Ding! Your experience pool is full, but unfortunately the expansion content has not been unlocked. You cannot level up further.
Wendy Frost stared at the notification and stopped breathing for a second.
Then another second.
Then a third.
Her chat froze with her.
And then it exploded.
"What the hell?"
"No way."
"That's the cap?"
"The level cap is nine?"
"You're telling me she grinded for three days just to get hard-stopped?"
"This game is criminal."
Wendy looked at the screen, looked at the experience bar, then looked back at the system message as if it might apologize if she stared hard enough.
It did not.
She had pushed for three days.
Barely slept.
Barely logged off.
Left meditation running whenever she could.
Squeezed every drop of progression out of every hidden corner she had found.
And this was the reward.
Her mouth trembled.
Then she burst into tears.
The reaction was so sudden that even the chat lost its rhythm for a moment.
"Wait. She's really crying."
"Oh no."
"Okay, no, that's actually heartbreaking."
"She's just a girl and this game psychologically mugged her."
"Wendy, don't cry."
"I'm going to find the developer myself."
"Where? The man doesn't even have a website."
That last message should have ended the conversation.
Instead, someone else caught something on the stream.
"Wait, wait, wait. There's another pop-up."
"Wendy, look at the screen."
"Wendy!"
The chat started spamming fast enough to turn unreadable.
Wendy wiped at her face, trying to get herself under control.
'It's just a game. Get it together. Apologize to chat. Smile. Move on.'
Then she looked up.
A new window had appeared.
Congratulations. You made it to the end.
Every player who reached this point truly loves the game. As the developer, I have no way to repay that affection. Please open the page below and begin your performance.
There was a link underneath.
Wendy blinked.
Then she clicked it.
The page loaded.
For half a second she did not understand what she was looking at.
Then she did.
Her eyes widened.
"What the hell?"
Chat erupted again.
"No way."
"He put the payment channel here?"
"This is crowdfunding."
"This psycho hid the funding page behind the level cap."
"So the real recharge page was emotional blackmail all along."
"I respect it. I hate it, but I respect it."
Wendy sat there in silence for a moment, reading the project page.
I made a game. Help me buy servers and register a company.
Description:
Exactly what it says.
Funding goal:
$100,000
Reward details:
None. No servers, no game. You want something in return? Help keep it alive.
She stared at the page, then laughed wetly through the last of her tears.
"So we blamed him too early," she said. "He didn't ignore the server problem. He literally doesn't have a company yet."
That only made it worse.
Or better.
It was hard to tell.
The whole thing felt insane. Amateur. Shameless. And somehow completely sincere.
The game was too well made to feel fake.
The crowdfunding page was too blunt to feel corporate.
It did not read like a monetization strategy built by a studio.
It read like one obsessive lunatic with no money, no staff, no legal department, and just enough nerve to turn a progression wall into a public collection plate.
Wendy registered an account immediately.
Her fingers moved without hesitation.
She filled in the information, scanned the payment code, and sent ten thousand dollars.
Chat went wild.
"It started."
"Wendy is too nice."
"No, this game earned it."
"I'm broke, but I'll throw in twenty."
"I'm doing a hundred."
"I got paid today. Screw it. Five hundred."
Then the link crossed streams.
People carried it into Blaze King's chat, and he reacted exactly the way Ethan expected.
With zero restraint.
"If Wendy already paid, then what are we doing here?" Blaze shouted. "Move. Everybody move."
He copied the link, pinned it, and turned the whole thing into an event.
The momentum became self-sustaining almost instantly.
Small donations piled into medium ones.
Medium ones got buried under larger ones.
Then the first real spenders arrived, people with enough disposable income to treat online obsession like a spectator sport.
Fifty dollars.
One hundred.
Five hundred.
Two thousand.
Five thousand.
The page refreshed so quickly it barely looked stable.
Thirty minutes later, the original goal was dead.
Not reached.
Dead.
It kept going long after that.
One hundred ten percent.
One hundred forty.
Two hundred.
Three hundred.
By the time the first wave slowed, the campaign had climbed past three hundred thousand dollars.
More than twenty thousand people had participated.
At DreamFund's cramped office in New York, the staff had no idea what to do with themselves.
"Boss," Chris said weakly, staring at the screen. "I think you need to eat something."
The founder looked over.
"What?"
Chris did not turn around.
