It was a completely different experience from every time Adam had obtained spell rune groups from the library or through other channels and constructed them for storage inside his threads. This new rune group was Adam's own independent creation, and it went straight into his soul instead of stopping inside a thread.
Adam's soul reaped enormous benefit from it. A gentle high-grade energy that Adam could neither explain nor put into words appeared out of thin air inside his soul — an energy unlike inert ether and unlike the far too active mana, a special energy that sat between the two.
The energy began to seep into and saturate Adam's damaged soul, and the hidden injuries left by the Soul Rend spell were healing at extraordinary speed.
"Is this the world's feedback?"
Adam floated up without meaning to, and at that moment body and mind alike felt an immense pleasure. It was nothing like the hysterical, drug-like pleasure of advancing by taking in negative energy; the pleasure of understanding true knowledge was wholesome and bright.
A short while later, Adam's hidden injuries had healed completely. He even had a premonition that as long as he held on to this feeling and kept researching in this direction, he would soon be able to advance.
But Adam suppressed that desire. He understood better than anyone that all he had done just now was verify the existence of electric current.
Through the experiment, Adam discovered that mana is an attribute-less, all-purpose medium, one that a mage or apprentice can control to manifest any element. In the experiment just now, the mithril room had been a circuit, the ether environment had formed an electric field, and then Adam had roused his magic to generate electrical energy and strengthen that field; the air and the mana were instantly ionized and turned directly into conductors, and current was produced. In the process the charges were consumed or neutralized, giving off light and heat and revealing tremendous power.
This was the principle behind electrical magic at the current apprentice level — in essence, nothing more than an application of static electricity.
Given the depth and breadth of knowledge he now possessed, Adam was naturally not about to settle for advancing to Mage on a foundation of static electricity. He filed this result away as a small gain on the road to his ultimate goal — recorded in his soul, then put out of his mind — and the moment he came back to himself he wanted to start a further experiment.
But for the time being, that was plainly out of the question.
Not only were his physical injuries severe, but after the room had been plowed through by that furious current, not one intact thing was left in it.
Then violent knocking sounded at Adam's ear. "Adam, how are you? Open the door, hurry!"
Adam descended from the air, and the instant his feet touched the ground, pain and weakness came rushing in. He scanned his whole body and found fresh wounds added to a frame that had still not recovered from having so much of its tissue destroyed; this is going to cost me even more energy stones.
James let out a breath of relief at the sight of Adam appearing in the open doorway. As for Adam's injuries, he was not in the least surprised — with an energy runaway of that degree, it would have been stranger if the man were unhurt.
"You... never mind, I don't understand whatever experiment you're running anyway, but that was far too dangerous. The lab's grade isn't enough to support practical verification on that scale, and it nearly blew up just now." James sighed, hauled the still-unrecovered Frank forward, and said, "Look at him."
Adam reached out and laid a hand on Frank, drawing the foreign current out of his body, and Frank returned to normal in an instant. Once he was up, he hurried away from Adam's side and stared at him with lingering fear. "What in the world happened? That numb feeling just now was unbearable. I couldn't control my own body at all — even my mechanical body stopped working."
At a flicker of Adam's thought, the crackle of current sounded in the laboratory again. Frank and James jolted as if startled and threw up psychokinetic barriers, watching Adam warily.
"This is the result of my recent research. I call it static electricity."
Adam did not explain further. The knowledge-sharing clause in the contracts they had signed with him covered only the meditation method; he was under no obligation to tell them his latest findings.
Nor did the two of them ask again. From what they had just felt, they knew Adam must have arrived at something extraordinary, which also meant secrecy and enormous value; to ask at all would be ill-intentioned.
Seven days later, the devil, out carousing in fine style, suddenly felt a summons from the soul. The hand holding his wine cup paused, and then he chose to ignore the summons and go on drinking. But before he could taste the wine through his simulated taste organs, a tearing pain came over him. He let out a shout, sprayed the whole mouthful of wine out, and gave the two female apprentices gathered around him a fright.
"Garfield, what's wrong?" one of the female apprentices asked.
She was genuinely worried. After several days of contact, she had taken quite a liking to this unfamiliar apprentice called Garfield — among apprentices, after all, there were not many so humorous, so witty, so charming.
Garfield was the name the devil had given himself. With the bewitching ability that came from his innate gift, the devil was easily welcomed by female apprentices; well aware that he could not actually do anything, he nonetheless loved the feeling.
