Dr. Chen Linwei was furious. Not with a person, but with the stubborn, infuriating intransigence of the universe itself. Her laboratory, usually a place of serene, intellectual order, was in a state of controlled chaos. Schematics were scattered across her workbench, and the air held the faint, acrid scent of burnt-out vacuum tubes.
Her beautiful tabletop quantum resonance device, the key to unlocking a new frontier of physics, was a failure. It was taunting her. The cascade effect, the brief, beautiful moment when she could bend the local constants of reality, was profoundly unstable, collapsing almost immediately after it was initiated. The components, subjected to stresses they were never designed to withstand, were burning out at an alarming rate. It was like trying to capture lightning in a bottle, only to have the bottle vaporize in your hands every time.
She paced her office, her mind a whirlwind of equations and frustratingly elegant theories. As she often did when wrestling with a particularly difficult problem, she began to mutter to herself, her monologue a stream of consciousness directed at the silent, uncooperative laws of nature.
In the corner of the adjoining lab, Mr. Wu was quietly sweeping the floor. He tried to make himself as small and invisible as possible, his head bowed. He was not trying to eavesdrop, but in the echoing silence of the laboratory, Dr. Chen's frustrated, passionate whispers were impossible to ignore.
"The energy bleed is far too high," she murmured, tapping a complex diagram with her finger. "The containment field is insufficient. It's the physical cost. It is always the physical cost! You cannot bend the local constants without paying a price." She threw a burnt-out emitter crystal into a waste bin with a clatter of disgust. "It's like trying to contain a small sun in a glass jar. The components simply cannot handle the strain. The degradation of the primary crystal is exponential… for every fraction of a second of sustained resonance, there is a corresponding, measurable period of… of physical decay. The weakness is inherent in the process itself. You cannot have the effect without the consequence."
Mr. Wu understood none of it. The words "quantum," "resonance," "containment field," "constants"—they were a foreign language, the arcane speech of gods and geniuses. But he was a terrified man, a man who had been given a mission. Agent Donovan's instructions had been drilled into his memory. He was to listen for a few specific keywords, phrases related to the strange malady that afflicted the Emperor.
And now, he was hearing them.
He latched onto the words he recognized, his mind snagging them from the stream of incomprehensible science: 'High cost.' 'Physical strain.' 'Degradation.' 'Weakness after use.'
He didn't understand the context. He didn't know she was talking about a machine made of wire and glass. He thought, with the simple, terrified logic of a man caught in a conspiracy far beyond his understanding, that she must have been secretly studying the Emperor himself. He believed he had just overheard a state secret of the highest possible magnitude. His duty, coerced though it was, was clear.
That evening, after the university gates had closed, Mr. Wu carried out the simple, low-risk communication method Donovan had arranged. He walked three blocks to a small, bustling street market and approached a specific noodle vendor, a man whose face he had been shown in a photograph. He ordered a bowl of beef noodles with extra chili and no cilantro. It was a simple, meaningless transaction to any observer. To the noodle vendor, another low-level American asset, it was a signal that Mr. Wu had something to report.
An hour later, the vendor passed a small, tightly folded note to another cut-out, a rickshaw puller. The note eventually made its way to the American safe house. When Donovan finally received it and unfolded it, he read the garbled, terrified old man's interpretation of advanced physics.
The message read: THE DOCTOR SPOKE TODAY. OF HER SECRET WORK. SHE WAS ANGRY. SAID IT WAS NOT WORKING PROPERLY. SHE MENTIONED A 'HIGH COST' AND GREAT 'PHYSICAL STRAIN.' SHE SAID THERE WAS 'DEGRADATION' AND A PERIOD OF 'WEAKNESS' AFTER EVERY USE.
Donovan read the message, and his first reaction was one of pure, disappointed frustration. This was useless. It was clearly about Dr. Chen's own scientific experiment, the same one that had caused the false alarm days ago. The old man was just reporting on her technical difficulties. It was a dead end. He almost crumpled the note and tossed it into the ashtray.
But something made him pause. He smoothed the paper out and read the words again.
'High cost.'
'Physical strain.'
'Degradation.'
'Weakness after use.'
He froze. His mind, trained to see patterns, to connect disparate pieces of information, began to race. He pulled out another report from his files, the original intelligence debriefing from Dr. Wu Jian after his rescue from China, the report that had launched Project Prometheus. He scanned the pages, his eyes flying across the text.
And there it was. Dr. Wu Jian's description of the Emperor's condition after he had caused the volcanic eruption at Krakatoa. 'Subject exhibited signs of extreme physical strain… complained of a high personal cost… I theorize a period of profound weakness and cellular degradation follows every major expenditure of his power.'
He looked from one report to the other. From the words of the Emperor's personal physician to the overheard ramblings of a frustrated academic.
The words were almost identical.
Donovan felt a sudden, electrifying shock, a moment of profound, world-altering clarity. He connected the dots. Dr. Wu's report from China about the Emperor's supernatural malady. Dr. Chen's strange experiment that had produced an energy signature that mimicked the Emperor's. And now, this message, where Dr. Chen was describing her machine in the exact same terms Dr. Wu had used to describe the Emperor.
"My God," Donovan whispered to the empty room. "She's done it. She's actually done it. She's replicated it."
He realized, with a sense of awe that bordered on terror, that Dr. Chen, working completely independently in her university laboratory, had stumbled upon the fundamental, universal law of the supernatural power that was reshaping their world: that it carried a severe, measurable, and predictable physical cost. Her science, her equations, her failed experiments—they weren't just about a strange machine. They were the key. They contained the scientific formula for the Emperor's Achilles' heel.
Donovan's entire mission, the entire focus of Operation NIGHTINGALE, changed in that instant. He looked at the dead receiver for his long-range detector. He didn't need it anymore. Getting a sensor near the Emperor was the wrong target. It was like trying to study a star by flying into it.
He needed Dr. Chen's research.
Her notes, her failed crystals, her burnt-out vacuum tubes, her pages and pages of incomprehensible equations—they were now the most valuable intelligence asset on the planet. They held the secret to understanding, predicting, and perhaps even weaponizing the Emperor's weakness.
The new objective was no longer to spy on a god. It was to steal the science that explained him. It was a far more tangible, and therefore far more dangerous, mission. It meant getting inside her laboratory, past Shen Ke's spies and her own formidable intellect, and stealing her life's work. The game had changed completely.