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Chapter 1191: Rare Element

Roland picked up a lead box and weighed it in his palm. Before activation, the silver metal was indistinguishable from ordinary iron — harmless, inert, unremarkable. It was almost inconceivable that this small, innocent-looking piece of metal contained an immense amount of energy.

And yet this was the very element that would allow men to convert mass into energy for the first time.

On a whole other level from chemical reactions.

The cabinet held roughly fifty lead boxes, each containing one kilogram of Uranium-235 purified to near-completion — fifty kilograms in all.

There were more than one such cabinet in the room.

If he activated all the uranium here at once—

He would release something that deserved to be called “high energy.”

“Can they really produce what you call ‘the Glory of the Sun’?” Nightingale asked. “Will they explode upon ignition? They don’t look combustible at all.”

“Want to know?” Roland said, amused. “It’s simpler than you’d think. Put these ingots together and they explode bright as the sun. The uranium in this single cabinet would be more than enough to raze Neverwinter to the ground. That’s why Lucia bears such responsibility. If she accidentally — ”

The room went silent.

Lucia pressed her hand to her mouth, face white.

”…There’s no way,” Azima said at last, in sheer disbelief. “Are you saying we might wreck the whole city if we’re careless?”

Nightingale snatched the lead box from Roland’s hand, put it back in the cabinet, and grabbed his arm to drag him toward the door.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting you out of this city,” Nightingale said. “Then I’ll find people to get rid of these things. Lucia — call Wendy. Tell her to contact the Administrative Office now.”

“I’ll go to Princess Tilly,” Azima said, already moving. “Only she can mobilize the Sleeping Spell.”

“Stop! I was joking — ”

It took him a considerable while to calm everyone down.

“You’re sure this is a joke,” Nightingale said. Not a question.

“Ahem. Yes — theoretically speaking,” Roland added quickly. “Activating these elements is not that simple. Even if I used all my power, I couldn’t guarantee success.”

Lucia exhaled. “Your Majesty… you scared the hell out of me.”

“It isn’t funny,” Nightingale said, glaring. “If Wendy and Scroll had heard that, joke or not — ”

“They would probably move the new institute far away from Neverwinter,” Roland said.

“Or move you far away.”

“Right. Let’s forget this conversation happened.” He cleared his throat. “As long as everyone here keeps quiet, Wendy and Scroll will never know.”

“Someone might already have heard,” Nightingale said, glancing out the window.

“Then I’ll reward you one bottle of Chaos Drinks to seal their silence,” Roland said immediately.

“Deal.” Nightingale vanished.

Roland looked at the wide-eyed Lucia and Azima. “That’s also part of the joke.”

Nightingale reappeared a moment later. “No suspicious figures found. But the deal — ”

“Remains valid.”

She settled in a corner with her precious dried fish and hummed.

After a moment’s hesitation, Azima spoke, her voice deliberate. “It wasn’t all a joke, was it, Your Majesty? You insisted we weigh each lead box to precisely four kilograms — container included, so the metal itself is identical in every box. You told us to have the guards block the surrounding area before any incident, and that we must never investigate on our own but come to you directly in the castle.” She paused. “These metal pieces are dangerous.”

Roland looked at her with mild surprise. “You’re perceptive. Most of your reasoning is correct. Apart from toxicity, mass is a critical factor — which is precisely why I had you separate them.” He had to admit he was impressed. Azima could deduce a subject’s properties from the research protocol alone. That meticulous attention to cause and consequence was probably how she had developed her tracking ability in the first place. “But to turn them into a weapon against the demons, we also need something else.”

“Those particles stored separately?” Azima said immediately.

“Not exactly, though you’re close.”

The composition of raw uranium was complex. Beyond uranium compounds, the ore contained many other radioactive materials — secondary daughter products that had either decayed into stable elements or were still mid-decay. Even the purification the radiation clan had performed when they built the Temple of the Cursed had not altered the fundamental composition much, as Lucia’s results confirmed.

Uranium-238 was the dominant fraction. It could not be weaponized, but the Magic Ceremony Cube recognized it, and its properties were close enough to Uranium-235 that all of it had been sent to the laboratory on the North Slope.

Uranium-235 with a purity above 90% could serve as a weapon. It made up barely 1% of the uranium found in the Earth’s crust. For most researchers, the central problem had always been extraction.

But Uranium-235 was not the rarest element in this ore. Its daughter products — thorium, radium, radon, polonium — were rarer still. For his Radiation Project, Roland also needed polonium-210, the naturally occurring isotope.

Nine years of compulsory education in his previous world had given him the outline. Marie Curie had made her name through the discovery of radium and polonium. Polonium-210 had a short half-life of barely a hundred days and occurred at almost undetectable concentrations, yet Curie had isolated it from pitchblende by tracking its powerful radioactivity.

Both radium and polonium could form neutron sources when compounded with beryllium — and this led to the second problem: detonation.

The first generation of nuclear weapons was, in principle, straightforward. The mechanism was to induce fissionable nuclides to release energy. When Uranium-235 absorbed a neutron, it became unstable Uranium-236, which split into two lighter nuclides and several free neutrons; the mass difference converted directly to energy.

Those released neutrons struck other nuclides, triggering further fissions, cascading outward. A nuclear chain reaction.

In the microscopic world, atomic nuclei are vast distances apart. If an atom were a football field, the nucleus would be an ant at the center. For a neutron to hit that ant, the field must be large enough that the neutron cannot simply fly out the edges — and the ant must lie in the neutron’s path.

To control the size of that football field, you controlled the mass and shape of the fissile material.

Critical mass was not a fixed number. It depended on geometry and a suite of calculations: a sphere presented the smallest surface-to-volume ratio, the tightest ant-field, the best odds of a hit. Roland had heard of battles lost to miscalculations in this domain. But his predecessors had done the exhaustive research. He knew the answer: for Uranium-235, critical mass in a spherical configuration was fifty-two kilograms.

That was why each lead box must hold no more than one kilogram.

Since critical mass was adjustable, it could in theory be reduced by either compressing the fissile material to increase density — the principle behind implosion-type weapons — or by supplying additional neutrons. High-explosive designs used the former: the detonation compressed the core until its density exceeded critical threshold. Given Neverwinter’s current technology, Roland could not reliably calculate the geometry needed to control that implosion precisely. So he turned his attention to the latter.

Neutrons. A sustained and controlled chain reaction.

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