He recalled what Aicolman had said.
Finish reading the grimoire and keep repeating the training, and the curse would be solved.
It wasn't advice that inspired confidence.
About as credible as 'you'll get a girlfriend once you get into college.'
But Adam decided to believe it.
There were no other options, and besides, the other party was an Archmage.
If the world were a game, wouldn't a quest like this pop up?
Quest objectives.
1. Survive on the mountain.
2. Finish reading the magic theory books while camping.
3. Find the cause of the curse.
Adam tackled them one by one, like clearing quests.
Making a fire was no problem, and if he lived in a cave, he didn't need to worry about housing either.
If he settled near the lake, he could take care of bathing and disinfecting at the same time.
Food, clothing, and shelter weren't much of an inconvenience.
Generally speaking, the real problem was security.
If a frontier village was defenselessly exposed to disaster, then a mountain was a place where disaster itself breathed.
Giant magic beasts that roamed in packs.
Mountain bandits who could show up at any moment.
And kidnappers who crept up without a sound.
But for Adam, none of it was a big problem.
KA-BOOM—!
Earthquakes that shook the ground periodically, and blue flames that bloomed out of nowhere.
That destructive roar was the top contributor to keeping the peace.
Bandit or beast, everyone became an equal coward before the eardrum-shredding sound of explosions.
KA-BOOM—!
"Damn, that sound again."
"Looks like some crazy mage has made this place his base."
"That goddamn bastard. Just let me run into him once."
"...Big Bro, but do you actually want to fight someone like that?"
"No. To be honest, everyone's out of their minds because nobody can sleep with that noise."
Not long after Adam settled in, most of the bandit gangs packed up.
If you made a mountain with over 15 explosions a day your base, you weren't a bandit, you were a hero.
Or a moron.
"Oh, my cozy sweet home!"
For his residence, he went with a cave instead of a tent.
It was an area close to the lake with plenty of open ground.
He threw the bombs that formed any which way onto the plain where there was no forest.
There was one fact he overlooked at this point.
He'd thought that on a mountain, all he had to do was watch out for fire, but the essence of a bomb wasn't fire. It was a shock that shook the earth.
Because he'd been throwing bombs around wherever, the ground weakened and a landslide ended up happening.
"I screwed up, huh. Gotta find places where the ground is solid first."
Using the mountain's elevation as a guide, Adam chose five bomb drop points.
Whoosh!
Along came that sound.
KA-BOOM—!
The magic beasts fled, whimpering, "Kyaang," "Kyaang."
The bandits moved away from Adam's residence as well.
The security problem was solved.
But Adam's real problem wasn't wild beasts or bandits.
It was sleep.
Tzzzt!
"Whoa!"
Even when he was asleep at 3 a.m., the magic circle activated.
Life on repeat: the moment he heard plasma, he had to spring up, grab the bomb, and run.
It was a hellish daily routine.
If he didn't hear the sound while he was asleep, death.
Every time it glowed, his heart sank.
He couldn't sleep comfortably, because if he fell into a deep sleep he might die.
He felt like he was going insane.
Is this how a neurotic patient feels?
In a state like this, insomnia was inevitable.
Even when he forced his tired eyes open and read, nothing went into his head, and it had been 2 weeks of dozing off and jerking awake over and over.
From unprecedented stress, Adam's personality became as sharp as a razor.
"Hey, kid, is it you? The psycho mage who's been doing crazy stuff on the mountain lately?"
A bandit holding a sharpened longsword came looking for Adam.
"Honorable noble mage, won't you show some mercy to us poor commoners?"
"......."
After staring blankly at them, he threw a freshly made explosive sphere.
Now that his environment had gone downhill, his temper had naturally turned savage, it seemed.
Come to think of it, they could've been bandits who handled mana. He'd definitely been short-sighted back then.
Just as he approached them, meaning to at least dig them a grave out of condolence.
"S-sorry, sir. We'll just go back down!"
"No, you don't need to go down. More importantly, you didn't get hurt too badly?"
He'd expected full-body second-degree burns at minimum, but the bandits ended up with a moderate amount of burns and a few broken bones.
"You spared us, didn't you?"
"No... Uh, well. Just don't pick fights from now on."
"Ugh, of course not!"
Inwardly, he had thought he wanted it to go off weakly.
Originally, he couldn't control its power at all, but at some point he'd apparently become able to control it little by little.
'What's the cause?'
This was something he hadn't heard even from Aicolman.
Did my skill go up?
What skill?
Reading speed?
No. Reading a few books couldn't possibly cause a visible change.
The most likely cause was, after all, mana control.
For instance, a structure where improving one's skill at managing mana also improved one's control over magic.
It was entirely possible.
The way knights and swordsmen train in swordsmanship.
It was only natural that, besides learning magic, a mage would have a skill in training and managing mana.
And as that went on, naturally, even using the same magic, mana consumption would go down and control over the magic would go up.
Mana control was a mage's skill itself.
Mana control probably influenced the learning of higher magic too.
Wasn't that the basic mechanism of a mage's skill?
Of course, it wasn't certain.
