**Chapter 31: Technology Boom**
**Day 1,170.**
**Location: Tokyo, Akihabara District (The New Forge).**
**Current Status: Level 12 Novice (Still faking it).**
**Global Trend: The Great Loot Rush.**
There is a saying: "One man's trash is another man's treasure."
In the context of an intergalactic war, however, the saying should be: "One alien empire's debris is a primitive species' ticket to the singularity."
It had been five days since the destruction of the Aetherian Cruiser. Five days since I, masquerading as the intrepid novice *Null*, had "sacrificed" myself to contain a warp-core explosion, swallowing enough energy to power a small star system before splashing down into the Pacific.
The wreckage of the cruiser had rained down over a thousand-mile radius. In a normal world, this would be an environmental disaster. The UN would declare exclusion zones; men in hazmat suits would scrub the beaches.
But this wasn't a normal world anymore. It was a server. And that wreckage wasn't debris.
It was loot.
I sat in a small electronics shop in Akihabara that had been hastily converted into a "Magitech Appraisal Center." The air smelled of ozone, soldering iron smoke, and unwashed gamers.
"Zero," I subvocalized, watching a teenager argue with a clerk over a piece of twisted, glowing metal. "What is the current market value of Aetherian scrap?"
**[The economy is volatile, Shigu,]** Zero reported via my neural link. **[Raw Aetherian alloy—'Star-Steel'—is trading at $5,000 per ounce. Intact circuit boards are priceless. The Global Auction House is processing three trillion dollars in transactions daily. The fiat currency system is collapsing in favor of Mana Credits.]**
"Good," I sipped a can of vending machine coffee. "Paper money is useless against Void-Eaters. We need resources that shoot back."
The teenager at the counter slammed his piece of metal down.
"It's not just scrap!" the kid yelled. "It's a thermal regulator from a plasma vent! My *Identify* skill says it has 95% durability!"
The clerk, a middle-aged man wearing a Silver Visor that identified him as a Level 20 *Artificer*, adjusted his spectacles. He tapped the metal with a glowing hammer.
**[Item Appraised: Aetherian Heat Sink.]**
**[Grade: Rare.]**
**[Potential Use: Mana-Battery fabrication.]**
The clerk's eyes widened. "I'll give you ten thousand credits."
"Fifty," the kid countered. "Or I take it to the Crimson Blades. Damon is paying premium for batteries."
"Twenty," the clerk sweated. "And a free enchant on your boots."
"Deal."
I watched the transaction with a sense of paternal pride. The monkeys weren't just using the tools; they were bartering them. They were reverse-engineering the apocalypse.
In the last week, humanity's technological level had jumped forward by approximately fifty years.
The Aetherian tech was bio-mechanical. It fused organic neural networks with hard-light circuitry. For human scientists, it should have been incomprehensible—like a caveman trying to debug an iPhone. But I had patched the reality. I had given them the *Artificer* and *Technomancer* classes.
Now, physics was optional. Understanding the "how" wasn't necessary; you just needed the "Level" to craft it.
"Null?"
I turned. Ren stood in the doorway of the shop. He looked tired. His black coat was patched with duct tape and mana-weave. The *Black Box* fused to his chest hummed with a steady, violet rhythm.
"Hey, Ren," I waved. "Shopping?"
"Recruiting," Ren said. He walked over, his presence causing the other customers to hush. The *Sin Eater* was a celebrity now. "We found something. Something big. Elena wants you to see it."
"I'm just a Level 12 Novice, Ren," I demurred. "I'm barely qualified to carry your luggage."
Ren looked at me. His eyes, permanently etched with the void, narrowed.
"Drop the act, Null," Ren said quietly. "You hacked an alien dreadnought with a wrench. You're coming."
***
**Silicon Valley, California.**
**Googleplex (Occupied by the US First Arcane Battalion).**
The flight over was comfortable. Ren didn't teleport us; we took a *Mana-Jet*.
That was new.
Boeing and Lockheed Martin had scrapped their jet engine designs overnight. They had harvested the anti-gravity nodes from the Myriad Scout and the Aetherian Cruiser wreckage. Now, sleek, wingless transports zipped across the stratosphere, powered by mages channeling mana into the engines.
We landed on the roof of the Googleplex. The campus had been militarized. *Centurion* guards stood at every entrance, holding rifles that were half-AR15, half-alien blaster.
Director Miller met us at the elevator. He looked better than he had weeks ago. The headache seemed to have faded, replaced by the manic energy of a man who has discovered a new gold rush.
"Ren," Miller nodded. He glanced at me. "And the... consultant."
"Null," I corrected.
"Right. Follow me. You need to see what the eggheads found."
We descended into the sub-basements. What used to be server farms were now high-security laboratories.
In the center of a clean room, suspended in a magnetic containment field, was an object.
It was a cube. Black, perfectly smooth, roughly the size of a washing machine. It pulsated with a soft, rhythmic blue light.
"We pulled this from the wreckage of the Cruiser's bridge," Miller explained. "It survived the explosion that..." He glanced at me. "...that *allegedly* vaporized the ship."
