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"It's the same as before," Claire reported from behind, "the batteries are not loading anymore, which means…"

I took a deep breath before sighing it away.

"Which means no spiritual energy is reaching Chihiro's reverse Qi converters," I finished Claire's sentence just to indicate I already knew what she was talking about.

This was the only thing that changed as I moved the sixth knob across all of its steps.

Before I first touched it, the factory was already operating on the same level of electricity as back when the disaster nearly struck, given how the whole circuit was separated in two and how we closed only one of them.

At that level, however, only about half of the energy transformed into Qi would get transformed back into electrical power. Yet, as we raised the output, gradually feeding more and more energy into the process… the batteries at the very end of the circuit continued to charge at an increasingly slower pace, all the way to the point where the entire circuit responsible for charging them simply turned off.

"I guess all we can do is keep going," I muttered, taking a deep breath before moving my hand over to the seventh knob.

By now, all of the factory's equipment was operating at full swing. The condensers pumped in fresh air from the outside into the system, the active part of the filtration system pushed the air through the filtering membranes, only for another set of fans to accelerate the purified air once again. Then, this air would serve as a vehicle to pick up and drag the Qi produced by a stack of Qi converters, funnel all of this mana-rich air into a narrow corridor… only for this air to then feed into the reverse Qi converters… somehow losing all of the spiritual charge it was carrying in the process.

This time we had all the precautions in place to prevent the spiritual energy from just amassing in place with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Yet, as if to spite our efforts, this energy had now vanished somewhere our sensors couldn't reach.

"Just what the hell is going on…" I muttered, doing my absolute best to crack the case.

Yet, even cracking the seventh knob open as I twisted it for the very first time didn't seem to bring any change, save for the slight increase in the total noise produced by the factory.

"How are we standing?" I called out to Claire, not daring to turn my eyes away from the factory below, knowing full well that once something happened, it wouldn't be a matter of seconds but milliseconds for us to react and hopefully respond.

And yet, step by step, we soon reached eighty percent of all the energy this factory was redesigned to draw from the grid… But whatever it was that we wanted to happen persistently refused to… well, happen!

"Should we just call it all off?" Chihiro suddenly suggested, throwing me out of the loop so hard I actually looked away from the control panel. "I mean, the protests are getting more and more intense, and there seems to be a government car heading here for some reason…" he added while looking down at the screen of his phone. "And if it's the guys I think it is…"

Chihiro raised his eyes and just stared into my face for a moment with quite the intense look behind his eyes.

"If it's them, then things just got quite a lot more complicated, Tim."

My heart froze for a moment...

So I shook my head, casting away all the needless aspects of the current situation before turning my head back toward the factory floor and giving myself a second to regain my focus.

"Stall them," I ordered, paying no mind to how I was telling my very sponsor what to do… while only thinking about what was before my very own eyes as I brought the seventh dial a step up… and then another.

The noise within the factory grew even louder than before… but that was it.

Gritting my teeth, I resisted the desire to just raise the power to the total throughput of the seventh knob in one fell swoop before slowly, gradually raising the limiters higher and higher.

"Eighth knob, huh?" I muttered to myself, only to cast a quick glance over my shoulder and to the back.

Claire, noticing my stare, powerlessly shrugged her shoulders.

"No matter how much you raise it, not even an iota of energy is reaching the batteries," she confirmed my suspicions before suddenly twisting her expression. "I mean, maybe there is; it's just not enough to overcome the charger's resistance."

I turned my eyes back to the factory before lowering them down to the control panel.

There was no indication of anything being wrong with the process. And yet, even though we had long since increased the power we'd been feeding into it well beyond what we used before… we just couldn't replicate the same event.

'Something changed,' I thought, trying to find logic in the situation that made little to no sense otherwise. 'Whatever it is that happened before changed the situation and circumstances to the point that we cannot invoke it again.'

This was quite a reasonable suspicion.

Who was here to tell us that all of this energy that was leaking… wasn't just falling into the same orb that I saw within the stopped time, feeding into the endless and unchanging phenomenon that was stuck in the realm beyond time?

