Alicia Alicia read Jiang Bailu’s condition in a heartbeat, like a hawk fixing on a wounded hare.

“Get her on the workshop’s loading platform,” she said, crisp as a bell rung in fog.

She didn’t wait for Yekase to speak. She flicked her hand; the workshop door swung open like a curtain lifting, and she waved them in.

Yekase jogged to the room where Alice had fitted her in a doll shell last time, laid Jiang Bailu flat like a skiff set on a dry dock. She glanced back; Alice drifted in, slow as smoke.

“My work isn’t cheap. Be ready.”

“Name your price.”

Money’s one thing; life is another. They’d made a pact to snatch the Golden Apple together, a bridge not yet crossed. Alice wouldn’t choose now to make trouble or tear a pact that hadn’t even begun to matter.

What Yekase feared were zealots—the deranged ones who spent blood like loose change. Negotiation and schemes turned to paper scraps in their wind. Tricks that worked on other freaks fell flat. Alice was textbook lawful evil. Her methods were knives honed on stone, tempered inside a Sinister Organization.

Alice tapped her workshop privileges, lantern-light through mist, probing the wreck inside Jiang Bailu. By the loading platform she raised Sorcery; runes flickered and danced on her fingertips, polarity and essence flipping like a school of fish. She offered no explanations, yet hid no steps.

Yekase watched, tracing currents in a river, parsing how she guided Sorcery and picked runes.

She found the Sorcery streamlines had direction, like wind with a compass. That clashed with the old notion of energy. Even Super-class Infinite Power couldn’t break that bedrock rule laid at creation. Only one explanation fit: Sorcery wasn’t “energy” in the usual sense.

Another de-listing for Infinite Power?

Wait. No one ever said Infinite Power had to be energy—

A wire flipped inside. Infinite Force Perception kicked like an arrow loosed. Yekase’s gaze pierced the roof of the Rabbit Hole and reached for the World Tree, its crown like a sea of leaves.

Right. Sorcery is a vector. Energy is a scalar.

So Sorcery isn’t energy. What’s so hard to accept?

Then what is it?

Answer: it’s an effect.

At heart, Sorcery is the product of some existence running some process. A sliver shows up in human cognition, a glint on open water, while the unseen bulk sits like an iceberg under the sea.

Right now, Yekase glimpsed a corner of that iceberg.

Her mind didn’t drown. It hovered like a gull above waves, watching from a place with no distance.

She saw the true shape of the Magus Hub.

Endless phantom lines looped out and back from that point, stepping perception up to tiers beyond human grasp. Her evolved Flash Energy shielded her mind, like eclipse glass, letting her stare into the sun.

Under the roots of the World Tree lay… an apple split in two.

Its skin flowed with golden light, as if cast from pure gold. All streamlines poured from the stem at the top and converged in the hollow at the base, like rivers to a delta. Between the two facing halves, over a small gap, dense parallel lines stitched them tenuously together.

That was Sorcery’s origin—the true face of the Magus Hub.

The Sorcery millions tap each day is a tiny slice, cut from the pure flow moving left half to right half. Against the ceaseless flux across that cut flesh, it’s less than a handful scooped from the sea.

“You’ve seen it.”

Alice’s voice rang beside her, in a not-quite-void where everything else dimmed like stars at dawn.

“Mm. I saw it.”

“Then you know what those Sorcery streamlines really are.”

“…A magnetic field, plugged into a Baseplate and loaded with Mystery.”

As mages use Celestial Speech to access the Newton Baseplate, and the HW array to access the Concept Baseplate, the Golden Apple converts and amplifies—Earth’s natural magnetic field plugs into a Baseplate, splits from its prototype, and mutates into a Sorcery field.

“Correct. I call that state ‘Magigenesis.’”

Alice sounded like she’d expected Yekase to pierce a question most mages never even ask, that familiar edge of impatience in her voice, dry as winter air.

“The kid’s out of danger. Keep attuning.”

“…Thank you.”

Yekase thanked her aloud, but inside she muttered. Those two shouldn’t have met. “The kid” sounded awfully fond. Why don’t I get that treatment…

Truth was, Alicia Alicia—famous in Mysidia—was the most “approachable” of the Longlifers Yekase knew. Toward mortals who’d never reach her height, she kept a lofty distance and leisure, like keeping pets in a sunlit garden.

And anyone she bothered to needle was, without exception, someone she deemed able or likely to stand as her equal.

Yekase’s divergent mind leapt like lightning to two axioms:

Axiom 1: In a purely physical setup, an electron and a positron collide and produce two photons.

Axiom 2: Add a sapient observer to that setup, and two standard quanta of Flash Energy appear.

She’d long taken those as givens, yet never asked—no precedent nudged her there—whether Flash Energy and photons shared a deeper bond than an origin story.

Magigenesis: the act of granting Mystery to phenomena.

Sorcery is the Magigenesis of a magnetic field.

Then… is Flash Energy the Magigenesis of a photon?

