"Adam."
After the fight Adam's name equated to power. They could ignore Ophelia's opinion, but they couldn't ignore Adam.
Tom didn't dare to speak. A cunning person like him had to become strong in secret, so he remained silent in the face of someone stronger than him.
Adam has been watching the scene before him for a long time. He didn't care about who owned the beast, but he was intrigued by the greedy nature of human beings -- Ophelia, Tom, Quentin... each of them fell into their primal instincts of greed and pride.
After Crystal had finished speaking, she ran to Adam's side. She pleaded to Adam with her eyes, but quickly stopped upon seeing Adam's expressionless face.
An awkward silence was stuck in the air.
William hid himself in the crowd. He told himself that he wouldn't have any conflict with Adam. Tom was tempting death so there was no way that he would defend Tom anymore. Besides, he was sure that Adam wouldn't do anything to Tom.
He was deathly wrong.
With a flick of his arm, Adam cast a fireball straight towards Tom and blew him into pieces of flesh and blood. Unphased, he walked forward to pick up the beast that had been in Tom's hands.
The apprentices were stunned. They didn't expect him to kill him.
Adam studied the crowd silently. He needed to gauge whether or not the Mage Continent was an orderly, civilised place or a primitive world. He also wanted to see how everyone would react when he had trampled upon common human beliefs.
Will they yield to him or resist him?
After about a minute, everyone recovered from the shock. Fear was plastered on their faces.
"He- he killed him!"
"How dare you! How could you?!"
"We're all apprentices here, and yet you dare to kill one of your own kind - the mages won't let you get away scot-free!"
How strange.
Earlier today, when the beasts killed the other apprentices, they weren't outraged like they are now.
"Adam, you- you're going too far!" Randy stuttered.
"You must explain your actions to the other apprentices. We can't tolerate someone who just kills their own companions. Pay the price," Quentin stared at Adam righteously.
Ophelia and Crystal held onto each other. Even in Ophelia's rage, she never once thought about killing Tom.
None of them thought Adam would commit murder.
He has no feelings. He isn't one of us.
Ophelia's father's words rang in her head. He was right.
To Adam this was simply a social experiment, "So what explanation do you want?"
Quentin's breath hitched. He couldn't talk back because he knew Adam was right. What is there to explain? He killed him, and no amount of explaining would bring Tom back.
What now?
Cold sweat dripped down Quentin's forehead.
Adam was dissatisfied, "Tell me, did I go too far?"
Randy spoke up, "We're literally on the same boat here, we'll be studying at the same academy in the future! Tom was annoying, but did you really need to kill him?"
Adam frowned. All of their explanations were filled with loopholes. Humans only think of themselves.
Is cowardice universal, or only present among these people?
Adam left the dining hall and nobody dared to stop him. When he left, some dared to murmur of Adam's cruelty behind his back, and made bold gestures with false bravery.
However it became silent again. Nobody dared to eat the beasts anymore.
Crystal shuddered. She thought Adam was simply indifferent to his surroundings, but she never thought that he would be indifferent to human life too.
Ophelia sighed. Her emotions were complex.
Meanwhile, the banquet of the mages never stopped, and food was being served constantly. Mages didn't need sleep anyways.
Mage Erin was drunk, and she laid on the table, "I didn't expect, hic- I didn't expect that the little guy would dare to kill, I, hic- I guess that he knew we wouldn't care."
"That's not the point. He doesn't kill for anything; he kills just for the sake of killing. This... Adam is very dangerous! If he kills everyone on board, I need compensation," Mage Jerome said, teasing the Black Mage.
The Black Mage chuckled, "Of course -- it's strange really, killing for the sake of killing. However, I don't think we need to worry -- he won't kill anyone else anymore."
And it was true. To Adam, it was pointless. Tom's death was simply a social experiment.
True to Adam's prediction, as the journey went on, more and more monsters boarded the ship, and the number of apprentices gradually dropped. By the second half of the month, the Mages completely sealed off the apprentices' cabins, so the apprentices had to fend beasts off on the deck day and night.
Soon, only six apprentices survived -- Adam, Ophelia, Crystal, William, Quentin, and Randy.
Mastering the fireball spell was merely a foundation - those who couldn't were the first to die; casting instant fireballs was the next step, and those who couldn't were next to die as well.
It became second nature for the apprentices to conjure a solidification rune to recharge their mana and to conjure fireballs.
Just as Adam predicted, the closer they were to the Mage Continent, the higher the quantity and quality of monsters -- every monster had magical powers and was as strong as a Great Knight.
One monster had a spell that summoned poisonous gas. It only appeared once, but it took out more than half of the apprentice group. William and the others soon realised that an alliance was meaningless, so it disbanded almost instantly.
Nobody dared to get close to Adam, including Ophelia. However, whenever monsters invaded the deck all of them would flock to Adam. They could only stand still when Adam cast twenty fireballs in quick succession and instantly subdued the poisonous beast.
Adam sat directly opposite the fireball runes that were suspended in the air -- he was unphased, with no scars on his body. He didn't seem tired either, and the torment seemed to have no effect on him. The selection of monsters made him dissatisfied.
Adam found that the nature of carbon-based living things have not changed -- the only thing worth recording was the magic that the monsters used, but it had already been a month and there wasn't any new, powerful magic for him to record.
He frowned, and conjured fifteen fireballs to destroy the fireball runes suspended in the air.
Meanwhile, Crystal was alone at the other end of the deck, looking into the distance. Suddenly, she saw vague figures beyond the fog and shouted in surprise, "It's the Mage Continent! We're about to reach the Mage Continent!"
However, when she returned to the group, she found that everyone was looking at Adam disdainfully, and Crystal shrunk herself.
"You already knew that these runes were attracting the beasts, didn't you?" William interrogated.
The moment Adam touched the shattered runes, he felt his magic power condense at a much faster rate than usual. He quickly retracted his hand, narrowly avoiding himself exploding in a burst of magic power.
"Yes, I knew about it a long time ago."
