Out of the seven remaining candidates, Ashok and Sneha had taken up two spots. Ronnie and Rohit, though, hadn’t made the cut.

Not that Aman expected the two goons to have the attention span to properly meditate.

They had been taken to an empty classroom by the expert while the rest of the class had been ushered back to their classrooms to continue their lessons.

Though he highly doubted that any of them would be able to concentrate on the classes after their disappointing morning.

Letting the seven of them seat themselves at the desks, the expert stood in front of the blackboard and began speaking.

“The seven of you are the most talented among your classmates in the art of soul manipulation. Your thoughts have a high degree of conjunction with your nano-photons and thus, you are able to direct the particles by imposing your will on them.

“You might have been told at the beginning of this test that it was perfectly fair and that there was no external factor that could boost your chances of success. Remember, nothing in this world is truly fair.

“While the strength of your soul does not affect the test in any way, thereby eliminating most known methods of enhancement, there is one factor that might make a difference. Any of you want to try and guess what that might be? After all, talent isn’t enough, at the Indian Institute of Eugenics we want people capable of using their talent. People capable of thinking independently.”

There was a short silence for a moment as the seven of them began thinking of what factors might skew the chances of selection in their favour. Aman had already analysed this problem the moment the exercise had been set and he had his answer ready. But, he hesitated when he remembered the look on the face of the expert when he had noticed him and his slight pause before selecting him.

His intuition told him to maintain his silence and not draw more attention to himself.

“The soul sensors.” A clear female voice rang out while he was struggling to decide, taking the choice out of his hands. It was Sneha.

The expert nodded. “Good. The difference of your soul sensors is what is skewing the results of my judgement.” Walking over to the blackboard and taking up a piece of chalk from the box present in a niche in the wall, he began to explain.

“The soul sensor consists of two parts. One part amplifies your brainwaves, that is more or less consistent across the models as our microchip tech has reached a plateau and unless we figure out something radical, we won’t be able to increase the amplification any more.

“The other part is the core of the tech and the variations in it are what separate each model’s performance and price. Nano-photons are the smallest known particles in the world and ironically, the only things that can affect them apart from biomagnetism is the heaviest of atoms.

“In chemistry, a synthetic element is a chemical element that does not occur naturally on Earth, and can only be created artificially. So far, 24 synthetic elements have been created (those with atomic numbers 95–118). All are unstable, requiring the latest of technologies to maintain their stability.

“They have the ability to condense the nano-photons and therefore allow the amplified brainwaves to detect them. That is how we detect the soul using the soul sensors.

“The higher the atomic number of the element at the core, the harder it is to produce and stabilize it and the more expensive the sensor. Correspondingly, the better the performance.”

He finished writing everything down on the board as bullet points. We had all studied this before when we had studied the periodic table but he was a good teacher and the refresher was welcome.

Putting the chalk down, he turned back to us. “So, this time, I will test you by suppressing your soul sensor with my soul pressure and you will perform the exercise again. This time, you will have an even starting line and out of the seven of you, I will only select two as that is the quota allotted to your school based on the performance of the previous students we chose from here at the Indian Institute of Eugenics.”