When All Under Heaven Know Beauty as Beauty, There Is Ugliness

A hundred years was enough time for far too many variables to arise. To avoid trouble dragging on, it was more reassuring to deal with it directly a century ago.

That was precisely why Adam had not gone down to inspect that energy in his own era, but had waited until after traveling back a hundred years.

After arriving at the map chamber with the enormous portrait that Fitzgerald had mentioned, Adam did not undo the Ancient Magic seal here, lest he alert the professors who were currently absent from their frames. Instead, he used Pull Card to pass through the floor and enter the cave directly below.

Following the traces of Ancient Magic energy, Adam found the energy sealed within Goblin-made Mithril… negative emotional energy extracted by Ancient Magic.

"Negative emotions can be directly converted into energy? If we set up a few machines like this in an office building, who would need to build the Three Gorges Dam…?"

Adam joked, but he did not underestimate the energy before him.

According to Professor Fitzgerald, those whose negative emotions had been extracted by Isidora would gradually become emotionally numb. That was clearly abnormal.

Adam had done plenty of experiments involving the extraction of negative emotions, thoughts, and even specific memories. Yet among all those Little Bartys who had devoted themselves to the advancement of magic, not one had displayed such symptoms.

There had to be some other factor at work, causing people to become emotionally numb.

The energy collected from the goblins’ equipment had clearly undergone secondary modification. He needed to study these firsthand negative emotional energies personally extracted by Isidora before he could determine exactly where this path had gone wrong.

Without question, if the problem could be solved, then whether it was extracting negative emotions or converting emotions into energy, both would be research results of tremendous value.

So that was why wizards rarely produced any groundbreaking, era-defining inventions or discoveries. It was not that such things did not exist—they had mostly been branded evil Dark Magic research and banned!

So what if the early experiments revealed some side effects? They could just pull a few Dark wizards out of Azkaban to serve as test subjects, couldn’t they?

Even when penicillin had first been discovered, plenty of people had died during its initial application. Only afterward did people learn that allergy tests had to be performed first, yet it still drastically reduced battlefield casualties.

Research certainly could not violate human nature, but it could not be endlessly timid either. Otherwise, it would never enter new fields—just like the Wizarding World, where research into the uses of dragon blood had advanced to the point of making fireplace cleaner with it.

After calculating the time, Adam set an alarm for himself, then pulled a Little Barty from his pocket and began his experiment.

"Ring-ring-ring~ Ring-ring-ring~"

Ignoring the alarm, Adam completed the final examination of the Little Barty before him before casually canceling the alarm spell.

"So it’s already the start of term! Hmm… I roughly know what causes the emotional numbness now. As the saying goes, when all under heaven know beauty as beauty, there is ugliness; when all know good as good, there is no good."

Adam stroked his chin as he retrieved the test subject and a series of tools before him.

"Negative and positive emotions only become increasingly distinct through their contrast with one another. Once all of a person’s negative emotions are extracted, that person naturally loses the ability to clearly perceive positive emotions as well. In the end, they become a living corpse incapable of distinguishing sorrow from joy, without grief or delight."

He had found the cause of emotional numbness, but the solution gave Adam a headache.

From his perspective, this problem was easy to solve. He simply had to control the degree of extraction, removing only the specific negative emotions he wanted to eliminate, just as he had done before.

But that method was not universally applicable. What value did a research result have if only he could use it?

What Adam wanted from this research project was to advance the wizards’ own technological tree, even if Ancient Magic itself was a niche branch among wizards.

As for himself, if he ever had such a need, he would not need Ancient Magic at all.

"So, someone with talent for Ancient Magic really does need to join the research. My own case is only an isolated example."

Adam already had some ideas. Give him a few more days, and he would be able to use Ancient Magic to perform refined negative emotional processing.

But the prerequisite for him being able to do so was that he had already been capable of accomplishing this without Ancient Magic. He was merely using a different method to achieve the same goal now.

He had no way of knowing whether other wizards possessing Ancient Magic energy could do the same. Perhaps they could master it through practice and experimentation, or perhaps they could not.

"It just so happens that term has only just begun, and there’s still some time before the freshmen’s feast."

Adam vanished from the spot, leaving only a sentence slowly echoing through the cave:

"First, I’ll go kidnap—no, invite Isidora…"

When Adam appeared again, there was already a witch beside him who looked to be around his age. After landing, she looked around before her gaze settled on the metal sphere in the distance.

"That is… the future result of my research?"

"That’s right, but as I demonstrated to you before, it is a path where too much is as bad as too little."

Adam shook his head.

Isidora fell silent. In her time period, she had already begun using Ancient Magic on her father to extract his negative emotions.

That was also why Adam had chosen her from that point in time. Isidora had already found that path then, but had not yet reached the point of no return.

At that time, Isidora’s father had not yet had all his negative emotions completely extracted, to the point where he became an emotionally indifferent living corpse.

If Adam had instead brought Isidora from the period after she had turned her father into a living corpse, her mastery of Ancient Magic might have been greater than that of the Isidora he had brought here. But everything she had done—everything that could no longer be undone—would have made her unconsciously unwilling to accept the possibility that she had taken the wrong path.

"Too much is as bad as too little…"

Isidora had not truly been able to understand before, but Adam had illustrated it for her with a drawing. He compared a person’s emotional world to a black-and-white painting: black represented negative emotions, while white represented positive emotions. If all the black were extracted…

Watching the sheet of paper remain utterly pure white no matter what shape the white representing positive emotions took, Isidora finally understood what Adam meant.

After staring at the metal sphere for a while, Isidora shook her head.

"Let’s go. We have another new companion, don’t we?"

"Hmm?"

Adam was somewhat surprised.

"I thought you would be eager to throw yourself into the research first."

"We have plenty of time."

Isidora truly wanted to help her father recover as soon as possible, but Adam’s ability to travel to the past and future whenever he wished meant she had no need to be so pressed for time. No matter when she completed the research, she could return to the moment she had left.

"Besides, haste makes waste, doesn’t it?"

She had begun using Ancient Magic on her father without adequate testing for the very same reason—driven by that sense of urgency. Now, it had proven that the results obtained that way were far from satisfactory.

Adam smiled faintly at her words.

"I’m glad you grasped the core principle of research so quickly."