"It's a data core," Ren said, stepping up to the glass. "I can feel the hum."
"It's not just data," Dr. Thorne stepped out from behind a console. The scientist was wearing a lab coat over a Silver Visor. **[Class: Grandmaster Sage]**. "It's a fabricator."
Thorne typed a command into his console.
Inside the field, the cube opened. A beam of hard light shot out, scanning the empty air.
"Watch," Thorne said.
He threw a raw ingot of steel and a handful of mana dust into the field.
The cube's light hit the materials.
*Zzzzt.*
There was no heat. No sound of grinding. The steel simply dissolved into a mist of atoms, swirled within the light, and reformed.
In three seconds, the ingot was gone. In its place sat a perfectly formed, intricate gear mechanism.
"Molecular assembly," Thorne whispered reverently. "It prints matter. We feed it a blueprint, we feed it raw mass and mana, and it builds... anything."
"The 'Forge of Creation'," I murmured.
"We call it 'The Printer'," Miller said pragmatically. "But here's the problem. It's DRM locked."
"DRM?" Ren asked.
"Digital Rights Management," Miller sighed. "It has a database of Aetherian blueprints—weapons, armor, ships. But we can't access them. Every time we try to select a schematic, it demands authorization."
Miller turned to Ren.
"We need a hacker. The System isn't giving us a prompt to bypass it. It says 'Admin Access Required'."
Ren looked at the cube. He touched the glass.
"I can't hack it," Ren admitted. "My void energy destroys. This requires... finesse."
They both looked at me.
I sighed. "I'm a Novice, remember?"
"You opened the airlock on the Scout," Ren reminded me. "You played the rhythm."
"Fine," I stepped up to the console.
I didn't need to hack it. I built it. Or rather, I built the System that translated its code.
The Aetherian Empire used *Harmonic Logic*. They didn't use binary; they used chords.
I placed my hand on the interface.
"Zero," I projected silently. "Bridge the connection. Spoof the authorization signature. Tell the box I'm the Admiral."
**[Spoofing... Signature: Admiral Shigu (Aetherian Designation). Access Granted.]**
I tapped the console rhythmically. *Tap-tap-hold-tap.*
The blue light of the cube turned green.
**[AUTHORIZATION CONFIRMED.]**
**[BLUEPRINT DATABASE: UNLOCKED.]**
A holographic list scrolled rapidly in the air. Thousands of schematics. Plasma Rifles. Gravity Grenades. Personal Shield Generators.
And something else.
**[Schematic: Atmospheric Mana-Filter (Terraforming Unit).]**
"Jackpot," Miller breathed.
"Wait," I said, pointing to a sub-folder. "Look at the requirements."
Miller squinted. "Resource requirements... Steel, Titanium, Silicon... and *Star Metal*."
"It needs a catalyst," Ren realized. "It can print the casing with steel, but the core needs the alien alloy."
"We have tons of it on the moon," Miller said, reaching for his radio. "I'll mobilize the Space Force. We'll start strip-mining the crater."
"No," I said.
Miller froze. "Excuse me?"
"If you strip-mine the moon," I said, adopting a tone that was slightly too authoritative for a Novice, "you'll destabilize the orbital defenses the Architect set up. The railguns need that rock for structural support."
"Then where do we get it?" Miller snapped.
I pointed at the schematic.
"We don't mine it," I said. "We transmute it. This cube isn't just a printer. It's an Alchemical Engine. If you feed it enough mana... massive amounts of mana... it can fuse lead into Star Metal."
"How much mana?" Thorne asked.
"More than a battery can hold," Ren said, looking at the readout. "It needs a live feed."
I looked at Ren. I looked at Miller.
"You need a power plant," I said. "But not nuclear. You need a *Human* power plant."
***
**Global System Update 5.0**
**The Industrial Revolution**
The notification hit the world an hour later.
**[SYSTEM UPDATE: THE AGE OF INDUSTRY.]**
**[New Class Branch Unlocked: The Battery.]**
**[New Structure Available: The Mana-Siphon Spire.]**
**[Context: The world is changing. Swords and spells are no longer enough. To fight the stars, we must build the stars.]**
I stood on the roof of the Googleplex, watching the construction begin.
It was happening fast. The "Printer" cube had been linked to the global network. Players with the *Technomancer* class were downloading blueprints.
Across the bay in San Francisco, the Transamerica Pyramid was being retrofitted. Scaffolding surrounded the spire. Mages were welding runes onto the steel beams.
They were turning skyscrapers into *Mana Siphons*.
"It's beautiful," Elena said, joining us on the roof. She looked exhausted but hopeful. "And terrifying."
"It's evolution," Ren said. "We're moving from the Stone Age to the Space Age in a week."
"But at what cost?" Elena asked. She pointed to the street below.
A group of low-level players were lined up at a recruitment booth. A corporation—*Apex Dynamics*—was hiring.
*"Wanted: Mana Batteries. Earn 500 Credits an hour. Just sit and channel. Safe work. No monsters."*
"We're commodifying the magic," Elena whispered. "People are becoming literal batteries for the corporate machine."
