In the quiet, climate-controlled basement of the Project Chimera headquarters in London, the world was, for the moment, at peace. The frantic energy of the past few days had subsided into a tense, watchful waiting. Michael Abernathy was reviewing intelligence reports from India, while the American team was trying to build a psychological profile of Meng Tian. In the corner of the room, a strange and complex piece of equipment, cobbled together by the brightest minds of the now-secret Project Prometheus, sat silently. It was a highly sensitive magnetometer, interwoven with crystalline structures and delicate wiring, designed not to detect earthquakes or magnetic storms, but to listen for the specific, unnatural energy signature they now knew was associated with the Emperor. It had been silent ever since it was activated.
Until now.
Without any warning, the device shrieked to life. A high-pitched, warbling siren, piercing and insistent, filled the room, sending a jolt of pure adrenaline through every person present. It was an alarm no one had ever expected to hear.
"What in God's name is that?" the senior American intelligence officer, a man named Cutler, demanded.
Dr. Aris Thorne, a young, brilliant, and perpetually nervous physicist seconded from Project Prometheus, scrambled to the machine, his face draining of color as he looked at the frantically scribbling needles and glowing dials. "My God," he breathed, his voice a mixture of terror and scientific awe. "It's a resonance event. A massive one. The readings… they're off the scale."
The team, Abernathy included, crowded around the strange device, their political games forgotten in the face of this raw, scientific anomaly.
"Speak English, Thorne!" Cutler snapped. "What are we looking at?"
Thorne, his hands flying across a panel of switches to refine the data feed, struggled to translate the impossible into words. "We've detected an energy burst, sir. Incredibly brief—less than four seconds in duration—but the amplitude is… astronomical. It's not a natural phenomenon. Not an earthquake, not a solar flare. The energy signature is bizarre. It has properties of an immense electromagnetic pulse, but it's also exhibiting characteristics of… of what I can only describe as quantum resonance on a macro scale. It's as if someone briefly and violently shook the fabric of spacetime itself."
Abernathy felt a cold dread creep up his spine. He knew, instinctively, what this was. He looked at Cutler, whose own face was a grim mask. This was Roosevelt's "sharp stick." This was Dr. Chen.
"Where?" Abernathy asked, his voice tight. "Triangulate the source."
"On it," Thorne said, his fingers clattering across a telegraph key, sending urgent data requests to other, similar monitoring posts the alliance had secretly set up at naval bases and observatories in Gibraltar, Cape Town, and Singapore. Within moments, replies began to stream back in. Thorne furiously plotted the intersecting data points on a map of the world. The lines converged with chilling, absolute precision on a single spot.
He looked up from the map, his face pale. "The event was centered, with pinpoint accuracy, on the eastern industrial district of Shanghai."
The room fell silent. The implications were horrifying and undeniable. They had given Dr. Chen the uranium salts, the key to her atomic kingdom, and she had immediately used them to detonate a "supernatural bomb" in the middle of one of the world's most populous cities. They had authorized an experiment, hoping for a small, measurable tremor. They had instead triggered a metaphysical earthquake.
"Get me the President," Cutler ordered, his voice strained.
Minutes later, Theodore Roosevelt's voice, tinny and laced with static, came over the secure line from Washington. Abernathy, his own voice grim, explained the situation: the alarm from the Prometheus device, the energy readings that defied physics, the epicenter in Shanghai. He explained that their little experiment had just registered as a major geophysical event.
On the other end of the line, Roosevelt was silent for a long time. The hunter who had so eagerly wanted to poke the dragon had just learned that his stick was, in fact, a lightning rod. His angry, impulsive decision, born of frustration and a desire for action, had resulted in something far beyond his comprehension. For a moment, the brash confidence was gone, replaced by the profound, terrifying realization that he had unleashed a force he could not hope to control. The historian in him was screaming about the law of unintended consequences.
Thorne, the young scientist, who had continued to frantically analyze the stream of complex data from the event, suddenly gasped. "Wait… wait a minute. Sirs, there's something else."
"What is it, Doctor?" Abernathy pressed.
"There's a secondary reading," Thorne said, his voice trembling with a mixture of confusion and excitement. "It's incredibly faint, a whisper, an echo. But the signature… it's identical. The initial event in Shanghai, the massive energy burst… it seems to have triggered a sympathetic resonance. Another, much smaller, energy spike somewhere else in the world, at the exact same instant."
"Another one? Is it the Emperor moving in response?" Cutler asked.
"No, sir," Thorne said, shaking his head. "This isn't a response. It's a resonance. Like… like striking a tuning fork here causes an identical tuning fork across the room to vibrate. The energy didn't travel from Shanghai to this new location. It just… appeared there, simultaneously."
Abernathy's blood ran cold. "Doctor," he said, his voice dangerously quiet. "Where is the second location?"
Thorne finished his triangulation, his brow furrowed in concentration. The data was weak, the location far less precise than Shanghai. But the general area was unmistakable. He looked up from his instruments, his face a mask of pure bafflement.
"It's faint, sir, but the data points to a remote, sparsely populated region on the border of northern Manchuria and Siberia."
Abernathy stared at him, the final, horrifying piece of the puzzle slamming into place. He remembered the reports from his own agents, the reports he had initially dismissed as propaganda—Meng Tian's impossible, bloodless victories. He remembered the analysis from Project Chimera, the psychological profile that painted Meng Tian as a man of extraordinary, almost preternatural, strategic intuition.
He looked at Cutler, his face ashen. The American, a step behind, looked back, confused.
Abernathy explained, his voice a low, horrified whisper. "The tremor… the resonance… it didn't just strike the Emperor. It has also, somehow, resonated with the one other person on Earth we now have to assume carries a similar power."
He pointed a trembling finger at the spot on the map. "That is the precise location of Meng Tian's forward command."
Their attempt to poke one dragon had just revealed the undeniable, terrifying existence of a second. And in their recklessness, they had just rung a bell that could be heard by both.