Marvel's Shendu: Dominating the Multiverse

Chapter 168 The Disobedient Peter

Parker walked over to the microscope and took a look. The staining was crude, but the direction of the structural analysis was correct.

"Acetic acid," Parker said.

"Acetic acid?" Octavius ​​raised an eyebrow. "What concentration?"

"Twenty-three percent."

Octavius ​​was silent for two seconds, then chuckled. Not mockingly. "The concentration window is very narrow. How many times did you try?"

More than three hundred times.

“More than three hundred times,” Octavius ​​repeated. The robotic arm behind him adjusted its angle slightly. “In your bedroom?”

Parker didn't respond to that. He walked over to the toroidal device and looked it over. There was something wrong with how the superconducting coil was wound.

"Here," Parker pointed. "The uneven turn spacing creates eddies during operation."

Octavius ​​turned his head and stared for five seconds.

"you're right."

Parker withdrew his hand. This lab was indeed far superior to the equipment at his home. The 3D printer he held, a birthday gift from Mei, had an accuracy of only 0.1 millimeters, and the outer casing of each printer had to be hand-polished every time. The equipment here could achieve 0.001 millimeters.

“You can use these,” Octavius ​​said, gesturing to the tool rack. “Anytime. You already know the password.”

"What are the conditions?"

"No conditions."

Parker looked at him.

"Okay, there's one." Octavius ​​pushed up his glasses. "Don't break my things."

The Lord stood outside the warehouse, in the shadow of a fire hose.

Under the effect of the serpent charm, light slid across him, casting no outline. He didn't follow. There was no need. The Space Stone's perception covered the entire interior structure of the building.

He could hear Parker and Octavius's conversation. Not eavesdropping, but the sound waves were naturally propagating at that distance; he simply hadn't blocked them out.

The Mind Stone detected Parker's emotional shifts. Before entering, he was wary and hesitant. Upon seeing the experimental equipment, both emotions subsided, replaced by something long absent: interest.

A sixteen-year-old boy. He conducted over three hundred solvent experiments in his bedroom.

The Holy Lord leaned back against the wall.

Octavius's approach was clever. Without promises or emotions, he used equipment and technology to build a framework, letting Parker walk in on his own. The attraction between a teenager lacking a father figure and an adult male willing to take his intelligence seriously doesn't need the Mind Stone to analyze.

The problem lies with Octavius ​​himself.

The Holy Lord retrieved the Mind Stone's reading records of Octavius. This man's mental map was not healthy. The neural interfaces of the four robotic arms were embedded on both sides of his spine, directly connected to the central nervous system. Each time it was used, the feedback signals from the robotic arms slightly rewrote his neural circuits. The current degree of rewriting was still within a controllable range, but the trend was upward.

To put it simply: those four arms are slowly changing his personality, without him even realizing it.

The Holy Lord stood up straight from the wall.

No intervention.

He made this judgment for a reason. Parker needed to go through some things. Ben Parker's death gave the teenager a foothold, but it wasn't enough. He needed to stumble a few times before he could stand firm. The role of the Holy Lord was not that of a babysitter.

He used the Space Stone to place an anchor point in the brickwork of the warehouse's outer wall. The microscopic spatial folding left no physical trace, undetectable by Octavius's instruments. Through this anchor point, the Holy Lord could perceive the state inside the laboratory in real time from any location.

Having done all this, he released the snake charm and turned to walk into the night.

Parker began visiting that lab regularly.

The frequency increased from once a week to three times a week, and finally stabilized at the end of each day's patrol. He usually arrived at 11 p.m. and stayed until 2 or 3 a.m.

Octavius ​​wasn't always there. Sometimes when Parker arrived, the lab was empty, the lights were off, so he would turn them on himself, find the materials, and start working.

He redesigned the transmitter using the equipment here. The new version is half the size, the launch distance is increased by forty percent, and three more optional parameters are added to the silk stretching mode.

Octavius ​​looked at the finished product without saying anything, and then placed it on the table and examined it for ten minutes.

"Is the trigger mechanism a palm pressure sensor?"

"Yes. Two presses are required to activate, preventing accidental activation."

"Response time?"

"Twelve milliseconds."

Octavius ​​handed the transmitter back to him. "It can do eight milliseconds. Replace it with a pressure sensor chip; I have one in the second drawer over there."

Parker rummaged through the drawer. He didn't recognize the chip model; the packaging had Oscorp's internal number printed on it.

"Is this what you 'deserve'?"

"certainly."

Parker took out the chip and returned to his workstation to begin modifications. After an hour, he reduced the response time to nine milliseconds. Eight milliseconds was impossible because his transmitter structure differed from Octavius's assumptions.

"Nine is enough," Parker said.

Octavius ​​didn't reply. He was working on his own things, the four robotic arms simultaneously manipulating the coils of the toroidal device. He had fixed the turn spacing issue that Parker had pointed out earlier.

"What are you doing?" Parker asked.

"Miniature fusion reactor".

Parker stopped what he was doing and glanced at him.

"Is the theory feasible?"

“If it’s not feasible, I won’t do it.” Octavius ​​threaded a superconducting wire through the magnetic confinement tube. “The core problem is plasma confinement. Traditional tokamak schemes are too large; I need to shrink it to the size of this table.”

"What kind of constraints should be used?"

"My arm." Octavius ​​raised the mechanical arm on his right rear. "Four magnetic field generating points, real-time servo adjustment. They can achieve reaction speeds that ordinary devices can't."

Parker looked at the four robotic arms.

"Is the interface in your arm directly connected to a nerve?"

"right."

"If the magnetic field deviates during the operation of the fusion reactor, the feedback current will—"

"Burn my spinal cord," Octavius ​​finished for him. "I know. That's why the constraint algorithm can't have any errors."

Parker looked at him. Octavius's eyes were calm behind his glasses, his pupils reflecting the blue-white welding light from the workbench.

My phone vibrated.

Parker glanced down. At that number.

"His fusion plan lacks passive safety mechanisms. If all four robotic arms malfunction simultaneously, there are no backup restraint measures."

Parker stared at the screen.

The second message followed.

"You know what this means."

Parker placed his phone face down on the table.

He knew perfectly well what that meant. A fusion reactor without redundancy protection, in densely populated New York City. If it exploded, the impact wouldn't be limited to just one building.

At 2 a.m., Parker left the laboratory and climbed to the roof of the building next door to go home.

He paused at the edge of the rooftop.

About a hundred meters behind, under a streetlamp, sat a cat. A short, gray cat, licking its paws as it sat on a trash can lid. In the dead of night, the cat's presence wasn't unusual. What was unusual was that it glanced in the direction Parker had left, then jumped off the trash can and disappeared into a dark alley.

Parker didn't notice the cat.

He shot out a spider silk thread, which swung into the night.

Deep in the alley, the cat's shadow stretched, distorted, and stood up. The Holy Lord withdrew the remaining energy fluctuations of the Spider Talisman and put his hands in his pockets.

Parker didn't listen to him, which was expected.