He shrugged. “There are a few different ways. Like you, I am a Y-awakened. I looked at your records, and noticed that while you trained for fighting, you never touched Chinese martial arts. Is there a reason?”

  I sighed. We were back to this. “It sucks.”

  “Sucks how?”

  “Most of it is total bullshit. Monkey style? Like pretending to act like a monkey will help. You scratch your head and armpits, jump around, and act like it somehow gives you primate muscle structure. I KNOW what primate muscle structure looks like, down to the myosin filaments, and not even the best kung-fu master in the world can match it. A real chimp could rip your arm off and beat you to death with it while you’re still trying to remember the ‘Scratch For Fleas’ form.”

  “The same with all the other animal forms. Crane style just means you offer people an easy nut shot when you concentrate too hard on your one-legged stance. In a real street fight, kicking higher than someone’s knee is a good way to get your ass kicked; it’s too slow, too telegraphed. Even going to ground, or letting someone take you to the ground, is a good way to get kicked in the head with a steel-toed boot or beaten to death with a street sign. I’ll take a dirty punch to the throat over a perfectly executed crane block any day.”

  I took a breath, on a roll now. “And don’t even get me started with all that Chinese medicine and chi flow patterns, Dim Mak and spirit-strike martial arts where fat old men pretend to knock people down from across the room without alpha powers. It’s all bullshit. The only ‘death touch’ I believe in is the one that comes from a .45 caliber bullet.”

  Mister Bob nodded along as I was talking, patient as a mountain. When I finished, he said, “You are both right and wrong.”

  “Okay,” I said, crossing my arms. “Enlighten me. What am I wrong about?”

  “Most of that stuff really is based around wish fulfillment and desperate old men trying to pretend that they own the secret truths of the universe. The whole concept is an important Chinese cultural artifact from a time when some of it really DID work.”

  “You mean the magic times,” I said, the words slipping out before I could think better of it.

  His head shot up as he suddenly looked at me with an intensity that could fracture diamond. “What did you say?”

  I blinked. “I said the magic times. Back before the Q-bomb, when humans actually believed in that shit. Back when court magicians could turn a staff into a snake, when the powers of true belief meant that pissed off gods COULD create monsters, or ride on flying chariots drawn by goats across the sky. When the universe’s rulebook was a lot more flexible.”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “How do you know about that?” he asked, his voice low and serious.

  I gave him a ‘look’ that I usually reserved for people who asked if my power could unclog their drains. “My power lets me observe molecular structures and interact with almost any particulate, and detect energy enough to both manipulate and interact with those structures meaningfully. I know damned good and well that there’s no physics that could account for what ‘I’ can do, let alone the people that can change into a giant bear, shoot laser beams from their eyes, or shit golden bricks. The math doesn’t math.”

  “I figured out years ago that there’s some magical asshattery going on, and that it was here long before the q-bomb ripped a new asshole in reality that a few very lucky people could draw on to do stupid magical stuff. I figured, in the end, pretty much every human has a special gift that could awaken if just exactly the right circumstances occurred… it’s just that those circumstances are invariably lethal, and if it’s not the perfect situation, people never get to sodomize the magical sphincter to get the power to keep themselves alive.”

  “The only difference between now and then is that people think they are too smart to believe in anything that isn’t vomited from the mouths of con artists and Hollywood freaks that have the word ‘doctor’ in front of their name. It takes a direct connection to the aforementioned cosmic blowhole in order to overcome all the energy of that disbelief, and save yourself from whatever suicidal stupidity would have gotten you killed otherwise.”

  He chuckled, a deep, rumbling sound. “I think that is both the most cogently crude and enlightened explanation of alphas I have ever heard. So.. first the scientific stuff. Everything is made of energy in the end. You’ve heard of the unified field theory?”

  I nodded. “I have heard that it’s in pieces and has been expanded and broken constantly since Einstein proposed it, mostly because he was a fake too. He stole a lot of other scientist’s ideas and marketed it as his own, like a patent-trolling Thomas Edison.”

  He nodded. “It’s in pieces because we don’t have a descriptor for the fifth force. We have frequency and wavelength from photons, mass and temperature from electroweak bosons, weight and compression from gravitons, and quarks from gluons.”

  I chuckled. “Simplified, but close enough for government work. I hate how physicists use the same word for boson strength as for molecular vibration, but it is what it is. Linguistics is not their strong suit.”

  “Well, there’s a fifth force. With it, the entire theory of everything becomes possible. Magic, chi, dao, or essence. I guess it’s aspects would be described as ‘shape’ and ‘flavor’, but the more mystically-minded would call it ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’. The problem is, the very existence of spirit and soul would make atheists shit a brick, which is most scientists.”

  “Spirit is that which KNOWS itself, like dirt, light, or even quarks, and of course, soul is that which can define itself, meaning life. That’s why scientists will NEVER discover the origin of life from its chemical basis, because it requires defining the soul of that life, and the unified field theory will never work because the link with which everything is truly defined involves self-knowledge as an immutable law. It is the definition of order, and while chaos is easy enough to find, order requires its own definition on every level.”

  I nodded slowly, my cynical brain trying to find the catch. “Very deep. And profoundly unscientific. I love it.”