1:015 on the 65th day of Winter

It was impossible. Absolutely impossible. But at the same time it would actually explain a lot. I was currently sitting on my workshop stool with my hands on my knees in thought. Arin could actually be picking the outcomes of wave function collapse at the subatomic level.

"Theod!" Arin said, and by her tone it wasn't the first time she had said it. "Talk to me. What is so weird about what just happened."

I came to my senses a bit. Maybe talking it through would help me understand it.

"Let me try and explain." I said.

I got up and crossed to where the bright leaf lanterns were set up. I opened their shutters so the room had light and walked to a slate on the other side of the workshop.

"The interference pattern on the wall is a result of something called a wave function." I said picking up a nub of chock and drawing a bunch of short parallel lines. Above it I drew a wavy line that represented the light level across the back wall.

"That's what it looks like for light but every part of reality, you, me, Schrodinger, everything, has a wave function." I said.

I took a long breath to consider how I would explain.

"Remember when I talked about individual units of light hitting the wall randomly. Before they interact with anything they are in every possible location within the wave function. Then they hit the back wall and bounce off. That is when it looks as if the light only hits one spot in what some people call a wave function collapse. Of all the possible outcomes you can only get one." I explained.

I pointed to one of the lines as I described the effect. But then I reconsidered my explanation. They called it wave function collapse when I took physics back in college but that wasn't the only theory. Another interpretation, first proposed by Hugh Everett in the 1950's, was that there was only one wave function for the whole universe and it simply branched into different realities, each with its own outcome. As someone who came from another world to this one, Everett's many worlds interpretation of quantum physics seems substantially more plausible than it did when I lived on Earth.

"So, from our perspective each unit of light will randomly hit the hair or not." I said. "But what's really going on is that for each unit there is a world where it hits and a world where it doesn't. What you are doing, as far as I can tell, is picking which world we land in."

She just looked super confused. I tried to think of an analogy.

"Say you go to the casino tonight and play a game of dice. Except instead of rolling two dice you are playing a game with ten thousand dice." I said. "There are so many dice that you have to carry them in buckets."

I ran my hands through my hair in exasperation.

"What you are doing with light is like dumping out all those buckets of dice at once and picking what every one of them rolls before they land." I said.

Then I thought of how my own magic worked. How materials seemed to fall into place and assemble themselves all at once. That must work the same way.

"Okay, that's pretty weird." she said. "But that just means that there's gotta be a trick to it. Like, loaded dice or something."

I consider her words.

"Sure. But even so it is a very effective trick." I said. "The level of control you have is truly impressive."

She blushed a little at the compliment. Her bashful expression was very cute.

"Thanks," she said.

I was thoroughly distracted now and I looked around for somewhere else to steer the conversation.

"That reminds me," I said. "I promised you a gift."

I walked over to a set of cabinets on the far wall and retrieved a long narrow bundle of cloth and leather.

"It is a bit early for the Winter Festival but I figure you can make use of it as an iron blood mage so I think you should have it now." I said.

Her eyes went wide when I passed it to her. I think she had an immediate sense for what it was by the weight and balance. She started pulling the cloth off of it to turn it out into her hands. She had a sharp intake of breath when it finally fell into her hand. It was a longsword about the same size as her own. As I had no talent for artistic craft I had simply purchased a masterwork sword for a pile of gold and modified it.

She looked at the scabbard with wide eyes. Then she ran her hand across the engraving I had done.

"What does it say?" she asked.

"The word is the name of the blade." I said.

"It is pronounced 'NOVA' and in, … a language I know, it means the death of a star. It is one of the brightest and most destructive forces in all existence."

I scratched the back of my head in nervousness. Technically I was talking about a supernova, but that was too many letters to fit on the blade. The name sounded better in my head but now it just sounded pretentious.

"I purchased the blade and scabbard from Forgemaster Gavin but I then modified it using my magic to fit you and your magic." I explained pointing to where the grip met the cross guard. "The grip has a crystal core inside a resonance chamber that, if I made it correctly, will greatly enhance the power of the laser spell."

Then I pointed to the pommel.

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"I modified this into an artificial monster core." I said. "It is constantly putting light mana into the crystal so that you should be able to trigger it much more quickly than casting the spell on your own."

Then I pointed to the flat of the blade where there was a tapered indentation running along its length.

"The beam is then focused again and again up the blade until it comes out the tip of the sword through a diamond lens about two or three times the width of a hair." I said.

I started to point out another feature but suddenly she was hugging me. I just blinked a few times trying to encourage my brain to catch up to what just happened.

"Thank you Theod." she said. "It's perfect."

Then she let me go and took a step back.

"Now can I try it out?" she asked with a gigantic grin splattered across that beautiful face.

"Yes." I said. "But not here"

***

2:045 on the 65th day of Winter

Target practice with Arin was fun. She reserved one of the mage core's training rooms for fire and lightning mages and went through a crazy number of wooden practice dummies and clay pigeons. I loved having an unlimited supply of gold.

Now I was back in my workshop seeing if I could figure out how a core enabled a mage to control the outcome of a quantum wave function collapse. My only clue was that whatever it was, human mages had it and demons didn't. While there was a taboo against using mage cores in magic items, there was no such taboo for demon cores. The war meant that demon cores were easy to come by from any store that sells cores. A human core was more tricky but ended up just being a matter of gold and paperwork. Many mages had donated their bodies to be used for medical research purposes over the years and several dozen of their cores were collecting dust in hospital research storage. I just had to swear that I was using it for legitimate research and they let me borrow one for a fee.

