The Mushroom-Bug Sword's theory was sound. But once Shen Cong had knocked out a rough prototype, the results fell short of what he'd hoped.

The biggest snag was this: he needed the four natural carrier vehicles to mimic, on their own, the Activity waves of the pointed, round, long, and flat mushroom spores. Only then could he work the Great Vajra freely and guide the Mushroom-Bug Sword into producing the Activity water-wave. Otherwise he'd have to split his mind five ways at once to run the energy weapon — an impossibility.

He ran the experiment over and over, and finally cracked it.

The solution was to build a spore bank.

He packed each natural carrier vehicle with a single kind of mushroom spore, then coaxed the carrier vehicle's Activity wave and the spore's Activity wave into entangling with each other, locking in a fixed mimic-wave. Steering a natural carrier vehicle's Activity wave was itself a form of interference; all he'd done now was hand the reins of that interference over to the mushroom spore.

With the spore bank in place, the carrier vehicles could keep mimicking on their own — no hands-on control from Shen Cong required.

The one catch: the entanglement decayed over time. Roughly every twelve hours it would slip free, and the carrier vehicle would revert to its own native Activity wave.

Which meant Shen Cong had to reset the entanglement back to peak condition once every twelve hours.

"With the spore bank driving the carrier vehicles, they'll be mimicking around the clock — meaning the Mushroom-Bug Sword is firing off the Activity light-wave nonstop. That burns through a colossal amount of Activity. Even with the Push-Pull Three-Core Totem Engine hoarding Activity for me, I couldn't keep up with the drain."

Having solved the light-wave mimicry problem, Shen Cong turned up another spot that needed reworking.

The Activity light-wave hit enormously hard, but it drained just as enormously — that punch came from the spore powder dumping all its Activity in one burst as it combusted.

As designed, one minute of the Mushroom-Bug Sword running might burn…