Chapter 302 — Meeting Again
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
Mary watched her mentor nervously; as for what that sudden outburst of his had actually meant, she honestly did not want to know.
She feared her mentor—feared him to the point of something close to terror. If she could have had her way, she would sooner never have shown any talent for magic at all, nor climbed ten years ago, out of sheer curiosity, into this masterless tower that had stood abandoned for decades, and there met the mentor who had only just moved in. By now she was already a formal mage of the second rank, and according to her mentor, "may yet reach the mid-tier in her lifetime." Yet to Mary's mind, becoming a second-rank mage was no honor at all—it was worse than being an ignorant village wife in some mountain hamlet.
At least a village wife did not have to dissect countless animals, did not have to cultivate deformed monstrosities, did not have to learn how to wire a human brain to a monster's, and did not have to bear the pressure of her mentor's disordered mind.
Daniel was a mage with something wrong in his head. In fact, to the handful of apprentices in the tower, the man was simply insane. He was often sunk in strange dream-states, and even when awake he had no sound emotions to speak of. He was violent, irascible, gloomy, and terrifying. He would make his apprentices eat rats and venomous snakes; on some hallucination or other he would loose dreadful demons and spellborn creatures into the tower, then drive his apprentices to fight them; and that was to say nothing of the horrible magical experiments he performed upon his own body...
True, Daniel did occasionally have gentle, kindly spells, but his mad periods outlasted them tenfold—and under such madness, his rare gentleness only grew more dreadful.
The old mage stood frozen like that for a dozen seconds or so, then at last stirred his body; the young female apprentice jerked her head up with a start.
"Mentor..." Mary bent forward slightly at the waist. "It's good that you're all right..."
Daniel looked at Mary for a good while, and only after seeming to notice the clasp at her throat did he recall that this was his student. He grumbled some indistinct syllables in his throat, then raised a hand and waved it: "Clean up the laboratory. You may rest for today."
Mary blinked, feeling a heartfelt relief. Then she watched the old mage before her slowly turn his body and walk toward the laboratory exit. The old mage's robe bulged out in a lump at his back, and artificial nerve cords, like snakes, poked out from the hem of the robe, twitching in spasms.
Gao Yang did not linger long in the "simulation arena." Once he had confirmed that the old mage had been kicked out of the network by his own doing, he released the data-dive state and returned to the surface layer of the mind-network.
Planting a spy among the Sleepers and finding a pawn he could control—that had been his plan from the start; and especially after discovering that the Sleepers had fabricated a "Otherworldly Wanderer" persona, the idea had only grown more refined. This cult was, after all, far too bizarre, and there was no way he could investigate everything himself, so finding such a pawn was inevitable—only that the pawn happened to be a Typhon mage as well, which counted as an unexpected harvest.
Having learned the rough situation with Daniel, Gao Yang had swiftly sketched out many provisional plans in his mind. He believed that, used properly, the old mage would serve many an unforeseen purpose.
He was not worried that this would increase his risk of exposure. After successfully breaching Daniel's mental defenses, he had already taken control of the man's privileges within the mind-network and set an "activation switch"—should the man so much as mention anything about an "Otherworldly Wanderer infiltrating the network," his connection would be cut at once. And even if this safeguard failed and word leaked out, how could the Sleepers possibly find Gao Yang?