Chapter 333: Self-Sustaining Chain, Magical Atom Bomb
Chapter 333: Chapter 333: Self-Sustaining Chain, Magical Atom Bomb
Every wizard’s magical reserves had a ceiling. No matter how much they grew, there was always a cap.
Flamel...
Nicolas Flamel, the six-hundred-year-old legendary wizard. His magical skill and Alchemy went without saying, but his total reserves... had those grown with age too?
If so, maybe it was possible. Regulus didn’t know.
But thinking of Flamel brought back something the old man had said during their last meeting.
"Magic can become matter. Pour magic in, and it becomes mass."
Magic to mass. The foundation of Alchemy.
The Philosopher’s Stone could turn lead into gold. The magical principle boiled down to a single sentence: not enough mass, so magic makes up the difference.
Regulus had never studied Alchemy and couldn’t claim to understand it, but the physics were straightforward. You poured magic in, and it became the protons, neutrons, and electrons that a gold atom needed.
If that was the case, what about the reverse?
Could mass convert back into magic?
If so, he wouldn’t need his own reserves to meet the critical threshold.
He could convert the target’s own mass into magic, then use that magic to drive the vibration.
The larger the target, the more mass available for conversion, the more magic generated, the stronger the vibration.
The target could supply the energy for its own destruction.
Nuclear Fission worked on the same principle. A uranium bomb’s explosive yield didn’t come from an external source. It came from the mass deficit of the uranium nuclei themselves.
A tiny loss of mass produced an astronomical amount of energy.
If the conversion ratio between magic and mass followed a similar scale, then converting even one percent of a target’s mass would release enough magic to pulverize the rest.
Following that conclusion to its logical next step, he needed to generate a conversion point at the target’s core.
Let that point consume surrounding mass and output magic. Magic drives vibration. Vibration fractures structure. Fracturing releases more mass for the conversion point to consume.
A self-feeding loop.
Neutron hits uranium nucleus. Nucleus splits and flings out neutrons. Neutrons hit more nuclei.
Conversion point eats mass and outputs magic. Magic drives vibration and shatters structure. Shattered structure feeds more mass to the conversion point.
If this logic held, the sequence of steps was clear.
Detonation: the Disintegration Curse provides the initial vibration, creating the first wave of fractures inside the target.
Conversion: at the core of the fracture zone, a magic-to-mass conversion point forms. Debris and stress energy from the fracturing are absorbed by the conversion point and transformed into magic.
Drive: the converted magic fuels a new round of vibration directly inside the target, drawing nothing from the caster.
Propagation: new vibrations shatter more structure, releasing more mass for the conversion point, which outputs more magic, driving stronger vibrations.
Criticality: conversion efficiency multiplied by fracture yield exceeds conduction losses. The cycle sustains itself.
Past the critical threshold, the caster walks away. The target finishes the job.
Regulus stared into the hearth.
The Disintegration Curse’s ultimate form wasn’t about shattering bigger things. It was about making the target dismantle itself.
The caster provides the first shot and the conversion point. Nothing more.
The target’s mass is the fuel. Its structure is the conduction medium. Its very existence is the energy source for its own annihilation.
His fingers tapped lightly on his knee. Baruk shuffled all eight legs and crawled down his arm to his wrist, front legs braced against the back of his hand, body rising and falling with the motion.
Regulus reached over with his other hand and stroked the spider’s carapace, then his thoughts drifted to something further still.
That morning, he’d fired a Disintegration Curse at open air.
Cognitive focus had worked. The beam connected with a patch of atmosphere, vibration initiated, but nothing happened.
Air molecules were too far apart. The vibration found no surfaces to bounce against, and the energy dissipated immediately.
But that had been an ordinary Disintegration Curse. What if there were a conversion point?
A conversion point didn’t care about medium. It consumed mass, and air had mass.
Roughly 1.3 kilograms per cubic meter. Not much, but not zero.
If a conversion point formed in open air and consumed the surrounding molecules, outputting magic, and that magic drove vibration, and the vibration compressed the surrounding air...
Compressed air surges in density. Molecular spacing collapses. It becomes a viable medium for conducting vibration.
Vibration propagates through the high-density air, compresses the next layer outward, and compression generates heat.
Heat ionizes the air. Molecules are torn into atoms. Atoms are stripped of electrons. Plasma.
Plasma is denser and hotter than any solid. A superior vibration-conducting medium by every measure.
