Half a world away from the chaos in Lin Feng's dojo, under the hallowed domes of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the air was just as thick, but with the scent of ozone, cold coffee, and intellectual desperation. Here, in a shielded, lead-lined laboratory in the sub-basement of the physics department, Jack Wilson was hunched over a containment field, his brilliant mind utterly captivated.
To Jack, the world outside his lab was a collection of inconvenient variables. Sleep was a necessary evil, and human interaction was an inefficient method of data transfer. His reality was the hum of high-powered servers, the scrawl of quantum field theory equations on his whiteboard, and the object of his two-month-long obsession: Specimen 734.
It was a piece of meteorite, officially. But it was unlike any celestial rock he had ever analyzed. It was a crystalline shard, no larger than his fist, with a dark, obsidian-like surface that seemed to drink the light. It emitted no discernible radiation, yet it possessed a mass and density that defied conventional physics. The government men in their black suits who had delivered it had been tight-lipped, speaking only of "anomalous energy signatures" and "national security implications." To Jack, it was simply the most beautiful puzzle he had ever seen.
He was running a chroniton resonance scan, a highly theoretical procedure he'd designed himself, when the crimson streaks began to paint the sky outside. Jack didn't notice. His entire world was focused on the monitor, where a single, impossible waveform was beginning to emerge from the data stream.
"No way..." he breathed, leaning closer. The specimen was reacting. Its internal structure was fluctuating, pulsing with a rhythm that was growing stronger, matching a frequency that Jack had only ever seen in models of stellar core collapse.
The low hum from the containment field began to climb in pitch, becoming a piercing whine. Red lights flashed on the control panel. ALARM: CONTAINMENT FIELD INSTABILITY.
"Come on, come on, give me the data," Jack muttered, his fingers flying across the keyboard, bypassing safety protocols he himself had written. Arrogance and genius were a potent cocktail. He was on the verge of a breakthrough, and no pesky safety warning was going to stop him.
The crystal at the heart of the chamber stopped humming and began to glow. A soft, internal crimson light, like a dying star being reborn. It pulsed once, twice, and on the third pulse, it unleashed a wave of pure, silent energy.
The wave didn't explode. It simply expanded.
The reinforced glass of the containment chamber turned to dust without a sound. The energy washed over Jack, not as a physical force, but as an intimate violation. It felt like his every cell was being simultaneously torn apart and rewritten. The last thing he saw before his world went black was the waveform on his monitor spiking into infinity.
He awoke to the sterile smell of antiseptic and the rhythmic beeping of a heart monitor. A nurse was checking his vitals, her expression a mixture of concern and bewilderment.
"Mr. Wilson. You gave us quite a scare," she said. "There was a massive power surge. Fried the entire wing. You were found unconscious on the floor of your lab."
Jack sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. He felt... nothing. No headache, no dizziness. In fact, he felt better than he had in years. The chronic ache in his shoulder from an old sports injury was gone. His vision, usually corrected by thick glasses, was perfectly sharp.
"I feel fine," he said, his voice clear and steady. Too steady. He slid off the bed, his movements fluid and balanced in a way they had never been before. He felt a surge of energy, a coiled readiness in his muscles that was entirely new. He dismissed the nurse's protests, his mind already racing, piecing together the impossible data points. The surge. The specimen. The changes in his own body.
He bluffed his way past campus security and back to his lab, now sealed with thick hazard tape. Inside, the scene was one of controlled chaos. Equipment was fried, metal was warped, and a fine gray dust coated everything. And there, in the center of the floor, lay Specimen 734. It was no longer glowing, its surface once again a flat, light-absorbing black.
He approached it cautiously, then knelt, his physicist's curiosity overpowering any sense of self-preservation. He reached out and picked it up. It was cool to the touch. As his fingers closed around the crystal, a nearby bank of destroyed servers sparked. A single monitor, its screen shattered, flickered to life for a brief second, displaying a string of corrupted code before dying again.
Jack froze. He looked from the inert crystal in his hand to the dead server, and back again. He understood. The crystal wasn't just an object of study. It was a power source. A battery of unimaginable potential. And the energy it had unleashed hadn't just destroyed his lab.
It had charged him.
A slow smile spread across Jack Wilson's face. This wasn't a setback. This wasn't an accident. This was the beginning. The greatest variable had just been introduced into the equation of human history, and he was the first one to get a chance to solve for x.