"Three days ago, you said if this project raised a hundred dollars, you'd eat—"
"Finish that sentence," the founder said, "and I'll fire you before I regret not firing you sooner."
Another employee nearly fell out of her chair.
"Boss, forget that. We just got more than twenty thousand new user registrations today, and most of them funded the same campaign."
The whole office went quiet.
Then three people started talking at once.
Traffic metrics spiked.
Payment activity surged.
The campaign that had looked like a joke was now the biggest thing their tiny platform had ever hosted.
The founder stood there holding his paper cup of tea and felt his emotions split in opposite directions.
On one side was vindication.
On the other was the vivid memory of several remarks he now wished had stayed inside his own skull.
Back in Seattle, Ethan had already stopped watching the social side of it.
The moment the number crossed the point he needed, everything else became irrelevant.
Three hundred thousand dollars was more than enough.
He closed the live funding page, opened a marketplace tab, and started buying hardware.
Not the most expensive servers.
That would have been pointless.
No matter how much they cost, they still belonged to this era. He was going to modify them anyway.
So he bought the newest useful hardware instead.
Server units. Components. Tools. Materials.
Anything he could get delivered locally and immediately.
Then he waited.
By that afternoon, the first batch arrived.
Most people would have unboxed the machines.
Ethan took them apart.
Not carefully, either.
He stripped open chassis, removed stock components, cut into assemblies, and started rebuilding the internal architecture piece by piece with improvised tools and a compact electric soldering setup that looked deeply unsafe.
Five hours disappeared.
When the hardware was finally where he wanted it, he moved to software.
The stock drivers were garbage by his standards.
The system scheduling was worse.
He rewrote what he needed, rebuilt what he could not tolerate, and kept going until the room smelled like hot metal, stale smoke, and burnt insulation.
By the time he finished, it was close to eleven at night.
He had not eaten.
He barely noticed.
He transferred the game environment over, downloaded the client onto a test machine, and ran a full internal check.
Movement response.
Skill delay.
Load behavior.
Connection stability.
NPC triggers.
Inventory state.
Nothing catastrophic broke.
That was enough.
Ethan leaned back and let out a slow breath.
"The server problem is solved," he muttered.
Then he immediately corrected himself.
"No. Most of it."
Because hardware had never been the only bottleneck.
Bandwidth was the other problem.
He picked up the phone and called the telecom company.
The first few minutes were tolerable. Then they got to pricing.
The cheapest dedicated data line was three thousand a month before installation and service fees.
The real costs came after that.
Application fees.
Materials.
Engineering fees.
Setup fees.
By the time the representative finished, even the lowest-end line had crossed well past seven thousand dollars up front.
And when Ethan asked about a higher-speed dedicated line suitable for a growing online game, the woman on the phone named a monthly figure so stupid he almost laughed.
Twenty thousand dollars.
Per month.
Ethan stared at the wall.
'You people are thieves.'
He kept his voice level.
"What if I just install the cheapest one?"
There was a pause on the other end.
"Sir, I checked the address. That may not be possible."
"Why?"
"That's a residential high-rise. These lines are usually provisioned for business locations. If you insist, we can do it, but because of the building and routing requirements, all additional engineering costs would be your responsibility."
Ethan closed his eyes.
Of course.
Of course that was how it worked.
He had the money now, but he had no intention of bleeding it out just to subsidize a telecom company's laziness inside a building he did not even want to stay in much longer.
"Fine," he said. "Forget it."
He hung up and tossed the phone onto the desk.
Then he looked around the apartment.
The cramped room.
The patched cables.
The old machine still humming in one corner.
The counter with its instant-noodle stains.
The entire place had been useful because it was cheap and forgettable.
That usefulness was over.
He needed space.
He needed bandwidth.
He needed somewhere that looked at least halfway like the first shell of a real company.
And if the telecom company would not bring the infrastructure to him, then he would move closer to infrastructure.
Ethan lit another cigarette, took one slow drag, and exhaled toward the ceiling.
"Fine," he said quietly.
"I'll change the battlefield."
Outside, the rain had stopped.
Inside, the new servers waited under the dim apartment light, half upgraded, half assembled, and already obsolete in his eyes.
But they were enough.
For now.
And now was all he needed.
A/N: If you enjoyed the chapter, add it to your library and drop a power stone. It really helps support the novel.