“Topology,” Senior Officer Q’in said. His voice was not loud, yet it carried to the back row without amplification. “It is not the study of shape. It is the study of continuity. And how to break it.”

He engaged the projector on his wrist. A sphere of hard-light materialized in the air above his open palm. It was perfect, blue, and hummed with a low resonance.

“A sphere. Euclidean. Predictable.”

Q’in made a sharp, chopping motion with his hand. The hard-light sphere shattered. It didn’t explode; it dissected. It fell apart into a hundred jagged, glowing shards that hovered in the air like a constellation of broken glass.

“I have scattered the set,” Q’in noted, his eyes scanning the cadets. They looked bored. They were brilliant, certainly—the Realm of Li produced nothing but brilliance—but they were soft. They had never seen a variable they couldn’t optimize. “You see randomness. I see unspecified paths. Lesson one: There is no chaos. There is only data you do not yet understand.”

He clenched his fist. The shards snapped back together. But they did not form one sphere.

They formed two.

Two identical, humming blue spheres now rotated above his palm. The volume of the light had doubled. The mass of the information had doubled.

A ripple of unease went through the cadets. One student in the front row—a boy with the gold ear-cuffs of the merchant caste—frowned. “Holographic trickery, sir?”

“Banach-Tarski,” Q’in replied, dismissing the hologram with a flick of his wrist. The light vanished. “A paradox from an ancient Earth mathematician. If you decompose one solid ball into a finite number of point sets, you can reassemble them into two balls of identical size. You create something from nothing.”

“That violates the conservation of mass,” the cadet challenged.

“In physics? Yes,” Q’in agreed. “In this reality, we are bound by the tyranny of matter. But in information theory? In the quantum topology of a code-breaking algorithm? Or in the mind of a strategist?” Q’in leaned forward, his eyes locking onto the young cadet. “In those spaces, you can create an army from a single soldier. You can create a fleet from a single ship. You can create a victory from a vacuum.”

He straightened his tunic. “But you are not here to learn philosophy. You are here to learn how to weaponize infinity.”