The days following his terrifying encounter in the marketplace were a living hell for Mr. Wu. The American agent's whispered threat echoed in his mind, a constant, looping torment. He had returned the disguised inkstone to its hiding place on the high shelf in Dr. Chen's office, but the act brought him no peace. The guilt was a physical presence, a sour taste in his mouth, a trembling in his hands that he could not quell. He had become a ghost haunting his own life, his movements jerky and uncertain, his eyes wide with a permanent, hunted look.
Dr. Chen, who had initially dismissed his behavior as a passing illness, began to watch him with a new, unwelcome intensity. Her concern was morphing into scientific curiosity. He was an anomaly, a variable in her controlled environment that she could not account for, and it vexed her.
"Mr. Wu," she said to him one morning, her voice sharp but not unkind. "You are moving like a man who expects the ceiling to fall upon him. If you are troubled, the university has counselors."
"I am well, Doctor. Just old," he had stammered, bowing his head and shuffling away to polish an already gleaming brass microscope. He knew his performance was unconvincing. He was a terrible spy. A terrible liar. He was just a terrified old man, caught in a game he could not comprehend.
While Mr. Wu was descending into his personal hell, Dr. Chen was ascending into a new intellectual heaven. She had stumbled upon a theoretical puzzle in her research, a strange, fringe theory of quantum mechanics that postulated the existence of sub-atomic resonance cascades. It was a concept so arcane, so far beyond the mainstream of physics, that most of her Western colleagues had dismissed it as mathematical fantasy. But Dr. Chen saw a beautiful, terrifying logic in the equations.
Consumed by her new obsession, she began to build. Using parts scavenged from old university equipment and a few components she had specially commissioned from a bewildered workshop in Tianjin, she constructed a small, tabletop device. It was an intricate mess of copper wiring, quartz crystals, and modified vacuum tubes. Its purpose was to generate a highly localized, high-frequency energy field, a resonance cascade in miniature. It was her attempt to prove her theory, to glimpse a secret of the universe that no one else had ever seen. The device emitted no sound, no light, no discernible radiation. It was, she believed, perfectly safe and entirely contained.
She had no way of knowing that she had, in her pursuit of pure knowledge, accidentally created a tiny, controlled version of the very supernatural phenomenon the American government was hunting from half a world away.
On the third day of her experiments, she fine-tuned the frequency and activated her device.
In the American safe house across the city, the needle on Agent Donovan's receiver, which had been oscillating in a gentle, predictable rhythm, suddenly went insane. It slammed to the far right of the gauge with such force that it bent against the retaining pin. The delicate machine, designed to detect the faintest whispers of energy, shrieked a high-pitched, piercing alarm.
Donovan and his associate, Harker, scrambled across the room. The alarm was deafening, a clarion call of success.
"What is it?" Harker yelled over the noise.
Donovan stared at the red-lined gauge, his heart pounding with a visceral, triumphant thrill. The signal was overwhelming, a tidal wave of raw power. It was exactly what Dr. Wu had described. There was only one possible explanation.
"It's the Emperor!" he shouted, a grim, exultant smile spreading across his face. "He's using his power! Somewhere in the city, he's doing something big! This is it, Harker! This is the window!"
This was the moment their entire, multi-million-dollar operation had been built for. This was the sign they had been waiting for. He scrambled to the secure telegraph machine, his fingers flying across the key as he tapped out the pre-arranged, top-priority, single-word message that would set the world's first supernatural arms race in motion.
ACTIVATE.
Thousands of miles away, in the desolate, sun-baked expanse of the Nevada desert, the signal was received. Alarms blared across the sprawling campus of the Prometheus Forge, harsh, pulsating whoops that sent personnel scrambling. The facility, which had been in a state of tense readiness, erupted into a frenzy of controlled chaos.
Dr. Wu Jian and Nikola Tesla raced to the main control room. Engineers shouted readings, lights flashed on the massive control board, and the deep, ground-shaking hum of the facility's generators intensified as they prepared to unleash an unimaginable amount of power.
"We have confirmation from Beijing!" Admiral Taylor's voice boomed over the intercom from his command post. "The Nightingale has sung! The target is active and vulnerable! Begin the firing sequence!"
Tesla, his eyes alight with a mad, scientific glee, began throwing switches. The Harmonic Disruption Engine, the great beast in the adjoining chamber, began to power up. Its massive coils glowed with a building, violent energy. A countdown timer appeared on a large screen: sixty seconds to firing.
But Dr. Wu Jian, the man who had actually witnessed the Emperor's power firsthand, was staring intently at his own, more sensitive diagnostic console. He was looking at the raw data signature of the signal from Beijing, and a cold seed of doubt was sprouting in his mind.
"Wait," he said, his voice tight with a sudden, terrible urgency. "Something is wrong."
"The signal is strong, Doctor!" Tesla countered, his hand hovering over the final activation switch. "The frequency is a perfect match!"
"The frequency is correct, yes!" Dr. Wu shouted, his eyes wide. "But the signature… look at the decay pattern! It's too stable. It's too clean. When the Emperor used his power, the energy field was chaotic, violent, like a natural storm. This… this feels artificial. It feels like a machine."
"Nonsense! It's a perfect lock!" Tesla boomed. "Twenty seconds!"
Dr. Wu's mind was racing. He remembered the feeling of the Emperor's power, the raw, untamed quality of it. This was not the same. This was a pale, sterile imitation. To fire their weapon now, to aim their thunderbolt at a ghost… what would be the consequences? Would it expose their hand for nothing? Or worse, could the stable resonance from Beijing somehow interfere with their own weapon, causing a catastrophic feedback loop?
He trusted his gut. He trusted his memory of the god he had seen bleed.
"Abort the sequence!" he screamed, lunging for the master control panel. "Abort! It's a false signal!"
Tesla, shocked by the smaller man's sudden, desperate conviction, hesitated for a split second. At ten seconds, seeing the absolute terror in Dr. Wu's eyes, he finally reacted, slamming his hand down on the large, red emergency stop button.
The firing sequence was halted. The massive weapon powered down with a groaning, shuddering shudder of protest, the violent violet glow in its coils fading to a dull hum. The great thunderbolt had been silenced, just seconds from being unleashed.
Back in Beijing, Agent Donovan received a furious, encrypted message from Nevada demanding an immediate and thorough explanation for the false positive. He stared at the telegraph slip, his earlier triumph curdling into a cold, sickening dread. His operation, his perfect plan, had nearly triggered an intercontinental, supernatural attack based on flawed intelligence. It was a catastrophic failure, averted only by the last-second doubt of a scientist thousands of miles away.
He realized with chilling clarity that his entire strategy was a house of cards. His coerced agent was a nervous wreck. His listening device was demonstrably unreliable, unable to distinguish between a god's fury and a physicist's experiment. He could not trust his instrument. And he now knew that to get reliable intelligence, the kind of intelligence on which one could risk firing a superweapon, he couldn't rely on the terrified old man in the university. He, or another agent, would have to get a new sensor inside the one place they had all sought to avoid: the impenetrable, hyper-secure walls of the Forbidden City itself. It was a suicidal proposition. The easy part of his mission was over. The impossible part had just begun.