I sat cross legged in my workshop with the demon's core in my right hand and the mage's cores in my left. There was no one else here at such a late hour. I focused and descended into my microscope around both cores, superimposing them in my perception like seeing double. Moving extremely slowly I began to deconstruct them. The outer layers of the cores peeled away to reveal crystal and pressurized fluids. Knowing what to expect I popped one core at a time, directing the stream through a small gap in my grip and away from me. The expanding gas cooled the room substantially but it would warm back up soon.

With the dangerous part over I dove back into comparing the cores. They were substantially similar in overall structure. They both had channels for hydrogen and oxygen with kidney-like chambers to mix them. The mage's core had long straight channels that looped around the outside of the shape while the demon's core had channels that were more like capillaries with small interleaved branches. I realized that the mage that this core belonged to was a metal mage so it was very similar to a light magic core but not identical. It would make sense that there would be many more differences between cores than the one difference I was looking for. I made notes of my observations before continuing.

Going deeper I found very little change in structure in the demon core. In contrast, I found cavities with fractal structures in the human core. These structures were present in the monster cores I had examined but they were few and far in-between while they were decently packed in the human core. I decided to leave one intact and run a few experiments. The cavities were connected to two other structures. First was a blob of carbon-14 and second was a web of graphene wires that ran all the way to the surface of the core. I thought that the wires might be taking some input from outside the core through some sort of electrical signal. The fractal itself was diamond with a bunch of different elements in small concentrations so I figured that it could be acting like a transistor that will activate from some sort of current pulse. It was a guess but not a crazy wild guess.

It took a while to build a method to send a pulse of current through the wires but once I did I was ready to run some tests. I started with an extremely small pulse with a microscopic capacitor and inductor. I verified that it did indeed send a small pulse through the graphene wires by attaching a small current transformer around them. Then I slowly dialed up the current. At one point my capacitor broke. I rebuilt it only to have my inductor break. I rebuilt that and dialed up the current again only to have the capacitor break again. What was going on?

The dielectric was breaking down at way too low of a voltage and causing a short circuit in the part. I fixed it again and again, getting more and more frustrated. Finally I threw the damn thing across the room.

"What the hell is going on?!" I said to nobody. It was the middle of the night by now. I woke Schrodinger with my outburst and now he was glaring at me from his bed.

"Sorry." I whispered to him. He ended up scampering off to go hunting or whatever. I got up and walked over to pick up the cursed thing. I sighed and turned it over in my hands. I decided to try a different approach. I took a look at the fractal structure again. It was obviously not a true fractal, as there were limits on how small the pattern could get but it had a bunch of repeating bubble structures of different sizes. I decided to try and trigger just one of the smallest bubbles. Maybe trying to do the whole thing all at once was overloading my circuit in some way I couldn't figure out.

I set up a much smaller experiment inside a glass marble created for the purpose. Within my closed hands I remade one small part of the fractal structure with only one hundred or so total atoms. I then connected it to a block of carbon-14 diamond on one side and an appropriate web of graphene on the other. I connected the graphene wires to a driver circuit like before. When everything was ready I triggered it.

The only thing that saved my life was that I was still wearing my armor from training with Arin. I was thrown across the room by a violent push and hit the back wall with a CRACK. I must have hit my head because what felt like a moment later I was in a heap on the floor waiting for the world to stop spinning. I tried to get up but only found out that my whole body was in pain. I was having trouble breathing too. I decided to just lie there for a while. I tried to think of what could have possibly gone wrong. None of the materials I was working with were explosive. There wasn't any mana in the marble I made.

I still couldn't seem to catch my breath. I eventually pulled myself to my hands and knees and tried to assess if anything was broken. Other than the gigantic lump on the back of my head I seemed to be mostly fine. I looked down and my clothing and armor were in tatters with only scraps of cloth remaining. My skin itched like a bad sunburn but wasn't blistered or blackened. I looked to where I had been standing before and gawked. There was a large scoop taken directly out of the stone floor and wall.

Heaving for breath I pulled myself up and walked to the hole in the floor and wall. It felt like I was climbing a mountain or something. It was a very strange blast crater. I had seen many explosions before and none of them were like this. Where did the stone go? It looked more like it was removed with curved cutting tools than blown up. I reached forward to inspect the cut surface with my microscope. Looking closely, the surface was much rougher than it looked from far away. There were deep pores in the outside layers of stone like pumice. There was also something strange. There were a bunch of heavier elements in the mix. There was a mix of oxides including silicon, aluminum sodium, and potassium but there was also a lot more phosphorus, magnesium, and calcium than there should be. Then I looked more closely and found that all the heavier elements were isotopes missing exactly one neutron. My head was spinning and I still couldn't catch my breath.

I sat on the floor and tried to think. What kind of explosion would add a bunch of isotopes to the stone? Well, I suppose that if a bunch of protons got thrown out all of a sudden then it could boost all the normal elements in granite up one atomic number and that would explain why they were missing a neutron. They would have to be extremely high energy. But free protons were basically just a hydrogen ion. Then I got a sinking feeling. I dove back into the microscope but, instead of looking at the wall, this time I looked at the air. In place of the normal mix of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide most of the air, most of what I was currently breathing, was hydrogen. I just blinked stupidly for a moment. Then I fled.