Adam floated inside a beam of light that shone straight down out of the void. The devil was flung out of his mind, Mage Armor surfaced from his body, and the runes flickering across it began to dissolve under the light, slowly and stubbornly shifting into another mode of expression. The aura of Adam's own existence climbed higher and higher; the people in the laboratory could not help backing away under the pressure, watching him with awe.
"Is he... is he about to advance?" one apprentice assistant muttered to himself. He had never seen an apprentice advance, but with that scene before his eyes, it was the only thing he could think of.
The devil, thrown down and still dizzy, had only just come back to itself. Hearing this, it shot Korvo a contemptuous look. "What a bumpkin. Advancement is nothing to my master — it's not as if this is the first time."
Korvo whipped around to face the devil. "Not the first time?"
The question left the devil a little uneasy. Not the first time was true enough — only last time the circumstances had been somewhat different. But it was not about to look uneasy now. With a perfectly straight face it boasted to Korvo, "Of course! My master is a genius. A little thing like advancement is far too easy for him. And he has Garfield the Great's help besides..."
Another burst of light cut the devil's words short. Feeling themselves being repelled by the ether, they had no choice but to withdraw from the laboratory, and at the same moment the sensing device installed specially for Adam began to sound its alarm.
At the top of the tower, Mage Victor snapped out of his meditation and murmured, "Advancing? So soon?" His true body made a light slash in the air before him, space split open, and his arcane avatar stepped into the gap.
Mage Victor held the highest authority below the Tower Master. In theory he could enter any place belonging to the tower at will, but mages generally did not do that — they chose to pay a proper visit instead. Now that matters were urgent, he could not be bothered with such niceties.
The devil was still loudly recounting its own magnificent contributions along Adam's road to growth when it looked up and saw a man standing abruptly in front of it. It hastily bowed its head low and said respectfully, "Great Mage Victor."
At the devil's words everyone froze, then hurried to bow, watching Mage Victor with awe and wondering why Mage Victor had come here.
Mage Victor had no time to waste on them. He could already feel the advancement energy reach its critical point; if he did not act to suppress it now, the process would become irreversible.
He laid his hand on the laboratory door. The special material able to hold back the spread of an ether-active environment rippled and vanished — and the advancement energy vanished with it.
Adam dropped to the floor and looked at Mage Victor calmly. "Good day, sir."
Mage Victor clicked his tongue in wonder. "You gave up your advancement?"
Adam nodded.
"You should know that contract isn't compulsory. If you had really advanced, you wouldn't have suffered any punishment for it. And you gave it up even so?"
The more Mage Victor looked at Adam, the more pleased he felt. People who held to the spirit of a contract like this were rare these days.
"Starting next month, your research budget is doubled. You'll still have free rein over it."
Adam felt that Mage Victor had misunderstood something. The sole reason he had given up advancement was that the knowledge he had verified this time was not the knowledge he wanted.
He had discovered that the Mage World was truly starved of knowledge about electricity and everything that followed from it. A tiny breakthrough in research was enough to earn a vast bounty from the ether.
Over the past few months Adam had verified only a handful of laws — Coulomb's law, Ampère's law, Joule's law, Oersted's experiment, and so on. The greatest breakthrough was proving that a magnetic field exists around an electric current: current is produced by the directed motion of charges, so the magnetic field around a current-carrying wire is in essence produced by moving charges.
The knowledge he truly wanted to verify, the knowledge he meant to advance on, was not this. But Adam could not continue his experiments now. This time he had forcibly dispersed the advancement energy through sheer willpower; a second time and the process would be truly irreversible, and he would lose his one chance to become a war Mage and step onto a higher stage.
Still, more funding was a good thing. Adam was not so foolish as to shove ether crystals back at someone who was holding them out to him.
Something had occurred to Adam, and with Mage Victor right there he asked directly, "Mage Victor, is there any energy in the Mage World that mortals can use, and that does them no harm?"
Mage Victor did not know why Adam would ask such a question. He thought it over, then said, "Safe and harmless? In an absolute sense, no. Most mortals on the Mage Continent burn energy stones for power, but once an energy stone is stimulated by spiritual power it displays properties close to mana as well, so it still harms their bodies. As for the places that serve mages, the precision instruments there are driven entirely by rune groups and mana, and mortals who work in them generally don't live long."
Mage Victor glanced around Adam's laboratory, and understanding dawned. "I see what you're getting at. Mages have tried this before, you know. But compared with mana, the elements are terribly inefficient, and producing elements still depends on mana in the end, so it isn't of much use."
Such was the magitech of the Mage Plane: from the very beginning, it had been separated from mortals.
In ancient times, the relationship between the ancient Mages and mortals had been purely that of slave owner to slave. They had neither the wisdom nor the inclination to research technology for slaves; they simply squeezed productivity out of them. And by modern times, the leap the mainstream mages made after their awakening had come almost in an instant, so no technology suited to ordinary people had been developed either.
Mortals' bodies were simply too frail. To walk straight into an ether environment and let mana enter the body would cause total collapse — which was why Mage civilization had skipped over mortals and been built directly on transcendent beings.
In another world, a system raised in midair like this would sooner or later face collapse. But on the strength of mages powerful enough to disregard society altogether, the Mage Plane was still developing swiftly and soundly. The world grew ever larger, mortals were endless, and many mages were born among them; mortals who died working for mages were immediately replaced by others. That made the bond between mortals and transcendent beings close — while in the other direction it was fragile.
And the most remarkable thing was that even so, no flaw could be seen.
Mortals were content with this state of affairs, enjoying the conveniences magitech brought them and paying no mind to a few deaths, while mages did not mind publishing whatever results of their research mortals could operate in exchange for profit, incidentally changing mortal lives...