Chapter 332: Chapter 332: Chain, Chain [bonus]
Regulus returned to the stone house and sat on the edge of the bed, back against the wall.
His mind kept replaying the scene. The beam punching through the sea surface, shockwaves displacing air in pulsing rings, the island splitting down the middle, water rushing in to fill the void.
Then he started thinking about what it meant.
One island. He’d treated it as a single target, pushed his output to maximum, sustained full power, and the result was an entire island shaken to rubble and sunk beneath the waves.
Did that count as brute-forcing a miracle? Making up for incomplete understanding with raw magical output?
Not that his understanding was incomplete. Both his theory and his power were close to their ceiling.
Wizards who could erase something that large from existence weren’t common, but they existed. He could count them on one hand.
Fiendfyre could burn it away, but Fiendfyre was a cursed creation that annihilated matter at an existential level, leaving nothing behind. Not even ash.
The Disintegration Curse worked through vibration. The island was still there, broken into countless pieces on the seabed.
Its method of destruction differed from every other spell. It didn’t apply force from the outside. It burrowed in and made the target tear itself apart.
But he’d only fired a single shot. A single point of impact.
Full sustained output, yes, but still entering through one point.
The granite interior couldn’t have been perfectly continuous. Hundreds of millions of years of geological change meant the rock had been compressed, stretched, cooled, reheated.
Cavities had to exist inside. Fissures. Boundaries between layers of different density.
Channels carved by seawater had filled with brine, forming barriers between sections of granite.
By all rights, the vibration should have stopped when it hit a cavity.
Air was too diffuse. Its efficiency as a medium for conducting vibration was abysmal. Pockets of air along the propagation path should have created dead zones.
Yet the fractures had run the full length of the island, passing through every gap without stopping.
Regulus stood and walked to the window.
The sky outside was still overcast. Sea wind squeezed through the gaps in the glass, making a low, mournful sound.
He stood there thinking for a long time, then pushed the door open and headed back toward the shore. Loose gravel crunched under his feet.
At the far edge of the tidal flat, he crouched and dipped his hand into the water.
It flowed between his fingers, ice-cold and briny.
He studied the granite that the sea had been scouring for centuries. Water moved through every crack. Every fissure was saturated. None of them were truly empty.
He straightened up and looked at the reef flat beneath his feet.
That island had soaked in the ocean for tens of thousands of years, maybe longer. Seawater had permeated every fissure, every joint plane, every microscopic gap between mineral crystals.
The interior of the granite wasn’t dry. It was saturated with saltwater. The cavities weren’t hollow. They were full.
Vibration propagated through the granite, hit a water-filled fissure. Water was a medium, far denser than air. The vibration lost some energy passing through the water layer, but it didn’t stop. It reached granite on the other side and kept boring inward.
One fissure was negligible, but the island’s interior contained countless water-filled fissures, each one acting as a bridge.
The vibration hadn’t leapt across the gaps. It had conducted itself through them.
Different medium, different efficiency, but the vibration could cross.
Regulus crouched at the water’s edge, waves washing over his boots and retreating.
This phenomenon wasn’t part of his development plan. He’d only meant to destroy an island.
But the phenomenon itself was far more interesting than destroying an island.
He stood and started walking back. Two steps in, a thought struck him, and he stopped.
Seawater filling the fissures had provided conduction bridges. That was the physics explanation. It held up.
But it only explained an island in the sea.
What if the island hadn’t been surrounded by water?
What if it had been a dry mountain, its internal fissures and cavities filled with nothing but air, no medium at all?
Vibration traveling through granite would hit a dry cavity. It would bounce off the walls a few times, and some fraction of the energy would re-enter the rock on the far side.
For small cavities, that made sense. A few bounces and some portion would get through.
Large cavities?
After a few bounces the energy would scatter to nothing. The far wall would receive almost zero.
His train of thought turned a corner, away from physics.
When he’d cast the spell, he had locked the entire island as a single target. His perception covered all of it, cavities included.
In his mind, the cavities weren’t interruptions. They were part of the island.
If the caster’s perception could influence how magic behaved inside the target, then vibration wouldn’t stop at a cavity.
The caster defined it as one body, and the magic treated it as one body. Cavities were physical discontinuities, not cognitive ones.
Two explanations, and he couldn’t tell which was doing the work.
Maybe both. Seawater in the fissures provided a physical conduction bridge. Cognitive framing provided the magical conduction logic.
Layered together, they carried the vibration from one end to the other.
But regardless of which mechanism was responsible, the conclusion was the same: the Disintegration Curse’s propagation had crossed discontinuities.
Regulus shoved both hands into his pockets and paced along the shore, wind buffeting his robes.
If propagation could cross discontinuities, what came next?
He’d shattered one island into massive granite chunks that plunged into the sea.
Those chunks were now physically separated from the original structure. Water between them. Air between them. Distance between them.
But what if the caster’s perception still treated them as a single body?
If, in his mind, those fragments were still parts of the island, would the vibration jump from one chunk to the next and keep going?
Fragment A shatters into B and C. In the caster’s perception, B and C are still part of A. Vibration conducts from B to C. C shatters into D and E. D and E are still part of A. It keeps running.
