The weeks bled together. I stopped counting after the first handful. Day, night, didn't matter much when most of my time was spent hunched over scrap or buried in books that weren't helping.
Vasha was always there, though.
Not in the room obviously, but in my head. Some nights I caught myself waiting, like I'd hear her humming in the kitchen or cursing at a stubborn pan. Other nights it was worse, waking from dreams that felt too close to premonitions—snapshots of futures I didn't want to admit were possible. I had to shut those down hard. Couldn't let myself spiral.
There was only one future I was willing to accept: she was alive, and I was getting her back. Full stop.
So yeah, the worry stayed, always there under the surface. But I couldn't let it take the wheel. If I burned time pacing circles and chewing my nails, I'd just be weaker when it mattered. And weaker didn't cut it.
So I threw myself into research.
The realization about my sensitivity fading away stuck in the back of my mind like a splinter. If I was right, it would be a disaster. But the truth was, I couldn't do anything about it. I had no tools for fixing the Ezra-gap in my head. No technique, no precedent. Trying to brute force the problem with meditation had already proven useless.
So I made a choice. Even if that ticking clock was real, it didn't matter right now. I still had years left before it caught up to me, and those years needed to count.
Rescuing Vasha came first. That wasn't negotiable. And once she was safe, keeping her safe came next. The galaxy wasn't kind, and the Empire was the single biggest reason for that. If I wanted her to live without looking over her shoulder, the Empire had to go, one way or another.
That was the hierarchy. Her safety over everything else.
If boosting my midichloreans could make me strong enough to hit harder, move faster, or even tilt the fall of the Empire a little sooner, then it was worth the grind. Worth burning through nights of failure. Even if it didn't solve the long-term decay eating at me, it might give me the power I needed while I still had time left on the clock.
After that… well, after that the galaxy could do what it wanted. I just had to make sure Palpatine didn't get some golden ticket to crawl back from the grave. Once the Empire was finished, even if I lost the Force completely, I'd have other ways to keep her safe. That was enough.
Days into nights, nights into mornings, each one the same cycle: scavenge, tinker, fail, scribble half-legible notes, repeat. By the end of it, I didn't have a breakthrough. I had a wall.
A big, immovable, "fuck-you-for-trying" kind of wall.
The short version or fact I came to realize - Midichlorians were untouchable. Physically, chemically, conceptually. Everything I threw at them bounced right off.
First I tried the physical route. Dropped a pile of credits on the best black-market microscope I could find — the one the seller swore had "near-atomic" magnification if you fed it good coolant and a prayer. It let me see nuclei, mitochondria, the whole messy plumbing inside a cell. It was satisfying for a morning. Then I tried to find the tiny pinpricks I'd always seen when I closed my eyes.
Nothing.
I could map out cell walls, watch cytoplasm streaming like city traffic, but the midichlorians? Not a trace. They didn't show up as particles, organelles, or weird specks. The instrument that let me spy on ribosomes and bacterial invaders couldn't so much as hint at what my senses claimed was there. If I couldn't see them even with that, mechanical manipulation was out. You can't solder what you can't see.
Chemistry was supposed to be kinder. So I locked myself in for weeks with half a dozen textbooks, advanced biochemistry, enzymology, a few dusty volumes on separation techniques, and another dozen papers I'd scavenged from university surplus drives. I read like a man trying to memorise a map to a city he'd never visited.
There were methods for everything: centrifuges that could peel a cell apart by density, stains that stuck to nucleic acids, columns that could isolate proteins by charge or size, electrophoresis to separate molecules by mass, mass spectrometers that could fingerprint compounds down to their atomic arrangements. The galaxy had inventors for every tiny corner of life.
None of it helped.
The reason was the kicker: midichlorians don't behave like molecules you can coax out of a cell and study under glass. They're tied to the Living Force. Tied in a way that made normal extraction techniques pointless.
Simply speaking, Midichlorians only exist in the living.
