Pepper didn't stay long on Long Island. Once she confirmed that Daisy had no plans to see Stark anytime soon, she cheerfully headed off to deal with contracts for wind farms and emissions-treatment plants.
The supercomputer hadn't earned a single cent. If anything, it had cost a fortune in labor and materials — a dead loss by any accounting standard.
Still, keeping Daisy away from Stark was worth the price. Pepper authorized hefty overtime pay for the engineering team and demanded they finish installation and testing at maximum speed. The official excuse was the usual customer-is-king spiel.
With the supercomputer installation entering its middle phase, PERIL had finally found time to finish translating the Mandarin's jokes.
Daisy pulled them up immediately — and within two minutes, her brow was knotted tight.
She still couldn't understand a word of it.
Taken literally, these weren't "jokes" at all. They were the Mandarin's personal reflections written during cultivation — training journals of a sort.
By any measure the material was extraordinarily valuable. But Daisy's head was spinning. The vocabulary was arcane, the phrasing deliberately obscure. She'd originally assumed the Mandarin was a Qi cultivator following a Taoist immortality path. Now that assumption was completely wrong. The man practiced something far closer to Tantric Buddhism — his writings were riddled with references to the Three Channels and Seven Chakras.
The texts were in Chinese, Mongolian, and Manchu, peppered with hefty chunks of Sanskrit. PERIL had spent considerable time cross-referencing sources and verifying accuracy. The translations were reliable.
But Daisy simply could not parse the sentences. It was the classic problem: she recognized every individual word, yet strung together they might as well have been alien script.
Nobody had ever known how the ten alien rings were supposed to be worn.
The Mandarin's approach was, to put it mildly, creative. He'd used Tantric theory as a framework, mapping each ring to a specific channel or chakra. The three most powerful rings — Mind Control, Matter Reconstruction, and Atomic Cutter — corresponded to the Left Channel, the Central Channel, and the Right Channel respectively.
The remaining seven energy rings mapped to the Seven Chakras.
Hoping to establish contact with the Atomic Cutter as quickly as possible, Daisy decided to give the Three Channels method a try.
She changed into yoga clothes — a tank top and a pair of flared leggings — sat cross-legged on the floor, and propped up a tablet playing an introductory video titled Three Channels & Seven Chakras: A Beginner's Guide.
She studied the video, cross-referenced the Mandarin's notes, and tried to relax her mind, searching bit by bit for the flow of inner energy — for those legendary Three Channels.
Tangbao the lion cub padded past her bedroom, saw her sitting there with a furrowed brow, and happily trotted off to play on his own.
Five minutes in, Daisy realized something was very, very wrong.
Every beginner's guide on the internet was garbage. There was no "energy flow" to speak of — the only thing she'd nearly achieved was falling asleep.
She searched again. And again. Finally, buried in the digital archives of a museum, she found a scanned handwritten manuscript — probably an ancient monk's personal notes for his disciples, covering the basics of what to watch out for during early practice.
"You've got to be kidding me!" Daisy read two lines and nearly hurled her tablet across the room.
Tantric masters were, by definition, monks. Male monks. Every technique, every meditation method, every secret teaching was designed for the male body. Female practitioners were expected to receive guidance through paired cultivation with a male teacher — and those instructions had never been written down. They were effectively lost to history.
Modern sources claimed anyone could practice the Three Channels system, but judging by the ancient texts, this was strictly a male cultivation method. The Left Channel connected to the right testicle; the Right Channel connected to the left; and the Central Channel ran straight down the middle. Daisy didn't even have the equipment. She couldn't connect a damn thing.
Could the female anatomy serve as a substitute? The internet cheerfully said sure. The ancient masters, however, had never bothered to research the question. As for asking a living Tantric authority — the only qualified master had recently had his finger severed by a certain someone and then tumbled into a snow-covered mountain range. Even if she fished the Mandarin out, he wasn't exactly going to answer her questions.
Was there truly no alternative? She searched exhaustively. The conclusion was, regrettably, no. The Three Channels and Seven Chakras were a male-only system. Women could attempt it, but if side effects arose, the ancient masters accepted zero responsibility.
Left Channel, Central Channel, Right Channel — she couldn't sense any of them. The Seven Chakras were even more hopeless.
She flipped through every surviving Tantric text she could find online. All of them used the Three Channels as their foundation.
The Mandarin's theory was even more archaic and esoteric. Without any grounding in the basics, and with only a handful of experiential notes rather than a proper manual, the best she could do was treat it as light reading for idle moments.
"Forget it!" The old methods were a complete dead end — barely worth referencing.
Fortunately, the rings weren't built by Tantric masters. She still had hope. She instructed PERIL to continue collecting data and decrypting the alien language inside the rings. Once the supercomputer was up and running with the Arc Reactor powering it, she'd see just how long one little ring could hold out.
Little Lorna had spent two blissful days running wild with zero supervision — and then realized nobody was actually watching her, which was unsettling in its own way. She tracked Daisy down and asked to learn how to control her powers.
Daisy, still reeling from the Three Channels fiasco, had dragged a lounge chair under a palm tree and was dozing off.
Lorna stared at her negligent guardian, momentarily speechless. She used to dream about nobody telling her what to do. Now that dream had come true, and she didn't quite know what to do with it.
She gently shook Daisy's arm. Once her guardian-slash-big-sister was awake, she bit her lip and said, "I don't think I'm a mutant. After that day, my power hasn't shown up again. Can you teach me?"
Having witnessed Daisy's teleportation and gravity manipulation, Lorna was stubbornly convinced she was a fellow mutant. She couldn't gauge the difference in their power levels; what she envied most was that Daisy showed no outward sign of genetic abnormality and could pass for perfectly normal.
Lorna couldn't. The chefs and housekeepers at the villa had all recoiled at the sight of her green hair, staring at her like she was some man-eating monster.
Daisy had no idea how to train a young mutant in the early stages. The best she could do was channel her inner Sebastian Shaw — specifically, how Shaw had trained a young Magneto. She pulled a table over from nearby, produced a coin, and gestured for Lorna to make it fly.
"Focus. Think of your power as an instinct — not something you consciously do."
"Don't look at me. Look at the coin. Picture it flying."
Lorna strained for five solid minutes, face flushed crimson, but the coin sat right where it was.
"...You're so dumb." Daisy offered unhelpful commentary from the sidelines, earning herself a fierce glare.
The girl kept at it for another five stubborn minutes, getting nowhere. Watching her struggle was almost painful, so Daisy finally stepped in to coach directly.
"Let me demonstrate. I can't control magnetism the way you do, but I can show you how magnetic force moves — you can feel it for yourself." She motioned for Lorna to watch closely.