Maybe that was the truth of this disaster to begin with? Rather than judging it as something that almost happened a few days ago, maybe, due to its nature transcending the frame of time, it was a disaster that happened at every point in time simultaneously, all the way from the big bang to the heat death of the universe if not even beyond that, with its destructive power split into infinite time and thus averaging to unnoticeable, statistical error?

"Yeah, that can't be it…" I muttered to myself as I leaned down over the control panel, pushing my mind to its limits in a bid to crack this mystery open.

This kind of explanation… was simply too convoluted to be the case. And most of the time…

'Right, there's always Occam's razor,' I thought, raising my eyes from the console to the factory floor as the sense of a nearby realization took over my entire mind.

And as my hand continued to slowly raise the power through the now eighth knob…

'The simplest thing we didn't try yet… The simplest explanation for why this entire thing just refuses to work…'

I gritted my teeth.

"Can it really be THAT simple?" I muttered, not even realizing I gave my thoughts a voice. "Well, seeing how things are going, I might as well just try it…"

"Tim!" Claire somehow managed to safely discard her laptop off her lap, stand up from where she was sitting, cross the distance that separated us, and then grab onto my arm before I could even sense her move.

"Hmm?" I turned my eyes to the girl, with the answer to all of our current struggles already taking form in my mind.

"Why do I get the feeling that you are about to do something incredibly reckless, stupid, and risky?" she asked, her hands clutching at my shirt as she stared right into my eyes from merely an inch or two away.

"I mean…" I looked away, as if to give the factory floor a quick, inspecting look, while in reality avoiding how Claire confronted my actual thoughts with reality. "Isn't everything that we are doing here reckless, stupid, and risky?"

Rather than challenging Claire's observation, which was quite right on the money, I opted to turn the perspective a bit.

We were literally playing with forces we didn't understand. The very fact that the same energy that nearly invoked a disaster before was now openly flowing for no real effect was the greatest proof of that.

But this status quo, of us pouring more and more energy into what felt like an abyss, could only last so long. At some point, something had to give.

Either we would breach the limits of whatever it was that was stealing all of this energy, or we would reach the limits of what energy this factory could process. Alternatively, in just a few more minutes, we would be forced to confront the authorities about what we were doing here.

And judging by the look on Chihiro's face when he brought them up for the first time just a few moments ago, they weren't the kind of people we could just use my uncle to deal with.

"Claire, I believe this is the only way," I then spoke softly while fully ignoring the state of the factory as I turned to the girl and grabbed her by her arms. "This is the only element that I found missing from the whole picture. And this entire thing…"

I shook my head before taking another glance at the factory floor, one that lasted for quite a while before I dared to turn my eyes back to Claire's stressed-out and panicky face.

"We went way too far to just give up now, didn't we?"

Claire pursed her lips into a thin line before opening her mouth a tiny little bit… only to lower her eyes as she bit down on her lips.

"There's no convincing you, is there?" she muttered, refusing to look at my face as her fingers grasped at my shirt even harder.

Claire then slowly raised her face before looking right into my eyes with those deep, brown pools of her soul.

"Just be careful, okay?" she then requested in a trembling voice, as if fighting against herself to voice anything even close to approval for what she already knew I was going to try.

"I will do my best, but I can't promise anything. If push comes to shove, though…" I hesitated for a second before turning my eyes over to Chihiro, "if the worst comes to be, I'm leaving my...fate to you, dad."

Chihiro's face grew still as I called him in a way I had yet to earn the right to use. Before he could react, however, I invoked the one missing element.

The one piece of the puzzle that I had yet to add to today's mix of circumstances to properly match every element of the scenario from the disaster near-miss.

And so, I invoked my constitution, allowing my spiritual power to flood my brain...

Only for the very same thing that happened during my last attempt at invoking my constitution to occur again. My directed attempt at injecting spiritual energy into my brain failed, turning my effort into a flooding of my entire body.

And just like a spark setting fire to a room filled with fuel fumes, the very moment my spiritual energy exploded all over my body, so did all of the energy stuck in a state of stasis that both was and wasn't in the factory with and all around us.