Dr. Chen Linwei moved through her laboratory like a storm front, a whirlwind of focused, intellectual energy. The "miraculous" repair of the Shanghai telegraph hub was, to the rest of the world, an inexplicable event, a ghost story to be whispered in teahouses. To Dr. Chen, it was a data point. The most significant, game-changing data point she had ever encountered.
She had spent the last twenty-four hours without sleep, hunched over the readings from her resonance device. The machine, which she had painstakingly calibrated using the faint signal from Donovan's "inkstone," had captured the event in stunning, terrifying detail.
On her blackboard, a new graph told the story. It showed her now-familiar readings of the Emperor's "supernatural heartbeat," the steady, low-level thrum emanating from the Forbidden City. And then, it showed the anomaly. A massive, sustained energy spike, a surge of power so immense it had dwarfed all of his previous "interrogation" spikes combined. It had lasted for nearly an hour, a colossal expenditure of an unknown form of energy. It was followed by a corresponding, equally dramatic trough: a period of profound "weakness," where the Emperor's baseline signature had dropped to almost nothing. For several hours, his energy reading was so faint she had almost thought he was dead, before it began to slowly, arduously, climb back toward its normal level.
She cross-referenced the precise time of this immense energy expenditure with the news reports that were just beginning to filter out of the south, reports of the inexplicable, instantaneous repair of the Shanghai station. Her mind, a machine of pure logic, connected the two events with the force of a thunderclap.
The conclusion was as inescapable as it was reality-shattering. The Emperor had not just sensed the sabotage. He had fixed it. From his palace in Beijing. He had projected his will, his power, across a distance of over six hundred miles with enough precision and control to manipulate the magnetic polarity of thousands of individual, microscopic relays.
This changed everything she thought she knew. His power was not just a localized, biological phenomenon. It was a strategic, continental-scale force. And the "physical cost" she had theorized, the weakness after use, was real, measurable, and directly proportional to the scale of the supernatural act. He was not just a man with a strange gift. He was a living strategic weapon of unimaginable power and equally unimaginable vulnerability.
She knew she had to see Donovan. She sent the summons via a pre-arranged, discreet channel.
When Agent Donovan arrived at the laboratory, he found her in a state of controlled, manic excitement. He had come expecting another tense negotiation, another round in their intellectual duel. He was not prepared for the paradigm shift that was about to occur.
"Your mission to place a sensor inside the Forbidden City is now irrelevant, Agent Donovan," she said, her voice sharp and final. She didn't even greet him. She simply pointed to the graph on her blackboard. "It is obsolete. A fool's errand."
She explained what her instruments had detected, what she had deduced. She laid out the truth of the Emperor's power—its range, its precision, and its terrible cost—with the cold, dispassionate clarity of a physicist explaining the law of gravity.
"I no longer need to be close to him to know when he is weak," she concluded, her eyes gleaming with a fierce, triumphant light. "I have just witnessed him expend a massive amount of his personal energy. Based on the recovery curve," she tapped the graph, "I can now calculate, with a reasonable degree of scientific certainty, his periods of maximum vulnerability. I can tell you when your god-king is little more than a mortal man."
Donovan stood motionless, his mind reeling. His entire mission, the complex, dangerous, high-stakes operation to get a listening post close to the Emperor, the very purpose of his presence in China, had just been rendered completely and utterly obsolete by her superior science. He had been trying to build a crude spyglass, while she had just invented a radio telescope. He had nothing left to offer her. His value in their bargain had just dropped to zero. He was completely at her mercy.
"You have failed to provide me with the Prometheus data I require," Dr. Chen continued, her voice turning to ice. She had sensed his sudden vulnerability, his loss of purpose, and she was pressing her advantage. "Your government's information is, as I suspected, trivial. Your value to me is therefore… limited."
She let the threat hang in the air for a moment before continuing. "However, you can still be useful. This event proves, beyond any doubt, that my own research is more vital than ever. To refine my sensors, to truly understand the nature of the energy I am observing, I require better components. More advanced materials."
She walked to her desk and picked up a sheet of paper. It was a list. "Your government has classified vast amounts of scientific research that they deem to be of military value. Journals on particle physics from the University of Chicago. Technical specifications for the newest vacuum tubes from the laboratories of General Electric. Raw, unrefined samples of certain rare earth metals. Materials I cannot acquire through official channels."
She handed him the list. "You will no longer be my liaison, Agent Donovan. You will be my procurement agent. You will use your network of spies and smugglers not to hunt for political secrets, but to acquire the tools I need for my work. This is your new mission. This is your new price for my continued silence."
Donovan looked at the list. It was a smuggler's dream and a security nightmare. It detailed requests for classified physics papers, schematics for advanced electronics, and even a small quantity of pitchblende—a uranium-bearing ore. He looked up from the paper, into her cold, demanding eyes.
He came to China to run a spy ring, to command a secret war, to topple a god. He had been outmaneuvered by his target, had his mission rendered obsolete by her genius, and was now being demoted to the role of a high-tech smuggler for a rogue scientist who was running a race far more important than his own.
He had no leverage. He had no choice. His country's best hope of understanding, and perhaps one day countering, the Emperor's power now rested entirely in the hands of this brilliant, amoral, and terrifyingly ambitious woman. He had to keep her working. He had to keep her on his side, even if he was now the junior partner in their deadly enterprise.
He gave a slow, defeated nod, the gesture of a king surrendering his sword. "I will see what I can do."
Dr. Chen took the nod not as a sign of cooperation, but as the simple acceptance of a new, unassailable fact. "I know you will, Agent," she said. "You are, if nothing else, a survivor."