The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 770

Previously, Alex had spent those three days in the hospital watching the world.

Felicia had thought he was resting. He was lying propped on two pillows with the television on the wall running the news, and a borrowed phone in his hand under the sheet, and he was reading everything this planet had to say about itself.

It took him about a day and a half to understand the size of it.

And the size of it was small.

Earth was behind.

Not a little. Not in one place. Behind in everything, the way a village is behind a capital.

Their aircraft still burned fuel. Their computers answered questions the way a clever dog fetches sticks — eagerly, and wrong about a third of the time.

Their medicine cut people open to find out what was inside them. There was not one machine on this whole planet that Prussia would have let into a museum.

He scrolled for an hour through what this world called its best technology and put the phone face-down on his chest.

"Is something wrong?" Felicia asked from the chair.

"No," he said slowly. "It's just very old."

She thought he meant the hospital, and agreed with him.

...

And it was not only the machines.

Magic existed here. So did cultivation. So did the old art of binding beasts.

He found all three in the corners of the news — a cultivation sect running a mountain resort, a licensed beast-tamer at a state fair, a magic academy in the capital with a very beautiful old building and a very ordinary syllabus.

All three were real, and all three were thin.

Everything he read said the same thing in different words.

There had been a great age once, a long time ago, and it was gone. What was left was a handful of families doing a so-so version of what their ancestors had done properly.

A man in the magic world of the towers would have laughed at the academy's entrance exam. A first-year disciple in Xia would have walked through this planet's best cultivation master like a door.

...

Now, in his own hall, Alexander took the necklace out from under his shirt and turned it over in his fingers.

It was a plain thing to look at. A silver chain, a pale stone, a setting worn smooth by a woman's thumb.

It had held five countries.

His mother had not only been the eighth Queen.

She had been a scientist. So had her father.

His mother's family. Small, quiet, no army, no council seat — and brilliant. A house that had kept the old arts alive in private while the rest of the world forgot them.

Somehow, they had built it.

They had taken the best of this planet's technology, its cultivation, its magic and its beast arts, and they had put each of them into something like a mind — a self-running intelligence — and shut it inside that stone. Then they had let it run.

Not for years. For thousands of years, inside, while almost no time passed outside.

Prussia was what technology became if you let it grow for a thousand years without a war to stop it.

Xia was cultivation with nobody ever forgetting a single lesson.

The towers were magic with five hundred years of competition behind them. The Dominion was the beast arts left to breed.

Every one of them had grown far past the world that seeded it.

And his mother had put that around his neck in a falling aircraft.

...

"It will teach you everything," she had said.

It had.

Alexander put the necklace back under his shirt, against his skin, where it had been for fourteen years.

He was the only person on Earth who had been to school there.

...

He started with the castle.

On the fifth night home, while Felicia slept, he walked the whole property with a bag of chalk and a length of cord.

Every wall. Every corner of the house. Out through the gardens, along the old gravel paths, around the dry fountain, down to the boundary where the ivy grows over the stone.

He drew as he went, lines and circles joining up across four acres, and where he could not draw he buried a small stone he had carved on the kitchen table that afternoon.

By dawn it was a single formation.

The towers would have called it a gathering array. It pulled heaven and earth energy in from the whole hillside and fed it down into the ground under the house, slow and constant, the way a root drinks.

It was also a wall.

And it was also a trap.

The robots came in a lorry on the eighth day.

Felicia had ordered four, then gone back and ordered two more because the card had not said no, and she stood in the forecourt with her hand over her mouth while the delivery men wheeled them up the ramp.

They were the best machines on the market. Tall, white, quiet, with soft grey hands and a single blue light where a face would be. They cleaned, they cooked, they did laundry, they could carry a man.

To Earth, they were the future.

To Alexander, they were a good start.

"They're beautiful," Felicia said.

"They're fine," he said, and she laughed at him for being hard to please.

...

The food came online, three times a week, in insulated boxes left at the bottom gate.

And on the kitchen counter, next to the kettle, sat a squat grey machine the size of a toaster that Felicia did not understand the purpose of.

"It tastes the food," he told her.

"It what?"

"It checks for poison. Before we eat."

She looked at him for a long time. Then she looked at the machine. Then she put their dinner in it, every single night, without being asked, and never once made a joke about it.

...

The weeks went by slowly after that.

He ate. He slept. He sat on the cold floor at night and drew heaven and earth down into the dantian, and the formation under the house fed him more of it than any mountain in Xia ever had.

And once a week he wrote to the capital.

The grey-suited man from the hospital was the Emperor's head steward, it turned out — the one pair of hands through which anything reached his father at all. Alexander's letters went to him.

They were very dull letters.

He was learning to read, they said. He was doing sums. He had finished the second primer.

He was working through elementary school at home, with Felicia's help, and he was very grateful for the patience of the palace.

The steward wrote back politely. Once, he enclosed a book about birds.

In truth, Alexander was building a mind.

Every night after cultivation he sat at a borrowed desk in the old study, with three laptops and a pile of parts the robots had carried up from the gate, and he worked until the sky went grey.

The artificial intelligence of Earth was stupid. It was stupid and it was boring.

It guessed. It flattered. It forgot what you had told it an hour ago.

He had lived fourteen years beside Gaia.

He knew exactly what a real one looked like.

He was not going to live on this planet without one.

...

Nobody came for the first three weeks.

Then on a night with no moon, a little after two, the gate lock clicked open under somebody's tools, and ten people in black came up onto the gravel drive in a line.

They were good.

They moved — spaced out, silent, rifles low, hand signals only. The Second Queen had asked for the best, and for once somebody had listened to her.

They crossed the lawn toward the dark shape of the house.

And kept crossing it.

...

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