I learned that the hard way with a stupid blood sample. I pricked my finger, pipetted a drop, and—because old habits die hard—I pushed my perception into the sample out of curiosity.
For a beat, there they were: a dense glitter of life, exactly like in me, like mad pinpoint lights. Then, within seconds, the sparkle was gone. Poof. Like someone hit a cutoff switch.
Vanished. No debris, no residue. Not dead in the sense of rot and cell rupture—just gone. The living-force signal around that bit of blood collapsed and whatever had been there wasn't visible to hyper-perception anymore. I watched, mouth dry, as billions of glowing points winked out because I'd removed them from their host.
Teleportation? Dissolution? Return to some cosmic junkyard? I had guesses - a dozen, actually but none of them useful. All I could say was this: take the sample out of the host, and the Force treats it as dead. Dead makes midichlorians disappear.
Was I missing something? Because I did remember the whole clone thing Palpatine did in the latest trilogy. If just taking cells out of body killed the midichloreans, then how did they do it? I had no idea and what I had been able to understand wasn't giving any clues.
That single fact nuked a lot of techniques off the table. No centrifuge would save them if the Force no longer acknowledged the sample. Chemical fingerprints were meaningless if the agent you wanted simply stopped existing outside a living system.
You could grind, filter, heat, freeze, fix, and stain until the walls shook and you'd still end up with nothing.
So then I turned to questions that weren't methods so much as biology trivia with implications a lunatic would love: how do they arise, exactly? Do they reproduce? Do they have generations? How do children end up with more midichlorians than their parents sometimes — is that even real or just a statistical fluke people chalk up to heredity?
If midichlorians could replicate inside cells, why did counts per cell stay roughly constant for an individual throughout life? If they couldn't replicate, where did offspring get extra copies? New ones popping into existence? Transference from somewhere? Did a living organism automatically got their midichloreans after some cosmic lottery?
None of the standard rules of biology seemed to fit cleanly.
Every path forked into more confusion.
At some point, I caught myself pacing in circles, muttering equations that weren't even real. I had a notebook full of arrows, question marks, and the occasional "FUCK" scrawled across entire pages. It was the research equivalent of banging my head against durasteel.
I started comparing it to physics back home. Like some first-year undergrad deciding to crack the Grand Unified Theory after reading a Wikipedia summary. That was me. I had no data, no baseline, no instruction manual. Just vibes.
And then there was the Ezra problem. The psychological hole in my head that made the Force answers come back scrambled. The biological side refused to cooperate with lab tools, and the mental side refused to cooperate with intention.
I thought about the obvious option: training. Real Jedi training, holocrons, masters who'd been living and teaching for centuries. Unfortunately the closest temple on my home planet had a parental lock on it — literally needed an apprentice-master pair to open certain wards. Even if I could bypass that (which I couldn't), I doubted my current level of force-sensitivity would let me in without someone noticing.
The fantasy plan was dumb and elaborate: tunnel under the temple, pick the lock with a crowbar and a prayer, smuggle out whatever knowledge I could. It was cinematic until I remembered Lothal's patrols and the Empire's appetite for "unauthorized archaeology." No way I was digging a molehill that would lead right to the Emperor's attention.
Imagine some Imperial scout stumbling across the entrance, phoning up Palpatine, and boom—congratulations, I just gift-wrapped the key to all space and time for Emperor Ball-Sacks himself. Yeah, no thanks.
Besides, the temple probably had some cranky Force ghost waiting to fry the first idiot with a shovel. Not on my bucket list.
And honestly? I had plans for that temple. Long-term ones. Totally noble. Maybe pull Aayla Secura out of Order 66 and let her retire on my couch. Or, if I was feeling ambitious, fish someone like Satele Shan out of the Old Republic and teach her how comfy slippers are. Purely altruistic. Strictly humanitarian purposes. A public service, really. Definitely nothing creepy about it.
Could the Force even get mad if I swapped a dying Person X with an identical Person Y, then let history keep rolling? No paradox, right? Just creative accounting.