Yekase jolted, memory flashing like a struck match. In an early archive—papers that didn’t even treat Flash Energy as a standalone Infinite Power—someone had slapped a provisional label on it—

“Photon Force.”

Looking back, wasn’t that the answer?!

The tangible world split before her like that buried Golden Apple, yet overlaid at once, layers inseparable. A world of basic forces, un-magigenized. And a world of Infinite Power after Magigenesis.

Divide them, and a tangle clears like silt settling in water.

The answers had always been there.

The future of Infinite Power, and of humanity with it… had always been there.

Yekase couldn’t hold back the joy of staring truth in the eye. She called out, voice ringing like bronze:

“Dao-ye, I get it!”

…

Soville City, shaken but unscarred, snapped back to its festival mood, lantern-bright and river-loud.

Lu Yao fetched the Giant Killer’s mech wreckage with a mechanical arm, hauling it back for study, like a fisherman with a steel catch. Ling Yi used Lu Yao’s trick and slipped into the oil painting; under a waterfall, in a little cabin, she met four tiny painters, brush-tips like fireflies. Dorothy burned through a day’s Sorcery and felt woozy; she found an inn and fell asleep like a stone sinking in a lake.

On streets alive with tourists again, a woman in a white-and-gold gown sprinted, lifting her hem, a savage scar raking her face like a claw mark.

“Unforgivable… unforgivable…!”

Her gaze raked the crowd like a scythe. Something slid from her sleeve into her palm; she clenched it like a pebble before a sling.

“Time and again you wrecked my art… You even destroyed ‘Giant Killer’! I have to make you swallow a real lesson now!”

This woman—the true “Giant Killer” long hidden in the crowd—was a puppeteer. Her craft couldn’t hold a candle to Alicia Alicia’s, but she carried sharp modern skills in hacking and demolition, steel thorns in silk. That’s how she clawed a cadre seat in the Shadow Realm War.

The cathedral explosives had been swapped for clownish fireworks. Her grand launch plan went up in smoke. Her secret black mech, “Giant Killer,” was even casually dismantled by two people mid-argument. The string of hits jolted and humiliated her like hail on tin. Her superior had told her to withdraw, but she just couldn’t swallow it.

No cameras watched Soville City. She used her body as cover and tossed the thing.

Bang!

A thick plume exploded on the pavement, rolling out like storm surf.

It flooded the street in a breath, shrouding every tourist in gray.

Try the Giant Killer’s custom smoke bomb!

She stood inside the haze and drew a sawed-off shotgun from under her skirt, a black tooth in the fog.

That’s right, it’s over—the heroes’ playtime ends here. No one will stop her. Those naive heroes won’t expect a big bad to slink back and pull a random street shooting.

That’s right—

“That thing’s real dangerous. I suggest you put it down.”

…

The voice spoke like the smoke itself. In a dozen words, its source circled the Giant Killer like a wind snake.

The Giant Killer clenched her gun and widened her eyes, a boar realizing the hounds had come.

Her voice tipped toward hysteria. “Who?! Who’s there?!”

The smoke-voice stayed unhurried, tea-calm. “Asking me? Hmm, let’s see… Nothing worth announcing. Just a retired ex-merc.”

Retired merc…

The Giant Killer exhaled. A merc wasn’t scary. Eight of ten were time-wasting hacks. The other two were too busy with million-credit contracts to vacation. And ten of ten were money-mad turncoats, reeds bending to any wind.

“I am Second Seat of the Shadow Realm War, ‘Giant Killer.’ Don’t ruin this. I’ll make it worth your while.”

As long as she dropped that title, this passing retired merc should hush up. It had always worked. Tonight had been rough enough to make her superstitious, but—

“I know. I’m here for you.”

—!!

The voice vanished overhead, like a hawk’s shadow.

She snapped a shot that way, hitting nothing. Then her legs felt a chill; her heavy hem had been sliced clean around without her noticing and dropped to the ground like shed bark.

A clatter followed—guns and explosives she’d hidden inside spilled out like nuts from a split shell.

Such blatant, swaggering provocation!

“You… you’re with those heroes!”

“And if I am?”

The voice showed on her left.

A white arc slashed on her right; her shotgun and her right hand dropped together, thudding like ripe fruit.

“—Urgh—aaah?!”

“And if I’m not?”

The voice came from her right.

A force seized her hair from behind. A knife idly sawed it off, straw under steel. She turned through wrist-stump pain and got a face full of her own severed hair, never once seeing the attacker.

Why didn’t the voice match the attack?

Next time… from where?

What angle? What weapon?

She’d thrown the smoke bomb, yet the other swam through it like a fish, while she became a lamb to the knife.

The Giant Killer dropped to her knees, shaking like sieve-shaken chaff, and stammered in collapse:

“No, no…”

“Hm? What’d you say? Want to guess where the next cut comes from?”

“Don’t come near me—aaah—!!”

…

“Too bad. Wrong guess.”