50. A Beautiful Two-for-One Trade

A Beautiful Two-for-One Trade

The beam tearing through the air was as loud and dazzling as lightning.

Cheng Rui stood in the shadow of his tower with his eyes closed, still frowning as he tried to hide from the portion of the glare scattered through the air.

Chi Li was basically immune to heat at this point—actually, heat strengthened her—so the two of us stood there and witnessed the full power of Cheng Rui’s laser tower in operation.

I called it a laser because I was fairly certain the beam was almost perfectly monochromatic, and its pulses came so rapidly that all my senses except Force Sense perceived it as continuous.

But it was not only a laser.

Somehow, Cheng Rui had mixed free electrons into the beam, electrons moving far faster than electrons in natural lightning.

The laser burned a conductive path through the air. It did not merely ionize the atmosphere; it scattered every gas in its path completely, leaving behind an ultra-high-temperature near-vacuum that allowed the electrons to propagate without deviation.

That unimaginably powerful laser-electron beam struck the nearest lightning tower like the hammer of an angry giant.

It was both lightning and laser, and it immediately began burning into the tower’s solid iron frame.

But unlike lightning or laser, it did not stop.

It continued second after second, so bright it could not be looked at directly, until the tower’s frame began to glow.

After five seconds, the tower bent slightly.

Seven seconds after that, it started to droop like a candle under midsummer sun.

By the twenty-second mark, the middle of the tower had melted, and the lightning-spitting top collapsed out of sight.

After a few seconds spent aiming, Cheng Rui’s weapon began firing at the second lightning tower, with a similar result.

Chi Li and I stood in awe as the greatest threat the enemy could deploy physically melted before our eyes.

But as the second lightning tower began glowing an angry red, I saw Cheng Rui’s tower start to smoke.

One glance into its interior with Force Sense turned my brief concern into understanding. I quickly flew to Cheng Rui, used Force Adjustment to reduce the effect of the glare and roar on him, then let him look at the smoking section.

“I was afraid that would happen,” he told me with astonishing calm.

“We have about one minute to get away before the little surprise I prepared for our monster friends explodes.” He shrugged. “You and Chi Li might survive. Probably.”

He stared at me.

I stared back.

Then I grabbed him with one arm, flew to Chi Li, picked her up with the other, and flew away with both of them as fast as my present condition allowed.

One street.

Two streets.

Three streets.

I did not hear the second lightning tower fall so much as feel it, Force Sense catching the tiny shock wave.

“I see the three of you have exceeded expectations again,” Liya greeted us at the entrance to headquarters.

“Now put the idiot who designed a nuclear weapon and detonated it inside the blast radius on the table so I can heal him before he dies of his own stupidity.”

“Will he be all right?”

“If by all right you mean that he is on the verge of being killed by his own foolishness…”

Liya deliberately paused, adjusting her answer so it would trigger exactly the series of reactions required for the events she had spent eleven planetary rotations cultivating.

She rolled her eyes—or performed something analogous to it—and released a carefree, confident feeling that relaxed both me and Chi Li.

At the same time, that feeling propagated beyond the world, destructively interfering with several earlier influences and thereby preventing one hundred and thirty-seven accidents, nine strokes, and one tornado that her actions would otherwise have indirectly caused.

The farther one could see along the tree of causality, the greater one’s responsibility for events.

Having completed that, she began the healing.

Cheng Rui’s body had been badly damaged, even fragmented in places, by the relatively high-energy waves emitted by the weapon he had designed and built.

The damage had far exceeded the capacity of spiritual repair. The portions of his pattern responsible for environmental energy and material exchange would soon fail, followed shortly by the portions that maintained intelligence and consciousness.

In our terms, he was dying.

Though that did not mean what we thought it meant.

To avoid the trouble of having to resolve that kind of teleological misunderstanding, Liya poured in an enormous amount of energy.

Also, in truth, she rather liked this budding intelligence, whose greatest wish was the pursuit of truth and knowledge.

Cheng Rui’s… body glowed strangely, releasing trace quantities of magic across all… frequencies, for lack of a more suitable local word.

With enough knowledge and precision, it would be possible to restore his pattern with less energy than a local used to take one step.

On the other hand, because someone had requested healing, providing healing was permitted.

With a sufficiently creative interpretation of certain treaties, excessively overusing a basic bruise-removal spell could still count as healing under these circumstances.

If, due to inefficiency, the spell happened to require enough raw magical energy to levitate a mountain in order to fully heal the target, well, who could possibly have foreseen that?

And if the unused excess magic had certain effects on the environment that some people might complain about… then they should have lobbied for better-worded treaties.

As Cheng Rui’s pattern slowly returned to a less damaged state, it also adapted, to an extremely tiny degree, to the vast energy flowing through it.

One million six hundred eighty-four thousand one hundred and thirteen distinct information structures underwent subtle changes.

Their meaning and content did not change. Editing the personality and thoughts of a living being was deeply frowned upon.

However, they did become more streamlined, like the locals’ crude information-storage devices after defragmentation.

They also harmonized with one another, aligning themselves with the nature of the energy flowing through them, forming new patterns through the coordination of smaller ones.

Just as the patterns of people could become a nation, the patterns of thoughts could become magic.