Anyway. That train of thought went way off the rails. Again.
The point was simple: I knew jack shit. Midichlorians weren't lab specimens. They weren't things you could freeze, stain, extract, or inject. They were the Force's business, not mine.
And I was still locked out of the manual.
So what did I actually have, after weeks of chasing my tail? A pile of broken equipment, some bloody bandages, and one conclusion carved into stone:
If I wanted answers, they weren't going to come from microscopes and test tubes.
They'd have to come from the Force itself.
If I couldn't pry midichlorians out with glass and reagents, maybe I could persuade them to show up on their own terms.
Ethically dubious. Vaguely clever. Perfect for a sleep-deprived lunatic with access to a busted workshop and bad ideas.
My volunteer was Nibbles, a loth-rat who had once chewed through a comms cable and somehow lived to be forgiven. I'd spotted him months ago in the ducts, and today he showed up again—staring at me from the corner with those blank, too-big eyes like he'd smelled food.
He wasn't tame. He wasn't even smart. But he wasn't afraid of me either, which put him at that dangerous overlap of "recurring nuisance" and "available test subject."
I told myself it would be quick. I told myself a lot of things.
First advantage of using a living creature was immediate.
Turn Hyper-Perception inward and then feed it outward—the Living Force lit up like a city at night. Midichlorians glowed in the stream, pinpricks of light riding the currents.
On Nibbles they were obvious, hundreds of little sparks clustered like dust motes in sunlight.
The sight alone felt obscene, sacred, and gross, depending on which second I looked at it.
I started small. Gentle pushes with the Force. Coaxing motions. Little nudges, like trying to herd fish.
Nibbles sniffed at the floor, whiskers twitching, and the midichlorians moved with him. Not because of me. Because that's how they always moved—following the current of life, not my clumsy hands.
I tried again. Harder. Different angles. Pressure instead of pull. Nothing.
An hour passed. Then another.
At some point I was standing over a very confused rodent, sweating, muttering curses under my breath while absolutely nothing happened.
The midichlorians didn't budge. Not a flicker.
It was like they weren't just untouchable by science—they were untouchable by the Force itself.
I lost it for a while.
Threw a wrench across the room. Kicked over a pile of scrap. Sat on the floor with my head in my hands and laughed like a maniac because of course—of course the universe would hand me the one problem that couldn't be solved with either brute force or basic cheating.
Eventually I calmed down.
Barely.
Call it intuition or delusion, but I had a feeling that Force was the key to my problem, through I didn't knew how or what type of key it was.
Hell, there were multi-dozens techniques of using Force in different ways, some from sith, some from jedi. Perhaps if his galaxy was from legends instead of canon, an couple dozens from the many sects and cults. Through with that addition, it would also open up the future and present to even more cosmic horror stories.
The gist was, there was so much to try, so much to do in the basket of possibilities for me to accept so fast.
That was the only way forward.
I let Nibbles go, muttering an apology he didn't care about.
He waddled toward the corner, sniffed at a pile of washers, then got his head stuck in an empty can before wriggling free.
Dumb little thing. Too dumb to realize he'd just survived a brush with mad science.
My eyes drifted after him, and that's when they caught on something else.
The old polearm leaned against the wall where I'd shoved it months ago. The one I'd stolen from that ruin. Force-imbued. Vision-inducing. A stick that liked to screw with your brain.
The thought came uninvited.
Maybe I should try it again. Maybe for training. Maybe even for answers.
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A/N:got a bit late as the chapter was tad technical to write. wanted to do the trial scene in this chapter but my mind wasn't really supporting the bandwidth required for that so maybe next chapter. Next chap would be the final one on lothal i think.
And next chapter wouldn't come before 26th I fear because of, ya know, exams in series. So don't forget to vote lest the fic ends up at the bottom of rankings.
In return, I will give an longer chapter on 26th and then another chapter on 28th.