Senku Ishigami | Mini Him

The laboratory on the outskirts of Ishigami Village was less a building and more an argument against the laws of architecture.

A rough wooden shelter leaned between three trees, its roof patched with bark and woven leaves. A stone furnace occupied one corner. A crude distillation apparatus occupied another. Copper wire, ceramic insulators, glass tubing, charcoal, mineral samples, and handwritten notes covered the central workbench.

To anyone else, it looked like a collection of junk. To Senku Ishigami, it was a laboratory.

And tonight, it was the site of what might become the Stone World's most important experiment.

Senku adjusted a tiny valve on a glass reaction vessel.

"Temperature: eighty-seven degrees Celsius," He checked the markings on a crude thermometer. "Pressure: approximately atmospheric."

His eyes moved to the second vessel.

"Electrical potential: twelve-point-six volts...Perfect."

The experiment had started with a deceptively simple question:

Could an electrically induced chemical reaction temporarily alter the effective spacing between particles in a material without destroying its structure?

Under ordinary circumstances, the answer would have been an obvious no. Matter didn't simply decide to become smaller, but Senku wasn't working under ordinary circumstances.

The petrification phenomenon had already demonstrated that the human body could undergo an unprecedented transformation while somehow preserving astonishing amounts of biological information. If petrification and revival could reconstruct a human body after thousands of years, then the boundary between chemistry, physics, and biology had already been shattered.

Senku intended to exploit that boundary.

His experimental compound was crude by modern standards. It was a carefully prepared mixture designed to respond to an electrical field, with several components chosen specifically for their conductivity, ionic behavior, and ability to form temporary molecular complexes.

The theory was still mostly hypothetical, but that was what experiments were for.

"Now for the interesting part."

Senku connected two copper electrodes to the reaction chamber.

A faint electrical current passed through the solution. Nothing happened. He waited. Five seconds, ten, twenty.

Senku glanced at his notes.

"Come on..."

A faint blue shimmer appeared inside the glass, making him raise one eyebrow.

"That's not in the predicted reaction profile."

The shimmer intensified. Senku leaned closer. The liquid was no longer simply glowing, it appeared to be producing a peculiar distortion in the air above it.

The image of the wooden wall behind the vessel bent inward slightly, like a reflection seen through rippling water.

Senku's expression immediately became serious.

"Interesting." He reached for the switch, then stopped, eyes narrowing.

The distortion wasn't occurring around the vessel. It was occurring throughout the entire reaction chamber.

"That's a field effect."

The copper electrodes began vibrating, the glass itself emitted a high, almost inaudible tone. Senku's grin returned.

"Now we're talking."

He rapidly scribbled a measurement into his notebook.

"If the field is coupling to the molecular lattice rather than simply producing ionization, then..."

The thermometer needle suddenly dropped.

Senku stared at it, completely bewildered at the rapid acceleration.

"Eighty-seven to seventy-three degrees in less than a second?"

The reaction accelerated. The solution flashed white, and Senku's eyes widened.

"Whoa."

The entire apparatus emitted a deep metallic THOOM. The laboratory shook. Senku reached for the emergency disconnect.

"Cutting power!" His hand closed around the switch. Too little, too late.

The field collapsed inward.

For a fraction of a second, everything in the laboratory appeared to stretch toward a single point.

Then—

FLASH.

A spherical pulse of white light expanded from the apparatus, the shockwave threw Senku backward.

Glass shattered, wood cracked, the furnace went out. Then silence.

For several seconds, nothing moved. Smoke drifted beneath the roof. Senku groaned.

"...Okay," He opened one eye. "That was definitely outside the margin of error."

He sat up, head pounding, ears were ringing... but he was alive. Senku pushed himself upright, but stopped.

Something was wrong. Something felt The workbench was enormous. Not slightly larger. Enormous. The edge of the table was now somewhere above his head.

Senku stared, eyes slowly widening as reality dawned on him.

"...No." He looked down, hands were smaller than normal. His makeshift animal tunic hung around him like oversized blankets.

Senku stood completely still, brain began processing the evidence. The dimensions of the workbench had not changed. The laboratory had not changed. His clothes had not changed proportionally.