The conversion point keeps feeding. It consumes the Plasma’s mass, outputs magic. Magic drives vibration. Vibration compresses more air into Plasma. Plasma is consumed by the conversion point.
Self-sustaining cycle.
In open air. No solid target required. No mountain. No island. No physical object whatsoever.
Cast at an empty sky. The conversion point materializes from nothing, feeds on air, outputs magic, detonates itself.
Nuclear detonation from thin air.
An image formed in his mind.
An open plain. Nothing there but atmosphere and sunlight.
A Disintegration Curse fires into the air. Nothing seems to happen. Then the conversion point activates.
The core region’s air is compressed instantly to thousands of times its normal density. Temperature spikes to tens of thousands of degrees. Hundreds of thousands.
The sun’s surface runs at just over five thousand degrees. The center of a nuclear blast exceeds a hundred million.
At that temperature, Protego means nothing. Magical wards mean nothing. Finite Incantatem means nothing. Carbon-based, silicon-based, physical defense, magical defense. All meaningless.
Matter at that temperature doesn’t distinguish between solid, liquid, and gas. Everything is Plasma. A soup of naked atomic nuclei and free electrons.
The shockwave expands outward from ground zero, far exceeding the speed of sound. Everything within several kilometers is leveled.
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima carried a yield of twenty thousand tons of TNT and flattened a radius of roughly 1.6 kilometers.
If the conversion efficiency between magic and mass were high enough, the Disintegration Curse’s ultimate form had no ceiling on yield.
How much mass the conversion point consumed depended on how long the caster allowed it to run. One second versus ten seconds meant orders of magnitude difference in energy output.
Could Voldemort survive that?
The corner of his mouth twitched.
Voldemort’s magical mastery was unparalleled. In the dark arts, he was arguably the greatest alive.
But even the greatest magic requires a living caster to cast it. Survival comes before spellwork. In that environment, neither exists.
Maybe he could run?
Regulus considered it, then mentally shook his head.
Within the blast zone, space itself would buckle under the extreme energy density.
Apparition required spatial stability to complete. When the surrounding spatial fabric was being torn and warped by temperatures of millions upon millions of degrees and monstrous energy concentrations, could space remain stable?
Space Warp was no different. Folding space required continuity between two points. If the intervening space had been churned into an energy maelstrom, the prerequisite for folding ceased to exist.
No escape. And if you can’t escape, you endure.
But could you?
Every wizard’s defense required direct magical involvement. But what happens to magic itself at those temperatures?
He didn’t know.
Nobody did. The magical world had never produced an energy release on that scale, and no one had ever been inside one.
Could Dumbledore survive it?
Maybe.
Dumbledore had the Elder Wand, had Fawkes, had an understanding of magic’s nature so deep that the world itself seemed to bend in his favor.
But that was still only a maybe. Against a nuclear detonation, every maybe crumbles.
Physics doesn’t negotiate at that magnitude. Magic might not either.
He slowly reeled the images back in and exhaled.
Flames danced in the hearth. The stone wall beyond had absorbed enough heat to feel warm, and that warmth seeped outward, chasing away the last chill he’d carried in from outside.
He looked down at his own hand. Minutes ago, it had held a wand and sunk an island.
Compared to what was taking shape in his head, one island was nothing.
The Disintegration Curse and the Decomposition Curse pointed in completely different directions.
The Decomposition Curse pursued the conceptual. Dissolution itself. Order returning to chaos, existence reverting to a state before it was ever defined. Its endpoint was the revocation of definition.
The Disintegration Curse pursued the physical limit. Its endpoint was a self-sustaining chain reaction.
One revokes the right to exist. The other revokes the structure of existence.
Different paths, different destinations.
He lifted his gaze from his palm and watched the fire.
A log popped in the hearth. A spark arced out, landed on the flagstone, and died.
He stood up.
A few days of holiday remained, and the Disintegration Curse’s two forms were sufficient for now.
Next on the list was Baruk’s magical structure remodeling, along with the reverse application of the Decomposition Curse to reshape the spider’s magical architecture. He’d put it off too long.
He walked to the door and pushed it open.
Sea wind rushed in. Salt, cold, a lungful that spread coolness through his chest.
The distant sea stretched out grey and featureless. Nothing to see.
The stretch of water eight kilometers out looked no different from anywhere else.
He stared for a few seconds, then shut the door.