Miniature Arc Oscillation Reflector

Early the next morning, Tony, having agreed to build the Jericho missile, got to work.

However, he did not immediately begin making the Jericho missile. Instead, he dismantled other missiles to collect palladium metal plates. Only by melting twelve plates together could he create the thing he had envisioned.

For Tony, every minute and second in this damned cave was agony.

An electromagnet in his chest could only sustain his life for a week. He was trapped in a cave prison blanketed by surveillance, with armed men outside watching him in shifts. The physical pain and the despair of possibly dying at any moment subjected him to multiple layers of torment.

Yet something deeper, harder, began to take root and grow within him.

Yinsen's words—"a critically important week"—transformed Tony's fear, humiliation, rage, despair, unwillingness, and fierce desire to live into an almost obsessive drive to act.

When Yinsen carried the melted liquid metal over to the mold and poured it in, Tony learned the name of the thin, bespectacled man beside him through their casual conversation.

Once the metal in the mold had mostly cooled, Tony used tweezers to remove the palladium ring.

He then assembled the metal ring into an equally crude device cobbled together from various parts. After Tony connected it to a power source and finished charging it, the first Miniature Arc Oscillation Reflector was born.

Lin Hai enlarged the image on his tablet and recorded this historic moment—the moment Tony Stark, in this cave deep in the mountains of Afghanistan, used his own ingenuity to light the first gleam of the Miniature Arc Reactor.

Yinsen, who had learned from Tony that the device was called a Miniature Arc Oscillation Reflector, asked about its power output. Tony calmly gave a number. "If I calculated it right, three