The reading, his frayed nerves, or the heightened clarity of mana that came from being worn down and on edge could also be the cause.
But the standard practice was to rule out any hypothesis whose variables couldn't be controlled through experiment.
So, mana control training it was.
"Okay!"
It looked more than worth testing.
***
Adam gulped down elixirs and sank into meditation.
"Big Bro, what's that mountain of medicine?"
"Elixirs."
"Sorry? No way. Do you know how much those are worth?"
"No idea."
Aicolman had given them to him, so he was just drinking them mindlessly.
He was destined to go his whole life without ever learning that a single elixir cost more than a slave.
"Just by selling these, even an average noble could live comfortably for 10 years, you know?"
"Oho, is that right?"
Then I'd better use them more efficiently, out of gratitude.
After all, during an EXP boost, you don't even go to the bathroom.
Adam focused on meditation.
"Whew."
Ssssss.
Like a heart pumping blood, he circulated mana from his head to his arms, from his belly to his legs.
Aicolman had said he needed to reach the stage where mana wrapped his whole body even without conscious effort.
Elixir, then meditation.
Elixir, then meditation.
When a bomb came out, toss it straight into the pit.
That mechanical life repeated.
Around the time half a month had passed.
He realized that mana was being absorbed when it passed through his right hand, where the magic circle was.
By the time a month had passed, the insomnia was still there, but his life had settled into a pattern.
Once, out of curiosity, he tried concentrating mana in his right arm.
The magic circle gulped down the mana like a hamster given food, then spat out three bombs in a row.
'Oh, huge progress!'
'Should I try it one more time?'
The moment he got excited and tried again, his shoulders grew heavy and his eyelids closed.
His eyelids slowly began to droop, as if fatigue had piled up.
The stamina that had once held up through 48 hours of straight work hit rock bottom in an instant.
It was the price of forcibly drawing on mana.
"Urk!"
His stomach churned, and the mana elixir nearly came pouring out of his throat.
He swallowed it back down.
It would've been a waste.
While he was absorbed in mana training, a lot of time passed.
Early summer, when faint bluish buds were already sprouting on branches where the double cherry blossoms had fallen.
Unusually, his body felt refreshed today.
Drip.
Drip.
The sound of water droplets falling from the cave ceiling echoed clearly.
When he rubbed his eyes, the droplets left on the leaves from dawn looked more detailed than usual; the sharp sense he'd had when he first perceived mana had come back to life.
"It's here."
More wind brushed across the back of his hand.
He could vividly feel the cold, soft sensation.
He raised his right hand and concentrated mana into the magic circle on the back of it.
Tzzzt.
Blue plasma flashed.
When the wind blew, the twigs of the still trees knocked together and rustled.
It wasn't a coincidence.
It was clearly a phenomenon that reflected his will.
For the first time, Adam was 'controlling' magic.
A round bomb glowing blue rose from the back of his hand.
Adam snatched the bomb and flashed a victorious smile.
'I've got a good feeling about this one.'
Adam looked down at the sphere.
Beep-beep-beep.
"Goddammit."
Soon the sphere spewed a blue flash and exploded.
KA-BOOM—!
The smile didn't last even a second. The sphere still spewed its flash and blew up.
Perfect control was still out of reach.
Just then, one of the bandits came running over in a hurry.
"Big Bro, I told you not to set them off close by!"
"Ahh... so close. It really would've worked this time."
It felt like just a little more and he'd have had it.
Seriously!
Right after swallowing that failure, he collapsed on the spot as if he'd fainted.
***
It hadn't been only bad things for three months.
First of all, he could now control the power to some extent.
Anywhere from full-body first-degree burns all the way up to industrial dynamite-level power that could blow up an entire cave.
The biggest progress was that some of the bombs came out as duds.
A dud bomb didn't go off right away. It exploded when he sent mana into it.
If it held out with no mana, it went off automatically after 72 hours, but that part didn't mean much.
Either way, thanks to that, when a dud bomb came out, he could sleep relatively at ease.
'But I can't go back to the mansion like this.'
Aicolman had talked about creativity right after effort.
Now that his body was complete, was it time to dig into the theory books? It was just as Adam was holding a book and mulling it over.
"Big Bro!"
Just then, a mountain bandit with a dark, scruffy beard came running, out of breath.
"Since when am I your big bro, you bandit bastard? You want to croak?"
"S-sorry!"
The bandit was panting.
"More importantly, why are you panting like that?"
"Ah, right! A carriage is coming up from below right now."
The bandit glanced back at the mountain road below.
"A carriage? That's rare."
Aicolman had said there were people who used this road, but ever since he'd settled on the mountain, hardly any carriages had passed through.
"There are guards, but they're nothing much. One shot of your magic, Big Bro, and they'd be blown to smithereens."
"You're telling me to rob them?"
"Didn't you say those guys stole your road, Big Bro, so stealing their things was fair too?"
"Wealth and looks aren't the be-all and end-all of judging a person. If each side has something the other needs, trading benefits both."
As it happened, there was something he needed, so the timing was fantastic.
"And if they won't agree to the deal?"
Adam gently closed his eyes and smiled.
"Then we go with Plan B."