The pain came more and more often. The devil produced a strained smile and said, "My ladies, my apologies — it seems I can't stay with you today. Something has come up and I must go. Until next time."
All the way back, the devil stoked boundless rage. He held that he had saved Adam's life back then — otherwise Adam would long since have been killed by the Archmage — and he felt that on the strength of that merit he deserved a higher standing; at the very least he should not be summoned and dismissed at will like some lowly slave.
The devil had clearance to enter the laboratory directly. He shoved the door open and bellowed at Adam, who sat quietly with his head bowed in the lab: "Even if we signed a master-servant contract, I think you should at least show a little respect to the man who saved your life—"
Adam raised his head, lightning flashing in his eyes. The devil felt a pressure unlike anything he had known, and swallowed every word that was to follow in an instant, looking as absurd as a rooster being choked by the neck.
"Hm?"
The devil readjusted his attitude at lightning speed and put on a fawning expression. "Oh, nothing at all. I revere my great master. Your loyal servant is ready to obey your orders at any time."
Because Adam had unilaterally severed the soul link, the devil could not sense his condition, and only on meeting him did he discover that Adam had fully recovered and grown stronger. In his heart he screamed madly, My freedom! My fair contract — the symbiotic contract!
It suddenly occurred to him that Adam could know what he was thinking, and he broke out in 'cold sweat' on the spot, his tone turning even more servile. "Master? Master?"
"How far have you gotten with the negative energy?"
The devil stalled. He had treated that energy as nothing but a materialized medium and spent every day in idle pleasure; he had never trained it any deeper.
"Well, this, that..."
Adam struck him a heavy blow, then rose and said to the devil, who had collapsed on the ground and could no longer even hold his form: "I'll give you three days. If you still can't grasp a way to use negative energy inside of three days, I don't think you want to learn the consequences."
After Adam turned the experiment's results into runes and fused them into his soul, he finally understood what James had meant when he said that Mage Armor, once fused with knowledge that belonged to you, would carry a strong personal inclination.
From that day on, even without Adam deliberately guiding it, the Mage Armor built by the Psychokinesis Meditation Method kept changing, and little by little it took on an electrical nature.
The change was gradual and imperceptible: the rune group formed from the static electricity knowledge Adam had comprehended kept attempting to communicate and interact with the psychokinesis rune group, and the psychokinesis, originally simple in nature, altered its attributes.
When Adam had discovered this seven days earlier, he was captivated at once and threw himself body and soul into remodeling his psychokinesis. Today there was finally a preliminary result, and he immediately thought of the negative-energy magic that had once injured him — which was how he came to remember the devil he had all but forgotten.
Adam was thoroughly displeased that the devil had wasted his time. If after three days the devil still failed to satisfy him, he would not mind teaching him a painfully memorable lesson.
Back in the mithril room, Adam took a magic power test target out of his personal storage space and began to test his spells.
At this point, to use apprentice-level electrical magic he no longer needed to construct a rune group deliberately; he had only to stir the ether into mana and guide it with electrically charged psychokinesis, and the spell would fire at once.
Bolts of lightning appeared out of thin air, striking the target from every direction, and the target displayed readings that ranged from as low as one up to forty at Adam's full power.
From what he had learned, this low-grade target was built for apprentice use, with a testing limit of fifty; any reading above that and the target would break.
Adam gave these bolts no name; there was no point. He was confident that he would soon surpass the mere application of static electricity and reach a deeper level, and by then static electricity and current alike would be nothing more than surface phenomena.
Having tested his electrical magic, Adam sat down cross-legged on the floor, perfectly at ease.
Since I've already grown thoroughly proficient in the use of static electricity, can I now go on to test true composite magic?
He acted the moment the thought came: Adam at once constructed the rune group for the basic Fireball, a burning orange sphere appeared in the air, and then he began trying to attach current to it.
Moments later, a fireball wreathed in flickering electric light appeared. It looked extremely dangerous. Adam fired it at the test target, and the reading was seventeen.
Adam frowned. The result could be called a success, but also a failure: he had merely attached current to a fireball, which was no different from casting two spells at once, still a long way from the true composite magic he had in mind.
Next he tried attaching electricity to other low-level spells, and the results were much the same — the power rose to some degree, but there was no qualitative leap.