"Better than being food for the Myriad," Damon rumbled, stepping out of the elevator. He was wearing a new suit of armor—sleek, silver, printed from the Aetherian designs. It hummed with power. "Besides, it pays better than Starbucks."
I watched the scene.
The corporations were rising. *Apex Dynamics*, *Void-Corp*, *Blackrock*. They were securing the patents on the new blueprints. They were hiring armies of low-level players to fuel their factories.
The Guilds held the military power. The Corporations held the production power. And the Government held the leash (barely).
"It's a powder keg," I said.
"And someone is about to light a match," Ren added.
He pulled up a news feed.
**[BREAKING NEWS: Apex Dynamics claims ownership of the 'Scout Ship' dungeon. Restricting access to paid employees only.]**
"They can't do that," Damon growled. "That dungeon is public property. We bled for it."
"They bought the land underneath it," Ren said. "And they have a private security force equipped with the new Pulse Rifles."
Damon gripped the hilt of his sword. "I guess we need to teach them a lesson about the difference between *buying* power and *earning* it."
"Wait," I interjected.
They looked at me.
"If you attack Apex, you start a civil war," I said. "The Architect gave us the tech to fight aliens, not each other."
"So we just let them monopolize the loot?" Damon asked.
"No," I smiled. "We out-compete them."
I pulled a small crystal from my pocket. It was the *Data Cache* I had snagged from the Frigate before it exploded. The one I hadn't given to Miller.
"The Printer in the basement has the Aetherian military blueprints," I said. "Standard issue. Grunt gear."
I tossed the crystal to Ren.
"This drive contains the *Prototype* schematics. The experimental stuff. The stuff the Empire banned because it was too unstable."
Ren caught it. He looked at me, his eyes wide.
"Null... what is this?"
"It's the open-source alternative," I said. "Give it to the Artificers. Upload it to the public forums. Break the monopoly."
Ren grinned. A wicked, chaotic grin.
"You want to leak god-tier weapons to the internet?"
"Information wants to be free," I shrugged. "And I want to see what happens when a Level 10 kid in his garage builds a *Gravity Bomb*."
***
**The Tech Boom**
The upload took ten minutes.
The reaction was instantaneous.
The internet exploded. The blueprints for *Personal Warp Drives*, *Singularity Grenades*, and *Hard-Light Armor* were suddenly available to anyone with a connection and a Silver Visor.
Apex Dynamics' stock plummeted. Their monopoly on "official" gear was worthless when a kid in Mumbai could print a better shield generator in his bedroom.
The world shifted gears.
It wasn't just weapons.
In London, a team of *Weavers* used the open-source schematics to build a *Regeneration Pod*. It cured cancer in three minutes. Hospitals began to close, replaced by "wellness centers."
In Dubai, architects used *Gravity Nodes* to build floating islands. Real estate expanded upward, into the clouds.
In Detroit, the auto factories retooled. They stopped making Fords and started making *Hover-Skiffs*.
Humanity jumped forward fifty years in fifty hours.
I sat in a park in Tokyo, watching a group of kids play tag. They weren't running. They were using low-level *Blink Modules* strapped to their ankles, teleporting short distances, laughing.
"It's chaotic," Zero said in my ear. "There have been three thousand accidental explosions in home workshops today."
"Progress requires breakage," I replied.
"However," Zero continued, "the rapid escalation of Earth's energy signature has consequences. We are no longer a dim bulb in the galaxy. We are a lighthouse."
I looked up at the sky.
"They know we're here," I said. "The Aetherian Empire. The Myriad. They know."
"Scans indicate a massive accumulation of mass at the edge of the Oort Cloud," Zero confirmed. "The Myriad Main Fleet. They are gathering."
"Let them gather," I said.
I looked at the kids playing with teleportation tech. I looked at the floating skyscrapers rising over Tokyo.
"We aren't just ants anymore, Zero. We're ants with flamethrowers."
***
**The Shadow in the Boom**
But not everyone was celebrating the new age.
Deep in the servers of the System, buried beneath the hype and the crafting logs, I felt a tremor.
A new player signature had appeared.
It wasn't a human.
It was tagged as a user, it leveled up like a user, but its origin point was... wrong.
**[Player: Guest_01]**
**[Location: Unknown.]**
**[Class: Mimic.]**
I narrowed my eyes.
"Zero, track that signal."
**[Unable to triangulate. The signal is bouncing off the lunar relay. Architect... the signal is coming from inside the Moon Base.]**
I froze.
My God Body was on the Moon. The Throne was locked.
But if something was up there... something that could interface with the System...
"The Observer," I whispered. "The Myriad Scout I met on the throne."
He hadn't just watched. He had logged in.
The Myriad were learning. They weren't just coming to eat us physically. They were infiltrating the digital infrastructure I had built.
"Ren," I tapped my comms. "Stop printing grenades. We have a problem."
"What is it?" Ren asked, the sound of a plasma cutter buzzing in the background.
"We have a spy," I said. "And he's playing a different game."
**Chapter 31: Technology Boom** ends.
**[Day 1,170 Ends.]**
**[Humanity Tech Level: Type 0.8 Civilization.]**
**[Threat Level: Critical (Internal).]**