The massive screen held several open windows, each showing something different.
One window played a video, another displayed diagrams, and yet another contained text.
Potimas was reading through all of these separate streams of information simultaneously.
Every last one of them was data compiled by a criminal group responsible for the kidnapping of a dragon child in a certain country.
Footage recorded during the abduction of the dragon child.
Observation logs of the dragon child after capture.
And data from tissue samples extracted from the dragon child.
All the data the kidnapping group had possessed was now in Potimas's hands.
Potimas had no direct involvement with the criminal group.
To be more precise, he had no *direct* involvement.
Potimas was connected to them through any number of intermediaries — people and organizations standing between him and the group, linked by only the thinnest of threads.
But the criminal group didn't know that.
What Potimas was doing was happening entirely beyond their awareness: he was stealing the fruits of their labor.
Moreover, he hadn't dirtied his own hands in the slightest — he'd even had someone else do the actual data theft.
The layers of insulation between parties were so numerous that even the most capable investigator could never trace the trail back to Potimas.
And even if someone somehow managed that, Potimas had already laid the groundwork to ensure he could never be held legally accountable.
It was true that his research had hit a wall. But Potimas had absolutely no intention of dipping his fingers into dangerous criminal activity.
Even less so when the subject was a dangerous creature like a dragon.
Potimas didn't want to die. He would not do anything that might bring even a shred of danger upon himself.
If he were to take such risks, it would only be when his safety was fully guaranteed.
And it was precisely because he had meticulously planned every detail and secured that guarantee that Potimas had set the current events in motion.
The criminal group were nothing more than pawns — sacrificial pieces used to obtain the research data Potimas needed.
Behind those pawns, he had even prepared an organization to manipulate them — a puppet pulling strings from the shadows. And even that organization bore no trace of Potimas's involvement.
Many people would be arrested as a result of this case.
But none of the investigations would ever reach Potimas.
That was only natural, since he had engineered it to be so.
If someone were somehow able to piece together every step of Potimas's trail, they would be rendered speechless by the sheer, overwhelming meticulousness of it all.
Every ounce of that effort was in service of one goal: immortality.
The relentless drive to fulfill Potimas's lifelong obsession.
An incident born of mad obsession, pulling countless people into its wake.
And yet, the data that ultimately arrived in Potimas's possession was, for all that, woefully scant.
Despite opposing a supernatural creature like a dragon, despite entangling so many people, all Potimas had obtained was less than ten pages' worth of written reports and less than one hour of video footage.
The return on his investment was pitifully small.
But Potimas didn't let that discourage him. He stared at the video with unblinking intensity, reading through the acquired data over and over again.
Simultaneously, his mind churned through countless lines of reasoning.
He had stationed himself before the monitor until the video had been played back nearly a hundred times, forgetting to eat or sleep.
And then he reached his conclusion.
Dragons operated not according to science, but according to the logic of magic.
The composition data of a dragon's scales contained nothing but the names of mundane substances.
They were closer to minerals than to biological tissue, and none of the materials were unknown.
However, strength tests produced values that far exceeded the theoretical limits suggested by that composition.
A phenomenon inexplicable by scientific common sense.
This much was obvious to anyone from the footage: the fire breath the dragon child expelled from its mouth, its flight that defied gravity as though it didn't exist, bullets ricocheting off empty air.
There was no doubt the footage was authentic. It wasn't doctored or staged.
The video was proof that supernatural phenomena could occur in the real world.
That said, in Potimas's assessment, even those supernatural phenomena had rules.
Otherwise, the dragon child would never have been caught after running out of breath.
They were supernatural phenomena beyond the reach of science, but they still operated under rules and laws. Not just anything was possible.
Once you understood that much, the rest was simple.
The key was that these were phenomena governed by firm rules — rules different from science, but rules nonetheless.
If that was the case, then as long as one didn't know the rules, it should still be possible for humans to replicate them.
If there truly were no rules, no laws — if it were genuinely divine, formless power beyond all comprehension — then even Potimas would have been helpless.
But if rules and laws existed, then it was simply a natural phenomenon of the world that humans happened to not know about.
It only felt supernatural because it was unknown.
Once you understood it, it was no longer supernatural — merely another law of nature.
To unravel those rules, Potimas threw himself headlong into the study of magic.
Science had taken him as far as it could in his quest for immortality.
And there, he would make a discovery.
An unknown energy that science could not explain: MA Energy.
This discovery, and the research Potimas subsequently pursued and published from it, would shake the world to its core and invite an era of great upheaval.