The secret research facility was a world unto itself, a pristine, white island of science and reason adrift in a sea of imperial superstition. It was part university laboratory, part maximum-security prison, buried deep within a secluded valley west of the capital. Here, behind electrified fences and platoons of the Emperor's most loyal guards, Dr. Chen Linwei and the prodigy Chen Jian were engaged in a desperate race to understand a power that defied all known laws of physics.
Their work had taken on a new, frantic urgency. The pressure from the throne was now relentless, a constant, crushing weight. Shen Ke had become a near-permanent fixture at the facility, a silent, black-robed specter of the Emperor's will, his presence a constant reminder of the stakes.
He had arrived that morning with a new, non-negotiable directive. The news of the German U-boat specialists en route to China had reached the Emperor. Qin Shi Huang, a man who instinctively understood the concept of asymmetrical warfare, now demanded a parallel weapon of his own. His order, relayed by Shen Ke, was terrifying in its simple, brutal logic.
"You created a resonance weapon in Shanghai," Shen Ke had stated, his voice devoid of emotion as he addressed Dr. Chen in her primary laboratory. "A field of energy that could harm the Son of Heaven from a distance. The Emperor now requires a version of that weapon that he can wield. He wants a projectile. He wants a concentrated, weaponized piece of the Dragon's Spark that can be fired from a cannon. He is demanding a supernatural artillery piece."
Dr. Chen Linwei stared at him, her face a mask of horror and scientific outrage. "That's impossible," she said, her voice shaking slightly, not with fear, but with the frustration of a master physicist being asked to perform a magic trick. "Spymaster, you don't understand. What happened in Shanghai was an accident. An uncontrolled, omnidirectional wave of chaotic energy. We almost leveled a city block. Focusing that kind of power into a stable, projectable, and aimable form is a problem of fundamental physics that could take us a decade to solve! It would require a complete rethinking of… of everything we know about energy and matter!"
Shen Ke's reply was as cold and unyielding as the winter ground. "The Emperor does not believe in decades. He believes in results. You will find a way." He then turned and left the laboratory, leaving the impossible demand hanging in the sterile air behind him.
Under this immense, crushing pressure, the already volatile partnership between Dr. Chen and the young prodigy Chen Jian reached its breaking point. For weeks, they had been at a theoretical impasse. Dr. Chen, trained in the methodical, cautious traditions of Western science, was focused on containment. She was trying to build a magnetic "bottle" that was strong enough to hold the chaotic energy of the Spark, an approach that was proving to be a frustrating and dangerous failure. Every time they managed to generate a nascent spark, it would violently decay within microseconds, releasing a dangerous burst of radiation.
"We need a stronger field! More power!" Chen Jian insisted, his youthful face flushed with impatience, his eyes gleaming with a reckless, feverish light. He was a creature of pure, intuitive genius, unburdened by the years of formal training that cautioned his mentor.
"More power will just create a more violent collapse, Jian!" Dr. Chen countered, her voice sharp with exhaustion. "We are trying to cage a storm! A bigger cage won't tame it!"
"That's because you are wrong!" Chen Jian suddenly shouted, slamming his hand down on a console. "You keep thinking of it as energy, as something to be contained! It's not! It's alive! The Emperor… his power is not a machine, it is a part of him. The Spark is not a storm to be caged. It is a fire that needs fuel!"
He began scribbling frantically on a blackboard, his chalk flying as he poured out a radical, dangerous, and utterly brilliant new theory. He argued that the Dragon's Spark was not just a form of exotic energy, but a unique state of quasi-sentient, living matter. It did not obey the laws of thermodynamics in the conventional sense. Its instability was not decay; it was starvation. To stabilize it, they did not need to build a stronger cage. They needed to feed it.
Dr. Chen stared at the elegant, terrifying equations on the board. It was a leap of logic that was both insane and, on some deep, intuitive level, horrifyingly correct. It explained everything: the power's strange, almost biological behavior, its connection to a living host. The risks were astronomical, but the potential breakthrough was undeniable.
They set up the experiment. The central laboratory was a great, circular room, dominated by the main containment unit—a sphere of reinforced crystal and chrome, surrounded by a complex array of massive electromagnets and resonating quartz tuning forks. They evacuated all non-essential personnel from the facility.
From the shielded control room, they began the process. Power surged through the electromagnets, their deep hum rising to a deafening thrum. The great quartz crystals began to vibrate, emitting a high-pitched, harmonic tone that seemed to make the air itself shimmer. Inside the containment sphere, a point of golden light appeared, flickering, unstable. With painstaking effort, they nurtured it, fed it pure electrical energy, until it grew into a shimmering, fist-sized ball of golden plasma—a captured, infant Dragon's Spark.
As Dr. Chen had predicted, it was immediately unstable. Their instruments showed it was shedding energy at a catastrophic rate, its structure on the verge of violent collapse.
"It's decaying!" she shouted.
"Now!" Chen Jian yelled, his eyes glued to his own console. "Introduce the catalyst! Feed it!"
Dr. Chen took a deep breath and nodded to the technician beside her. "Engage the manipulator."
A robotic arm, its steel claws holding a small, terrified lab rat, extended into the containment sphere. It moved the living creature towards the shimmering ball of light.
The result was instantaneous, silent, and utterly horrifying. The moment the rat's biological energy field touched the edge of the Spark, it was simply… unmade. It did not burn. It did not explode. It did not even have time to scream. Its physical form, its matter, its very essence, dissolved into a stream of pure, white energy that was immediately and hungrily absorbed by the golden sphere.
The mote of light flared with a blinding, triumphant brilliance. Its size instantly doubled. Its chaotic, flickering instability vanished, replaced by a perfect, serene, and terrifying stability. Their instruments went wild. The energy readings had gone off the scale.
They had done it. They had stabilized the Spark. They had found its secret. The Dragon's Spark, the Emperor's divine gift, was a form of energy that consumed the life force of living things to sustain and empower itself.
Dr. Chen stumbled back from the console, a hand clamped over her mouth, her mind reeling in revulsion and pure, primal terror. She had not created a weapon. She had created a monster. She had caged a sliver of pure, life-consuming entropy.
Chen Jian, however, was ecstatic. He was laughing, a wild, unhinged sound of pure intellectual triumph. "It worked! It worked! I was right! It's a predator! It feeds!"
Shen Ke, who had been watching the entire experiment on a shielded monitor from his own private observation room, remained perfectly silent. His face was unreadable, but his mind was already, with cold, brutal clarity, grasping the limitless military and strategic applications of what he had just witnessed.
Dr. Chen stared at the object of her creation—the beautiful, stable, serenely glowing golden sphere of energy that now floated calmly in the center of the containment unit. It was an object of unimaginable power, born from a horrific, absolute sacrifice. And in that moment of terrible clarity, a second, even more horrifying realization crashed down upon her.
The Emperor's "divine affliction." The nosebleeds after a great exertion of his power. The periods of profound exhaustion. She finally understood. It wasn't a side effect. It wasn't a weakness. It was the cost.
The Emperor's own life force was the fuel for his power. Every time he used his supernatural senses, every time he performed a feat of impossible strength or will, he was, in essence, consuming a piece of himself. His greatest weapon, the very thing that made him a god among men, was also the thing that was slowly, inexorably, killing him.
She now held, in her mind, the two most dangerous secrets in the world. She held the secret to creating a weapon that could make him a true god. And she held the secret to his one, true, and ultimate mortality.