The boy's voice had not been quiet, and it drew the attention of the previous cohort of apprentices. One of them sneered with no attempt to hide it: "Kid, put away your arrogance. You're in no position to look down on Adam. Even if his talent is gone now"—here he paused, recalling the startling strength with which Adam had once stood above every one of them—"he is still not someone a waste like you gets to insult."
The man had not spoken up for Adam because he was close to him; he simply could not stand watching the newcomers look down on the old hands.
The boy whipped around, spiritual power spilling out of his body beyond his control as he tried to find whoever had spoken.
But Korvo pressed a hand on his shoulder first and said gravely, "Li, this may be rude of me, but you should learn not to pass judgment on things you don't understand."
The boy named Li flushed red, staring at Korvo in disbelief. "Brother Korvo, even you...?"
Korvo shook his head to cut him off, then reached out to accept the task and walked straight out of the mission hall.
By every mage's common sense, an unstable, hard-to-control element like the electrical element had no research value: its power stood out at the lower stages, but with no advancement path to follow, it would soon be overtaken once one reached formal rank. Yet he had a strong premonition that a man capable of creating the Psychokinesis Meditation Method could not be that stupid. So he decided to go to the recruitment.
Not for any other reason—the mere chance to get close to its creator was worth his time, and besides, it was only a job, not selling himself into servitude.
After passing layer upon layer of identity verification, he arrived on the third floor of the Elemental Experiment Building and lightly knocked on the laboratory door.
Frank opened it. Once Korvo explained his purpose, Frank took him straight to Adam's room.
"We meet again, Mr. Adam," Korvo said with a smile.
In a flash Adam remembered when he had seen this man before, but he did not know Korvo's name.
"Korvo Butler. I've come to apply as a laboratory assistant."
Adam gave him a look. He had seen him back then in front of the apprentice bar, which meant Korvo had already found his own research direction. So why would someone like that choose to come here and apply as an assistant?
But Adam did not ask. Instead, after verifying that Korvo had mastered psychokinesis, he simply produced a contract and handed it over. Whatever his purpose, under a contract with no loopholes in it, it made no difference.
Korvo did not explain himself either. He picked up the contract and read it carefully: the confidentiality clauses and the rest were no different from other contracts, and once he confirmed that the contract's term was one year, he signed his name.
Three days later, thanks to the generous pay, thirteen people had joined the laboratory as Adam's assistants. Together with James and Frank, the fifteen of them could now spare Adam a great deal of tedious, dry empirical work. Now, at last, he could run experiments to verify whether the various electrical formulas and theorems still held in an ether environment.
Apart from James and Frank, the thirteen newcomers had been full of doubt about Adam's experiments at first, because they were utterly unlike any elemental laboratory in their memory: no elemental aura filling the space, no runes, no magic, no explosions—only one crude-looking piece of equipment after another, the sort even an ordinary mortal could easily operate.
In daily life Adam counted as a fairly easygoing man, but inside the laboratory he became an out-and-out tyrant. They began to voice their doubts to him, but Adam ignored them all, only requiring that they carry out the empirical tests day after day, over and over, and record every tiny change in the data.
They had no idea what help the faint deflection shown on the contraption Adam had named a torsion balance could possibly be to magic.
Nor what the point was of building a container that could store electricity, using mithril to make a channel for the electrical element to flow through, and then setting a compass of the kind used on mortal ships nearby to watch its needle swing as the electrical element passed.
There were many more such baffling experiments. Compared with their doubts, Adam was fascinated by every shift in the data, and five months later he did something they found even harder to understand.
The Mage Continent was a high-magic environment, and that came from the concerted efforts of countless mages, who had made the extremely inert ether slightly more active. But to Adam that degree of activity was not enough—not enough to let him carry the data from his experiments into an ether environment and verify it. So he spent an enormous sum of energy stones to purchase an ether environment generator, and then, under everyone's dumbstruck gazes, tossed several complete ether crystals into it without the slightest hesitation.
"Adam, what are you...?" Korvo asked, stammering.
To these apprentices, ether crystals were simply too far beyond their reach. Korvo was relatively knowledgeable; among the others, quite a few were laying eyes for the first time on the highest-value currency circulating in the Mage Plane, and they could not even imagine anyone being willing to squander it like that.
Adam set the timer on the ether environment generator, then told them, "Starting now, raise a psychokinetic barrier at full load. In three minutes this laboratory will enter an ether-active state. If you feel you can't hold on, you may withdraw and rest on your own. After that, you are to record every change in every value. Remember—every single one!"
Hearing the warning in Adam's tone, no one dared slack off; they hurried to raise their defenses as required. A faint excitement stirred in their hearts—perhaps they would soon learn what Adam's string of experiments over the past months had actually been for.
The energy annihilation field that every elemental laboratory was fitted with began to work, and three minutes later the instrument started spraying activated ether outward. Though it could not be seen with the naked eye, everyone, Adam included, felt their breathing grow difficult, their spiritual power begin to riot beyond control, and mana pour like a landslide into the psychokinetic barriers.
At Adam's command they methodically began the experiments they had been running all along. Now and then an apprentice assistant could not withstand the ether-active environment and withdrew; after snatching what rest they could, they threw themselves back into the work.
For two full days, even as his body was corroded by mana, Adam never once left the laboratory. He only stared, wholly absorbed, at every scrap of data collected, calculating and summing it up at high speed in his mind.
At last, just before his body was on the verge of collapse, he succeeded in verifying that all the data held equally in an ether environment. He shut the instrument off in one motion, and just as everyone breathed a sigh of relief, an astonishing change came over Adam...