After talking to his parents, Adam was determined to find some strategies or some tools that could help him increase his strength considering the circumstances.
'I tried to float but I couldn't do it anymore?' Adam thought to himself. 'I don't understand completely about my power, and the answer is somewhere inside my head, but there is just too much information...'
He believed that just training his physical strength was not going to do much, because there was not much time before he went to the Empire, so he decided to visit the only place where he could probably find more alternatives. The research department.
When he entered the research department building, the first thing he saw was a woman that he vaguely remembered.
"Good morning, Ca-Carlie…?" Adam muttered, although he sounded unsure, as he looked at the brown-haired woman with ample chest.
The woman shot a piercing glare at Adam.
"Ha? Are you trying to make a funny joke, or did you finally become senile?" She said, looking at Adam tiresomely, and dark circles were apparent under her eyes. "Anyway, don't talk to me now, I am going to sleep."
Adam didn't say anything to Carlie (?) and just looked bewildered. She was always like that even though she know Adam's status.
'This place is a mess as always,' Adam thought, seeing the room, 'and it was likely that the entire building was filled with failed prototypes, junk metals, paper sheets, books of all sorts, and other unknown materials.'
It looked more like some kind of a mad scientist's dungeon than a proper laboratory.
Seeing Adam's reaction the woman remarked something. "What's wrong with you? You look so… I don't know, different?"
"Well, I..."
Adam saw a confusing scene flashing back inside of his mind. However, all he was sure about was that he needed to do something about himself.
Before Adam could say anything, the woman looked at him and made her point.
"Is it because of what happened yesterday? Honestly, I didn't think that something like that would affect you." The woman scorned, looking at Adam as if she was trying to settle an old grudge. "Thinking back about how you looked so confident every time you came here, treating me like an amateur and looking down at me with these red eyes, I never thought that you had stage fright..."
"What? Red eyes?" Adam looked a bit confused. His eyes should be black.
"Mm? Whatever. I got no time to comfort you if that's what you came here for… Unlike you, I am a full-fledged scientist. But for now, I gotta sleep," the woman said, but she was mumbling rather than talking, and then disappeared somewhere inside of one the room inside the building.
"What's up with her?" Adam wondered out loud.
"Don't mind her, Caroline is just trying to cheer you up in her way." A voice came from behind before Adam could understand what Caroline meant.
'So her name was Caroline,' Adam thought to himself.
The person who talked to Adam was a common-looking man in his thirties, and he had this aura screaming that he was a scientist just from the look on his face and the glasses that he was wearing.
Adam greeted the middle-aged man. "Ah, Good morning…. Mr…?"
"Haha, Good morning, it's Joshua. You are still as uninterested in people's names as always, young Lord. But I am glad that you are still your usual self after yesterday's incident," the man said, and unlike his appearance suggested, the man had a deep and manly voice.
"Haha.." Adam let out a dry laugh.
"Anyway, I will ask you again if I have some questions related to that project. For now, I need to focus on my research… Hehe," Joshua said, and an ominous smile appeared on his face as he walked away.
Adam was seriously confused by how these people treated him.
*****
:::[Adam's POV]:::
The research facility should be familiar to me, yet everything felt foreign when I took a closer look at the surrounding. I never got used to seeing these weird artifacts.
I looked around the room and inspected every corner of every closet. 'It feels like I didn't come here for a while.'
I walked around the building for a while and finally arrived in front of a room that I was familiar with.
I opened the door, using a key that I only possessed, and then entered the room.
The room was packed with a lot of futuristic-looking gadgets that, lying around almost in every corner room.
However, I felt like there was something weird about the room. Something was out of place.
"Did I create this?" I wondered out loud and picked a cube-like object on the table and examined it. I knew that I worked here for a long time but not enough to create some of those things. "Did Joshua or Caroline come here?"
"It seems like I am faced with another mystery. As if what's happening inside my head wasn't enough," I said to myself, but I knew that there was an explanation for all of it, but I just couldn't connect the dots yet.
Nonetheless, I was always excited to see all of the high-tech stuff inside the room.
The first thing I needed to do was to examine these gadgets and understand their functionality.
Also, I needed to distinguish the prototypes from the useful ones.
There was a lot of work to do.
For these past fifteen years, it felt like everything was easy and going smoothly, but after what happened, I knew that my efforts weren't enough.
"So first, what is this cube? It looked important because it was left on the table and not on the floor like everything else…" I wondered and examined the black cube. "I can somehow remember everything else... Mmmm, I can't remember when I created this. Or does it belongs to someone else? Then, how did it end up here?"
The surface of the cube was metallic, and when I took a closer look at it with a microscope nearby, I found out that the cube was not a chunk of some kind of metal, instead, it was the product of the assemblage of tiny little fragments.
"Nanotechnology?" I said out loud.
The cube was something made with extreme precision and a lot of attention the detail.
As a whole, it was perfectly shaped without flaws, and every component that constituted it was perfect without even one single flaw.
I placed the cube in front of my face, trying to find out if it had other functionalities.
'Pzzz!'
Suddenly, a faint red light was projected from the cube and scanned my face. Then a female voice, which sounded emotionless but also convincingly real, spoke to me.
[Scan completed. Activation of the system. Welcome back, Master.]