It barely budged from its initial position, but it was clear that it had moved. There was a reaction!

Alonso's heart raced with excitement, but he knew better than to let his emotions break his concentration. He took a deep breath and steadied his mind, focusing again on the knife. It had moved slightly, a promising sign that his approach was on the right track. However, moving it further and with more control was going to be the real challenge.

He focused on the magnetic field he had visualized around the knife. He needed to amplify and stabilize it. The faint warmth in the sword's hilt suggested that his method of using it as a conductor was somewhat effective, but not enough. He adjusted his mental image, visualizing a stronger, more coherent field emanating from the sword and enveloping the knife.

Minutes passed, and the knife began to vibrate slightly. Alonso's temples throbbed with the mental strain, but he ignored the discomfort. He concentrated harder, visualizing the magnetic field around the knife growing stronger and more stable. The knife shifted slightly, lifting a few millimeters from its initial position.

This small movement filled him with a sense of hope. In this electromagnetic space, the knife did not have a fixed position; instead, it stabilized wherever he moved it. This was a crucial realization, as he did not have to worry about levitating the knife as in facing gravity. He just needed to move it slowly to a position above the floor.

He took a deep breath and focused again on the knife. He needed to move it further and with more control. He visualized the magnetic field, making it more coherent and directed. The knife moved slightly upwards, staying in its new position. He kept his concentration steady. He needed to maintain the stability of the field. Slowly, carefully, he directed the knife upward.

The knife moved through the air, no longer wobbling as much. Inch by inch, it floated closer.

The knife passed through the floor. It had reached above it. He was sweating but, perhaps for the first time in a while, a smile appeared on his face. He had done it. He moved an object with his mind! True, it was a weightless virtual object, only existing in an EM space, but nevertheless, his statement remained true.

He sensed the body lying down behind him slowly wake up. He woke up.

Alonso watched his past self groan and rub his eyes, obviously disoriented. He recalled how he had felt back then. Lost, anxious, fearful, disoriented, panicked. But what about now? How was he now? Oh, right, he was no longer a human. You cannot lose what you don't have anymore.

He kept looking at his old self, the human he once was. It stretched, and then surprise came to its face. He had seen the knife. He came closer and slowly inspected it. He was curious, and how could he not be, as an object had appeared in his empty space. All attention was on the double-edged object. An object clearly designed to kill.

After hesitating for a while, his past self crouched and picked up the knife. The space around him shattered. Even then, he felt nothing. No fear, no panic. He felt … cold, empty. After several seconds, the EM space returned. The situation changed. His domain noticed several new elements: a cage, a creature, a human, and a button. The second trial.

His past self came closer to the cage. It was staring at the creature: a white featureless abomination. A weak, fragile, and small abomination. The him from back then shifted his sight to the food and water. He was hungry and thirsty. His thoughts were clouded. He was also weak and fragile.

After that, his past self looked around the room. He was trying to find something else, something that would give him a clue of what to do. He was lost and needed an answer. But more than that, he needed food and water. And so he found it. He found the button.

He calmly walked to the button. He hesitated. He was afraid of the creature inside. The nightmare. The monster. But he needed to eat and drink. The button was pressed.

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The space around him froze.

His past self did his part. It was his test now.

He walked around the room, sensing any object that might lay outside the physical confines. But as expected, there was nothing there. Beside the dagger, held in his old self’s arm, there was only one other metallic object in the room. An object that had mysteriously and suddenly disappeared back then when he pressed the button: the cage.

Alonso laughed as he thought of it. From a knife to a cage? Such a smooth transition.

His stomach growled. Getting hungry already?

“Be patient, this may take a while,” he said as he walked closer to the cage. He went through it, as it being in EM space it did not affect his real body. Just in case, and maybe more as a playful gesture, just as he stepped inside, his sword quickly sliced through the neck of the creature inside. Nothing happened.

“You gave me quite a bite,” he smiled at it and then took two more steps that put him at the exact center of the cage.

The cage was not too big, but not small either. It was a box, with 2 meters in length, width, and height. If the test was to levitate a physical cage of this dimension, then that would be outright impossible with his current capabilities no matter what he did. But he understood the objects in this space were weightless and they stabilized wherever they were moved to. That meant, he just had to move it, slowly, until it went completely outside the confines of the physical room. Until it disappeared.

But that was easier said than done. After all, the size of the cage was nothing like the size of the knife. It was on a whole other level.

He closed his eyes again and took a deep breath, centering himself. He focused on the principles of electromagnetism that had guided him so far. If he could move the knife, he could move the cage, but it would require far more precision and strength. He concentrated on his electromagnetic domain, visualizing the cage as he had with the knife, but this time on a much larger scale.

He began to extend his EM waves outward, surrounding the cage. The structure was metallic, and he could sense every bar, every corner, and every connection. He visualized a magnetic field forming around the cage, just as he had done with the knife. But this time, he needed to amplify the field significantly to encompass the entire cage.

Alonso poured his energy into the sword, feeling the warmth in its hilt intensify. The magnetic field around the cage began to form, but as he expanded his EM waves, he quickly realized they were too weak. Even amplified by the sword, his waves couldn’t cover the entire cage. The field flickered and wavered, unable to maintain stability. He knew he needed a different approach.

“Constructive interference?” He had thought about it before, but the precision required gave him a headache. He took a deep sigh. Now he did not have a choice.

If he could create constructive interference in his EM waves, he might be able to strengthen them, at least for a certain range. For a perfect overlap, he basically needed to generate two waves at the same time of the same frequency and wave speed. For a temporal overlap, he needed the waves to have similar frequency and wave speed, and have a peak in approximately the same spatial location. Both ideas were simple in theory, but executing them would be far more challenging.

For the first, he could not generate two waves at the same time; he had tried and could not, or at least he had no idea how to. So only the second plan was worth pursuing. For that, he had to ensure the waves strengthened each other for as long as possible, as significant differences in wave speed would make the constructive interference too brief and not very useful.

“Time to work.”

He took a deep breath, focusing on his brain waves. He visualized them as tiny pulses of energy, oscillating in perfect harmony. He imagined each wave overlapping with the next, creating constructive interference that would enhance their overall effect. He began to experiment, adjusting the frequency and intensity of his waves.

He approached the task with a cold and calculated precision. He methodically adjusted each parameter, observing the effects without letting frustration cloud his mind. His body ached from the strain, and his head pounded, but he remained detached, treating the pain as just another variable in his experiment.

The first few attempts were disastrous. The waves clashed, creating chaotic patterns instead of the desired amplification. He observed the failures dispassionately, making mental notes of what went wrong and recalculating his approach. He adjusted the frequency again, seeking the right balance with meticulous care.

Minutes turned into hours. His body protested, but he ignored the discomfort, focusing solely on the task at hand. He visualized the waves in greater detail, seeing each oscillation, each peak and trough. He imagined the energy they carried, and began the painstaking process of overlapping them with precision.

His vision blurred with exhaustion, and his muscles trembled, but he remained focused. The room around him seemed to shrink, his world narrowing to the interplay of waves in his mind. Each tiny adjustment required immense concentration, but he treated it as a puzzle, each piece fitting into place through sheer will and intellect.

After hours of relentless effort, he did it. He managed to create a long-lasting constructive interference with two waves. The combined wave was stronger, more stable, and doubled in amplitude for a reasonable spatio-temporal margin. He finally felt a flicker of satisfaction, but he knew the real challenge lay ahead. He needed to extend this success to all his waves.

He tried again. He failed.