How was making a rubber bouncy ball shift into R1 different from removing a ball of cancer? At it’s most basic level, there was no difference at all. If I could surround it with a field, then I could shift it to another layer of reality and I didn’t have to bring it back to the same place that I took it from. Wasn’t that essentially what surgery did? Surgeons opened up the body and cut out the cancer. I could do the same thing, but without cutting into the body.

The idea stunned me and its sheer simplicity rocked my reality. I could remove things. Why hadn’t I seen this possibility before? I’d been so focused on learning about my ability and its rules that I’d overlooked the simplest applications of that knowledge. I mentally kicked myself for my stupidity. This is just the kind of thing that I was missing out on by not sharing my secret with dad, Eva and James. One of them would have worked this out months ago.

Figuring that I’d wasted enough time already, I opened my computer and started researching all about cancer removal surgeries. I quickly learned that using my abilities to remove things would be enormously helpful in certain ways, but in other ways it would be a real challenge.

When it came to cancer surgeries, it seemed that there were three types of problems that you could encounter. The first was the surgery itself. Surgery involved cutting open the body and that meant that infection could set in. Cutting someone open is also very stressful to the body and many cancer patients were already very weak from the results of the cancer. Blood loss was another factor that had to be taken into account. All these factors worked in my favor as my method of cancer removal would bypass these issues.

However, the other types of problems that cancer surgeries had, I would have to work around as well. These problems had to do with the where and how the cancer was distributed in the body. Sometimes the cancer was too close to or wrapped around a vital organ and removing it could end up killing the patient. Other times, the cancer wasn’t localized into a mass or a ball that could be removed but was instead distributed around the body in smaller clusters of cells. In both of these cases, surgery was ruled out in favor of other treatment methods, such as chemotherapy and medication. I felt confident that with practice, these wouldn’t be insurmountable issues for my abilities.

As I continued my research, I also found that even when surgeons removed a mass of cancer, there was still the possibility that they’d miss a bit of it and the cancer would eventually regrow. That meant that if I were to shift out the cancer, my control of my field would have to be precise enough to detect and surround individual cells. I had never used my field so precisely and didn’t even know if that level of precision was possible. So far, I only worked with entire objects that were large enough to be seen by the naked eye.

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This was going to take a lot of work and I didn’t know if I’d have enough time to develop my abilities in time to save Evan. Despite the great time he’d had earlier today, he was fading fast and might only last another week. I’d spent months ratcheting up my power to be able to do the things I could. How was I going to be able to learn enough control in less than one week?

Maybe I wouldn’t have to remove the cancer in one shot. What if I could remove a part of it, weakening it, and giving Evan more time? I could keep on removing more and more of the cancer, buying me time to learn enough control to get rid of it entirely. Who knows, if I kept taking out chunks of the cancer, it just might give up and shrivel away.

With that happy thought, I worked on a plan to increase my skills. I would start off with practicing on inanimate objects and move on to live test subjects when I’d gained some skill. Looking around the room for some inspiration, my eyes lit on a pencil on my desk. Could I remove the graphite center of the pencil from the wood surrounding it?

I wrapped the pencil in a field and scanned it. The parts were easy to identify. There was a rubber eraser at the end, a piece of aluminum holding it in place, the wood shaft of the pencil and the graphite core. I focused on the core, put a field around it and activated it into R2. That was surprisingly easy. I now had an empty pencil and I scanned it again to check if there was still any graphite residue that I’d left behind. I couldn’t detect any, but that didn’t mean much. I hadn’t tried to detect such minute amounts before.

While searching for ore with Mark, I’d gotten used to finding ton quantities, but I’d had no trouble finding gemstones and diamonds in the gram quantities. However, this was several orders of magnitude smaller than that. Looking at the empty space in the pencil, I could see some grey residue where the graphite used to be, so I knew that there was some graphite left. That knowledge led me to try scanning again, this time focusing on only a small part of the pencil and trying to blow up the image in my mind. I had to teach my field to zoom in closer and closer by shrinking the area of the field progressively and seeing what information I was getting.

After a lot of trial and error, my field finally showed me the graphite residue. By that time, my field had contracted so small that I couldn’t see it anymore. However, I could still feel it in my mind and sense the small particles of graphite. They were so tiny and I wasn’t sure if I could make a field that small. I tried anyways and was partially rewarded with a minuscule field that surrounded several particles of graphite, along with some of the wood. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good for a first try.

Unfortunately, my subsequent tries didn’t get much better and soon I couldn’t keep up my concentration. Like everything else, this was going to require practice and a lot of patience. Working with such tiny fields was easy from a physical standpoint. I could hold the field around a particle all day long and never notice it. However, creating the tiny field to surround only a few particles required intense concentration. It was too damn easy to lose my visualization of the particles. It was like singling out one particular piece of floating dust in an attic and then trying to grab hold of it. Not easy!