so it did no damage at all, but it left the devil gaping — so it really does work?
James and Frank were just as astonished. In the Mage Plane, ordinary people enjoyed the black box of technology that magic had created, knowing nothing of the principles behind it, while mages had grown used to the conveniences mana brought and had never thought to apply the elements this way. What they had just seen set off stormy waves in their hearts.
"What's going on here?"
Adam's eyes were shining. He first bound the devil in place, then ordered the two of them: "Keep going. Don't stop."
So blast after blast and spark after spark kept appearing inside the silver room. The devil went from reluctance to just letting it happen, once it found that the feeble electricity could not hurt it.
The two men and one devil repeated that monotonous experiment inside the laboratory for two whole days. Throughout those two days Adam stared transfixed at the lightning and the sparks without a word; he felt as though he was about to comprehend something.
On the third day, Adam called a halt to the experiment and, without a word, waved the two of them and the devil out. Already exhausted, the three hurried out of the laboratory at the first word.
"What on earth is Adam trying to do?" James wondered.
"The experiment just now did produce electricity, but..." Frank was too embarrassed to say the word "useless," but in his heart he knew perfectly well that any apprentice who had mastered runes could easily unleash magic thousands of times more powerful.
"Let's just say he's gone crazy. I've got things to do — I'm out." The devil spat viciously a few times and bolted out of the laboratory in a few strides; it had not gone off to enjoy life for several days now.
Adam alone remained inside the silver room. He sat before the recorder and watched the earlier experiment over and over, and felt the spark of insight in his mind grow brighter and brighter. But it was still a little short — just that last little bit...
Three days later, Adam suddenly unleashed on the room the strongest electrical element magic he could use at his current stage. His mana poured out without reservation; bolt after bolt of lightning hammered into the mithril room, flowing through that excellent conductor endlessly without dissipating.
Crackling lightning kept leaking out of the walls on every side, destroying all the experimental instruments, and the sparks thrown off by the collisions bloomed before Adam's eyes again and again.
Like a madman, he dispersed his own defenses and let the thunder strike and pierce through his body. As his injuries grew worse and worse, his eyes only grew brighter.
Outside the door, Frank and James did not know what Adam was doing, but they could sense that the energy fluctuations in the laboratory had gone beyond the range an apprentice could defend against — even Adam, staying in there much longer, would die.
An alarm sounded in the laboratory: "Attention. High-energy reaction detected. Danger!"
Frank gripped the door handle with his mechanical arm, and the next second was flung back by a violent current. The current ran through his mechanical body and into his whole frame; he dropped to his knees in agony and did not recover for a long while.
Watching Frank's miserable state, James gave up any thought of breaking the door down and could only stare at it in worry.
"The energy reaction's too violent. At this rate the lab won't hold!" James said anxiously.
The energy gauge lamp every laboratory was equipped with kept flashing red, and the red light gradually merged into a single sheet. James knew that when the red light went solid, that was the moment the laboratory would explode.
"Damn it!" He cursed, hauled Frank up in one pull, and ignoring how unbearable it was to have current running through his body, carried him out of the laboratory on his back. As for Adam's safety, that was no longer something he could worry about.
Inside the mithril room, Adam was covered in wounds, his whole body marked with gashes torn open by the lightning, but he paid them no mind at all and kept watching it all.
Adam suddenly raised his own electric potential, and at once the lightning surging through the air came rushing madly toward him, about to swallow him whole.
At that critical moment, Adam closed his eyes. Psychokinesis surged out of his body and interacted with ether; mana filled his frame. He stretched out a finger, stirred his psychokinesis, and began to write runes in the air.
Every line of the runes was written with extraordinary difficulty, yet the completed runes as a whole carried a beauty that seemed wrought by nature itself. The vast electrical element drew closer and closer to Adam; Adam wrote faster and faster, until at last a whole string of runes took shape in the air and entered Adam's soul complete.
Adam did not lower his finger. He tapped it lightly forward, and the sky full of lightning dissolved into nothing.
At that same moment, the shrill alarm and the red light also died away.