My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Liam was back in his bedroom at Bellemere Mansion.

He had gone to the Pagoda looking for Master Han and Luo and found it quiet.

But through the third clone he found out they were in individual cultivation rooms, deep in a cultivation session that had been running for several hours.

He left them to it. Interrupting cultivation for the sake of a conversation, even a conversation he’d been looking forward to, wasn’t something he was willing to do. The work they were doing in those rooms mattered more than his curiosity about their progress.

Besides, he already knew their progress through the clone’s eyes. Master Han had broken through to Foundation Establishment. Luo was close behind. Their craftsmanship had improved alongside their cultivation.

He was proud of both of them.

Back in his room, he sat on the edge of his bed and let his mind settle and the thought that surfaced first was the planned armour he wanted to craft for himself with the five Jörmungandr’s Scales.

The Scales had been sitting in the Dimensional Space since he’d acquired them. He had known from the moment he held the first one what he intended to do with them.

He has planned a full body armour. Not a conventional design but something that integrated the scales’ properties with the kind of technological layering Lucy had pioneered in the exosuits.

It sounded impossible and he had always been fully aware of that but he wasn’t worried.

He had sketched the concept out in his head multiple times since then and never followed through because there had always been something more immediately urgent demanding his attention.

But the Tiamat invitation had clarified the priority.

He was going to accept the invitation but today and not this week, but he was going to accept it because refusing an invitation from a primordial goddess who had specifically chosen him was a decision made from fear rather than judgment, and he didn’t make decisions from fear.

What he was going to do first was prepare.

The system had told him he’d be safe and protected in her domain. He believed that assessment as far as it went. The system had never given him something designed to harm him.

But he was also going to walk into that domain wearing the best armour he could get his hands on. It wasn’t because he doubted the system’s assurance but because walking into a primordial’s domain unprepared when you had the capability to prepare was simply poor judgment, and he had no interest in meeting Tiamat like that.

He would craft the armour before he went.

He pulled his attention away from the invitation and let it move to the next item, which was the wormhole network.

He had received it as a sign-in reward and it had been sitting inactive ever since. He had been aware of it as something that needed to happen eventually and had been deliberately not thinking about when eventually was because the implications of activating it required more thought than he’d had available.

Now he was thinking about it.

The network wasn’t complicated in mechanical terms. Activate it, and stable wormholes would open across the galaxy, connecting points in space that currently had no connection. Travel that took years or centuries at conventional speeds would become instantaneous. The infrastructure of interstellar civilization would shift in a moment.

The complication was everything that happened afterward.

He was aware of the conflict that would potentially break out. Other races in the galaxy would want to lay claim to the network, want to take it for themselves, or want to control the part that connected to the solar system their civilization was in or those they controlled. Some would approach it as territory. Some as infrastructure they hadn’t built but intended to own. Some as a threat that needed to be neutralized before it could be used against them.

Liam naturally wouldn’t allow anyone — no matter how powerful — to lay claim to whatever was his. That position wasn’t negotiable and he wasn’t going to soften it based on whoever was doing the reaching.

He also understood that he had been modelling the galactic reaction to the network’s activation from a human perspective.

He’d been imagining something analogous to a nation building a major port and the neighboring powers scrambling to control access to it. Territorial logic. Resource logic. The particular anxiety of established powers watching something new appear that they hadn’t built and didn’t control.

But that was a human model applied to the galaxy, and the galaxy was not human.

The Milky Way was young relative to the broader universe. The region of it where the solar system sat was newer still. But young was relative.

Fifty billion years was still fifty billion years. The races and civilizations that had survived the universal war — the catastrophic conflict that had erupted when entities from other universes had pushed into this one — had been developing in the aftermath for a span of time that made human recorded history look like an afternoon.

He had no model for what fifty billion years of uninterrupted development produced in a civilization. He had no idea how many such civilizations were out there. He had no way to predict how they would read the sudden activation of a galaxy-wide wormhole network by an entity they’d never encountered operating from a star system in one of the galaxy’s younger regions.

But the black forest ideology was his working framework. Assume the worst until demonstrated otherwise, because demonstrated otherwise required surviving long enough to be demonstrated to.

It was a cold model but the universe was a cold place and the civilizations that had survived so many years had survived by making accurate assessments rather than optimistic ones.

Which meant the wormhole network activation had a prerequisite. The Ganymede command center had to be built and fully operational first, with the fleet command infrastructure, the early warning systems, the FTL deployment capability, and whatever military force he could assemble in the time between now and then all in place and ready.

He wasn’t going to announce his existence to the galaxy without the ability to defend it.

That pushed the activation timeline significantly further out than he’d originally imagined.

The Ganymede base was a major construction project even by Lucy’s standards. The Emperor Class-II was still in its skeleton phase. The surveillance and defense outposts across the solar system were planned but not built.

Lucy had been clear that civilian tourism routes needed those outposts before they could run safely. The military case for them was even stronger.

The realistic timeline, working through the sequence honestly, was longer than a year. Possibly significantly longer.

He sat with that and found he wasn’t troubled by it.

The time wasn’t wasted time. It was preparation time, and preparation at this scale had its own value regardless of what it was preparing for.

The gap between where he was now and where he would need to be for the wormhole activation wasn’t about standing still while he waited.

It was about closing the gap. And while it closed, there was work on Earth.

He also thought about the rats.

He hadn’t spent much deliberate attention on them since Lucy told him about it. He had made his position clear, that he would respond personally when the time came.

They had deduced that he owned Nova Technologies. They had assessed that as an opportunity rather than a reason to stay away. They had built a structure around probing his limits and working toward control of the company, which meant control of the technology, which meant control of everything the technology touched.

The ambition wasn’t small. He would give them that.

What it was, was a mistake. Not because the ambition was wrong in the abstract but because they had looked at everything Nova Technologies had demonstrated over four months — the lunar base, the spacecraft, the nanites, the coordinated institutional responses that had moved markets and governments simultaneously — and had concluded that it was something they could reach for.

That conclusion was the error.

He wasn’t going to move on them today. He was going to let them continue building their plan with the comfortable belief that they were operating below his awareness. Everything they had done was documented and in Lucy’s files, which meant it was effectively already in his hands whenever he chose to reach for it.

When he reached for it, it would be deliberate and it would be complete. It won’t be a warning or a demonstration of displeasure.

It would be clean and total removal, that left nothing behind except an understanding in whoever was watching that some things were not available to be reached for.

He would make the world understand what it meant to go after people he cared about. Maybe then, he would announce his identity and his powers to the world.

But the announcement of his identity as the CEO of Nova Technologies and his powers to he world was something he hadn’t thought about yet. But he was aware that it will happen eventually.