Dr. Chen Linwei's laboratory had become the stage for the world's most dangerous and secret negotiation. Agent Donovan arrived for their second clandestine meeting under the cloak of a moonless Beijing night, feeling less like a spymaster and more like a supplicant making an offering to a mercurial and powerful goddess. He carried his second "payment" in a locked briefcase: a detailed log of the Emperor's official and unofficial meetings for the past month, a priceless piece of intelligence painstakingly acquired by the entire American spy network in Northern China.
Dr. Chen took the offered microfilm spools without a word of thanks. She loaded them into her projector and began to study the information, her sharp, analytical mind cross-referencing the meeting times and attendees with the resonance data she had been secretly collecting. Donovan stood by, a silent observer in her domain.
After a long period of intense concentration, she switched off the projector and turned to the large blackboard, her hand moving with a sudden, excited energy.
"It is exactly as I hypothesized, only more pronounced," she said, more to herself than to him. She began to draw, overlaying her graph of the Emperor's energy spikes with Donovan's political intelligence. "Look. A massive energy amplification, sustained for nearly seven minutes, coincides exactly with the time of his 'private' audience with your Minister Yuan Shikai. A smaller, more turbulent, and erratic spike matches his meeting with the hero-Admiral, Meng Tian. It is unequivocal. He is using his ability as a form of active, targeted interrogation. He is a living polygraph, a biological truth serum."
She tapped the blackboard with her chalk. "But that is merely a confirmation. The most interesting data point is what is not here." She pointed to a long, flat, stable period on her graph. "According to your log, he spent three hours yesterday in private meditation in the Hall of Mental Cultivation. And during that time, the signal was at its lowest, its most stable, its most… controlled. It is the precise opposite of what one would expect from a conventional energy system. It suggests his power is not a resource he expends and then must recharge. It suggests the power is a constant, a chaotic storm he must actively and consciously suppress at all times."
Her eyes gleamed with the thrill of discovery. "Rest and meditation do not recharge him, Agent Donovan. They allow him to strengthen the cage that contains the hurricane inside him. His moments of weakness are not after he has used his power; they are the moments he is using it."
Donovan was stunned. This was an insight so profound it inverted their entire strategic understanding of their target. They had been planning to strike when they thought he was exhausted, but Chen's data suggested the most dangerous time to attack might be when he was at his most calm and focused.
"This," she said, tapping the graph again, "is the kind of data I require from you. This is the currency I value." She then turned to a small table where a roll of microfilm and a sealed envelope sat waiting. "And this is your payment in return."
She handed it to him. It was her end of the bargain: another installment of her research.
Back in his safe house, Donovan immediately began the slow, arduous process of transmitting the new research to the Prometheus Forge. In Nevada, Dr. Wu Jian and his team received the new pages with a mixture of hope and trepidation. They laid out the new equations, their excitement quickly turning to a deep, collective frustration.
"This is nonsense!" Nikola Tesla finally exploded, throwing a page of diagrams down on the table. He was a man who understood the majestic, beautiful logic of electricity, and the equations before him felt like a deliberate mockery of that logic. "The woman is either a charlatan or she is actively laughing at us! These calculations for harmonic containment are fundamentally unsound! They violate the primary laws of thermodynamics! This chamber design would not hold water, let alone a sustained resonance cascade!"
The other physicists murmured in agreement. The research was brilliant, the mathematics elegant, but at its core, it was all wrong. It was a beautiful, complex machine with a fatal, deliberate flaw at its heart.
But Dr. Wu Jian, who had seen the real-world effects of this "impossible" science, saw something else. He looked past the frustrating errors to the structure of the deception itself.
"No, you are wrong, Mr. Tesla," he said quietly, his voice cutting through the other men's complaints. "It is not nonsense. It is a lock with a false keyhole. She is showing us a problem of immense complexity, but she is deliberately giving us the wrong formula to solve it. She is leading us away from her true path."
He picked up one of the pages. "Look at the elegance of the errors. A lesser mind would make a simple calculation mistake. These… these are beautiful. They are internally consistent within their own flawed logic. This is not a mistake. It is a message." He looked at his colleagues, his eyes wide with a dawning, fearful respect. "She is telling us, in the only language she values, that she is smarter than we are."
Donovan, receiving this assessment from Nevada, felt a chill run down his spine. He was in a battle of wits with a mind far greater than his own. He was being played, toyed with.
But Dr. Chen, in her supreme intellectual arrogance, had made a single, tiny, almost insignificant mistake. In one of her complex, deliberately flawed diagrams for a new type of resonance chamber, she had scrawled a small note in the margin, a seemingly random thought experiment. She had written it in English, a small act of vanity to prove her mastery of their language as well as her own. The note read: 'Fails to account for isotopic decay chain of U-238 as potential contaminant in base resonance.'
She believed it was a perfect red herring, a piece of arcane scientific jargon so obscure it would be dismissed as meaningless. Uranium was a heavy, stable element, of interest only to geologists. It had no place in her elegant theories of harmonic resonance.
But the note was not being read by spies. It was being read at the Prometheus Forge, a facility that had gathered not only the world's top electrical engineers, but also its top nuclear physicists, men who had been secretly studying the properties of radioactive materials for years.
When the translated note was passed to a young, brilliant physicist on the team, a recent graduate from the University of Chicago, his eyes went wide. He ran to a blackboard, his hands flying, scrawling a series of new, terrifying equations.
Dr. Wu and Tesla gathered around him. "What is it, Oppenheimer?" Dr. Wu asked.
"Don't you see?" the young physicist said, his voice trembling with a mixture of terror and awe. "Uranium-238. Isotopic decay. She's not talking about a contaminant. She's talking about a power source."
He tapped the board. "We have been working under the wrong assumption. We thought the Emperor's power was a biological or an electromagnetic phenomenon. But what if it isn't? What if his body, through some impossible genetic fluke, is acting as a kind of organic biological reactor? What if he is able to metabolize heavy elements, to trigger and control a form of low-energy atomic fission within his own cells? It would explain everything. The immense power release. The cellular degradation Dr. Wu observed—that would be radiation sickness. The 'weakness after use' would be the body struggling to contain the radioactive byproducts. It all fits."
The men in the control room stared at each other in horrified silence. Dr. Chen, in her attempt to mislead them with a clever distraction, had accidentally given them the one clue, the one piece of outlier data, that could lead them to the true, terrifying nature of the Emperor's power.
The arms race had just escalated, leaping from the supernatural to the atomic. And they now knew that the god they were trying to kill was not just a sorcerer; he might well be a walking nuclear bomb.