Two words surfaced in his mind.
Chain reaction. Chain Conduction.
He stood at the shore’s edge, wind pulling at his robes, and those two words were the only things in his head.
He drew a deep breath. Sea air filled his lungs, cold and sharp with salt.
Then he Apparated back to the cottage, sat cross-legged in front of the hearth without bothering to settle in, and didn’t even react when Baruk hopped onto his shoulder.
Firelight warmed his face, but he didn’t feel it. His thoughts wouldn’t stop moving.
If it really was Chain Conduction, what was the next step?
An island shatters. The fragments keep shattering. Fragments of fragments keep shattering.
Could the process sustain itself indefinitely?
No.
Each layer of propagation cost energy. The vibration attenuated.
When he’d hit that island, fractures had spread from the center to the farthest edges, but the damage at the periphery was visibly weaker than at the core. Four or five layers out and the energy had bled to almost nothing.
The chain ran, but it ran out of momentum.
So what if the chain didn’t attenuate?
What if, at every layer, the energy didn’t decrease but increased?
Nuclear Fission.
Those words surfaced on their own, too.
One neutron strikes a uranium-235 nucleus. The nucleus splits, ejecting two or three new neutrons and releasing a massive amount of energy. New neutrons hit new uranium nuclei. More splits. More neutrons. More energy.
Chain reaction.
The key was the critical condition. Each fission event had to release enough neutrons to successfully strike the next nucleus, or the chain couldn’t sustain itself.
Insufficient purity or mass, and the neutrons fly out without finding another nucleus. The chain breaks. The reaction dies.
Sufficient purity and mass, past the critical threshold, and the chain becomes self-sustaining. Unstoppable.
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima went from detonation to mushroom cloud in under a second.
He mapped the model onto the Disintegration Curse.
Step one, achieved. A single shot enters the target. The target shatters.
Step two, also achieved. Vibration crosses discontinuities and propagates farther.
Step three, not achieved. The chain wasn’t self-sustaining.
He’d stopped casting, and the residual vibration ran through the island for another ten seconds or so, dismantling the entire structure before dying out. The fragments that crashed into the sea didn’t continue breaking apart.
One critical condition was missing.
The critical condition for the Disintegration Curse should be this: the energy released by each fracture event must exceed the energy lost in conducting the vibration to the next layer.
Fracturing itself released energy.
During granite’s formation, the binding forces between mineral grains locked stress into the crystal lattice. When the rock shattered, that stored stress was released as heat, sound waves, kinetic energy of the debris.
If the vibration could trigger those stresses to release simultaneously, then the energy carried by each fragment wouldn’t come solely from the Disintegration Curse’s initial input. It would also include energy stored within the target’s own structure.
Released energy exceeding losses meant a self-sustaining chain.
Released energy falling short meant attenuation. A few layers and the chain dies.
His strike on the island fell into the latter category.
The initial vibration had been strong enough to carry through the entire island, but every layer had cost more than it gave back.
What if the initial vibration were several times stronger? A dozen times? Dozens of times?
Strong enough that the stress energy released by each fracture event, combined with residual vibration, exceeded the conduction losses.
Past that critical threshold, the chain runs on its own. The caster doesn’t need to keep feeding it.
One shot goes in. It shatters. The fragments shatter themselves. Their fragments shatter too.
A single Disintegration Curse fired into a mountain. The impact point crumbles. The energy released by that crumbling drives the vibration outward. Wherever it reaches, the rock breaks. Wherever rock breaks, new energy is released.
The chain propagates on its own, from peak to base, from one face to the other.
The entire mountain disintegrates from the inside. No need to stand there sustaining output. No need for his magic to fill the mountain’s entire volume.
He provides the first shot. The target finishes the rest.
The principle was identical to Nuclear Fission.
A uranium bomb only needs a detonation mechanism to slam two subcritical masses together into a supercritical mass. The neutrons run on their own. The chain reaction starts on its own. The explosion completes on its own.
The detonation mechanism doesn’t supply the full energy of the blast. The binding energy of the uranium nuclei is the real source.
The Disintegration Curse doesn’t need to supply the full energy to demolish a mountain. The stress stored within the target’s own structure is the real source.
The caster only needs to provide that first shot.
The corner of Regulus’s mouth twitched.
To reach that critical condition, the initial vibration had to be powerful enough to trigger the release of stored stress within the target, so that the released energy would overwhelm conduction losses.
Destroying one small island at full power had cost two-thirds of his reserves.
To hit a mountain and reach critical threshold, the required initial output might be dozens of times what he’d spent today. Maybe a hundred times.
He couldn’t do it. Not yet.
After a year and a half of Star Guided Meditation, his total magical reserves already dwarfed those of any peer his age, and most adult wizards couldn’t match him either.
But adult wizards weren’t the benchmark.
Reaching the critical threshold for a self-sustaining chain might demand a magnitude of power beyond any single wizard’s ceiling.
Dumbledore couldn’t do it. Grindelwald couldn’t do it. Voldemort couldn’t do it.
That had nothing to do with technique. It was pure biological limitation.
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