Yuan Shikai was a man who believed in a universe of levers and gears. He believed in the tangible power of steel, the motivating force of silver, and the predictable, malleable nature of human greed. He did not, under any circumstances, believe in miracles.
Which was why the report on his desk was giving him a chilling, unfamiliar feeling that bordered on vertigo.
The first dispatch had been a masterpiece of controlled chaos, a testament to the success of his new, brutal strategy. It came from his agent, Artisan, and confirmed that the Shanghai telegraph hub had been neutralized, precisely as planned. The city was an information island, cut off from the capital. Yuan had read it with a deep, visceral satisfaction. The first move in Operation Pandora had been a flawless success.
The second dispatch had arrived just hours later, a frantic, almost hysterical message from his commercial agents in Shanghai. It made no sense. The entire telegraphic network, which should have been inert for weeks, was back online. Not partially, not intermittently, but fully and perfectly functional. The official explanation being whispered by the baffled engineers on site, the explanation that was already starting to curdle into legend in the city's teahouses, was that the system had, impossibly, "repaired itself."
"Miracles," Yuan Shikai spat, the word tasting like poison in his mouth. He slammed the dispatch down on his desk. "There are no miracles. There are only actions and consequences I am not yet aware of."
He paced his office like a caged tiger, his mind, a machine of cold logic, struggling to process an illogical event. He grilled Madame Song, who had already been in contact with his own technical experts. "A redundant system? A backup generator?"
"Impossible, Minister," she replied, her voice as calm and steady as always, a stark contrast to his own agitation. "Our agents confirmed the primary switching boards were scrambled. A magnetic pulse of that magnitude would have affected any backup system in the same way. It is not a matter of power; it is a matter of information. The data itself was corrupted."
"Could the magnetic field have dissipated naturally?" he pressed, searching for any rational anchor in a sea of impossibility.
"Our physicists say no. A field strong enough to cause such damage would leave residual magnetic traces for days. To spontaneously realign thousands of individual relays simultaneously is… a statistical improbability so vast as to be functionally zero. A manual repair, they estimate, would have taken a team of one hundred engineers at least two weeks."
Weeks. Not hours. Yuan stood motionless, staring out the window at the smoking chimneys of his industrial empire. For the first time in his adult life, his logical, predictable world had a crack in it, a crack through which an icy, irrational wind was blowing.
He did not believe in ghosts or gods. But he was a student of power, and he was beginning to suspect he had profoundly misjudged the nature of the power that sat on the Dragon Throne.
His mind flashed back to his last private audience with the Emperor, after the American accusation. He remembered the strange, probing intensity in the Emperor's eyes. He had felt no fear then, confident in his own perfect self-control, his own internal emptiness. But now, he re-examined the memory. Had the Emperor's calm been the placidity of a ruler, or the stillness of a predator that had already seen its prey's fatal weakness?
The whispers from the court, the propaganda spread to inspire the common folk, had always spoken of the Emperor's first life, of his divine nature. Yuan had always dismissed it as useful mythology, a tool to control the superstitious masses. But what if it wasn't? What if the legends were a pale shadow of a terrifying truth?
'It is impossible,' a part of his mind screamed. But another, colder, more pragmatic part began to connect the dots in a new and terrifying pattern. 'But what if? What if his senses are not limited by distance? What if his will is not limited to words and commands? What if he… felt what I did?'
The thought was paralyzing. He was a master of a political game played with human pieces. But what if he was not playing against a mortal king? What if he was playing against a god who could perceive the world in ways he could not comprehend? The thought filled him with a new, chilling paranoia. He felt like a man who had been confidently plotting a murder in a locked room, only to realize the walls were made of one-way glass, and the victim had been watching him the entire time.
This newfound fear, this ghost of a possibility, forced a dramatic shift in his strategy. He could no longer afford a slow, subtle game of economic sabotage and political maneuvering. He believed, with a growing, sickening certainty, that the Emperor now knew he was the traitor. The public humiliation at the proving grounds, the freezing of his assets—they were not warnings. They were the opening moves of a meticulous execution. The Emperor was simply building an ironclad, conventional case against him before delivering the final blow.
He had to act. He had to create a crisis so large, so immediate and so destabilizing, that the Emperor would be too busy putting out the fires to concern himself with a single, disloyal minister. He needed to activate the next, more terrible phase of Operation Pandora. Immediately.
He summoned Corporal Riley.
The American was brought to his office. The change in Yuan's demeanor was stark. The confident, masterful puppeteer was gone, replaced by a man whose eyes held the wild, desperate energy of a cornered animal.
"Analyst," Yuan snarled, forgoing any pleasantries. "Your timeline for the American terror campaign has been moved up. To now. I need a target. Not a slow-burning fire like a miners' strike. An explosion. Something that will cause immediate, widespread, and undeniable panic. Your expertise. Give it to me. Now."
Riley stared at the Minister, at the raw, undisguised desperation in his face. He knew that whatever he said next would not be a theoretical plan for the future. It would be an order, acted upon instantly. The power to cause immense harm was being thrust into his hands. He thought quickly, his mind racing, trying to find a path that would satisfy Yuan's lust for chaos while minimizing the potential loss of life. He was trying to sabotage his own master's plan.
"A pipeline," Riley said, his voice trembling slightly. "The Trans-Appalachian natural gas pipeline. It runs through hundreds of miles of remote, unpopulated mountains. A catastrophic rupture… it wouldn't kill many people directly, but the explosion, the fire… it would be immense. It could be seen for a hundred miles. It would shut down gas supplies to half a dozen major cities in the middle of winter. The fear… the fear would be absolute."
Yuan seized on the idea, his eyes lighting up with a feverish gleam. "Yes. Perfect. A fire that can be seen from space. Fear that travels on the wind."
He strode to his desk and immediately began to dictate a new, top-priority message for Artisan. His voice was a low, urgent hiss.
ACTIVATE PANDORA. ALL OTHER OBJECTIVES SCRAPPED. PRIMARY TARGET: TRANS-APPALACHIAN GAS PIPELINE, SECTOR GAMMA-SEVEN. DETAILS TO FOLLOW. YOUR OBJECTIVE IS A CATASTROPHIC RUPTURE. I WANT A FIRE THAT WILL BURN FOR A WEEK. MAKE IT BURN.
The die was cast. Yuan Shikai, a man of pure, cold logic, was now acting on a foundation of supernatural fear. He had become a true believer in the Emperor's divinity, and that belief had pushed him to make a desperate, reckless move. He was hoping to start a fire in America so large, so bright, that it would hide him from the all-seeing gaze of his own angry, and very real, god.