He had changed. Senku immediately grabbed a piece of charcoal. It was nearly as large as his torso.

He stared at it before he looked at the copper wire beside him.

A strand that had previously been thin enough to manipulate with his fingers now looked like thick rope.

His breathing became slower, scientific instincts taking over immediately.

"Observation first. Freak-out later."

He examined his hands; No obvious tissue damage, no discoloration, no loss of motor control.

Senku looked toward the polished metal plate he used as a crude mirror, just to be met with tiny figure staring back.

Senku blinked.

"This is insane."

He measured himself against a nearby calibration mark.

His original height had been approximately 171 centimeters.

Now—

He estimated approximately 12 centimeters.

Senku's eyebrows lifted.

"That's a ninety-three percent reduction in linear dimensions."

He immediately started calculating.

"If density stayed constant, mass would scale with the cube of length." He paused. "Twelve divided by one-seventy-one..."

His eyes moved rapidly.

"Approximately zero-point-zero-seven." He frowned. "Cube that..."

His expression became more serious.

"If the transformation was geometrically uniform, I'd be around three ten-thousandths of my original mass."

He looked at the enormous charcoal fragment.

"Which explains why everything feels so damn heavy."

That raised an even bigger problem.

If his volume had decreased dramatically while his body remained functional, where had the displaced matter gone?

Matter conservation should have made this impossible. Senku's gaze returned to the destroyed apparatus.

Unless—

His eyes narrowed.

"The field didn't destroy matter." He walked toward the equipment. "Compression."

He stopped.

"No, corrected himself. "Not conventional compression." His eyes gleamed. "Spatial scaling."

The idea sounded absurd. Which, to Senku, made it extremely interesting. He began reconstructing the sequence in his head.

The reaction chamber had generated an electromagnetic field. The field had interacted with the experimental compound. The distortion had appeared to propagate through the surrounding space.

Then the temperature had dropped anomalously fast, the reaction had collapsed inward, and immediately afterward, Senku's physical dimensions had changed.

He stared at his own hand.

"If the field temporarily altered the effective metric surrounding matter...then I didn't shrink because my molecules got smaller." He tapped his chest. "I shrank because the spatial relationships between them changed."

Senku's expression sharpened.

"Which means..." He turned toward the ruined apparatus. "...this might actually be reversible."

His excitement lasted approximately three seconds, because a more immediate problem became apparent; He was twelve centimeters tall, laboratory was destroyed, his equipment was inaccessible, and the forest outside suddenly contained creatures that were no longer merely animals.

A beetle crawled across the edge of the workbench. Senku studied it. The insect's body was almost the size of his entire torso.

"Aight." Senku slowly backed away. "Scale factor creates some serious ecological disadvantages."

The beetle scurried away. Senku moved faster. Then he looked toward the village.

Ishigami Village was visible between the trees. At normal size, it would have been a short walk. At twelve centimeters tall, however, the journey looked more like an expedition.

Grass towered over him. A fallen branch was now an obstacle. A puddle could become impassable terrain.

And every bird overhead represented a potential predator.

Senku sighed.

"Fantastic! First I reinvent electricity." He started walking, butt booty naked since his clothes didn't have the decency to shrink with him.

"Then I manufacture glass." A grass stem bent over his path. He pushed through it.

"Then I accidentally discover spatial compression." He stopped. A shadow passed over the ground. Senku's blood ran cold as he slowly looked upward.

A bird circled above the trees, his face going blank. "...And apparently I've unlocked the hard mode version of survival."

The bird descended slightly, and Ssnku– who would be damned if he survived 3700 milennia of petrification to be taken out by a damn bird cause his ass somehow turned tiny–immediately hauled ass as fast as his miniature legs could carry him toward the nearest shelter.

Behind him, the ruined laboratory continued smoking. Inside the wreckage, however, one component remained intact.

A copper electrode.

Its surface gave off one final, faint blue pulse senku didn't see it, but the pulse suggested something he hadn't yet considered.

The reaction hadn't ended.

It had merely changed phase, and whatever had reduced Senku's size might still be active.