CHAPTER 47: NARROWING IT DOWN

Timothy headed back to his personal bedroom while Angela and his mother watched television from the living room.

He closed the door behind him as he entered and then jumped to the bed. He grabbed his bag, opened the zipper, and rummaged through his belongings until he found a pill bottle. He opened the lid and popped one pill and seconds later, he could feel his brain being upgraded again.

A cool rush spread through his head, like invisible gears turning faster than ever before. His thoughts sharpened, his focus narrowed. He would need his one hundred percent brain capacity to plan his future business.

After that, he pulled out his iPhone and began scrolling through articles and industry reports. Semiconductor manufacturing, GPU markets, fabrication plants—the screen was filled with charts, projections, and endless streams of technical jargon.

The more he read, the clearer it became. Building chips wasn’t just about design. It meant bleeding billions into research and even more into fabrication plants. Factories the size of entire malls, machines that cost hundreds of millions each, and a supply chain so global that even the most powerful countries struggled to control it.

Sure, the reconstruction system gave him an advantage. He could skip years of development in an instant. But then reality struck him—the company that had just given him twenty billion dollars was NVIDIA. If he launched his own chip company tomorrow, one that directly threatened their position, what would that look like?

Timothy paused, staring at the glowing screen in the dark. It wasn’t just business, it was common courtesy. They had trusted him, handed him money without hesitation. To turn around and stab them in the back by becoming their competitor wasn’t just bad manners, it was suicide.

Companies at that level didn’t play fair. They had power, influence, and connections that reached far beyond markets. If he became a threat, they wouldn’t let him sleep peacefully at night.

"Okay, no more semiconductors. It’s too risky," Timothy muttered.

He then shifted his focus to the one business idea he had thought of, and that was the automotive industry. Especially the EV market.

Currently, the automotive market has a huge opening. Every country was pushing for clean energy, every government setting deadlines for the end of gas-powered cars. Europe wanted to phase out combustion engines by 2035, California by 2030, and even China was heavily subsidizing EV companies. Billions in grants, tax cuts, and contracts were being thrown around like candy to anyone who could deliver.

If he wanted to jump into an industry with insane growth, EVs were the way to go. Tesla had proven that already. From a company on the brink of bankruptcy, they rose to one of the most valuable automakers in the world simply by being ahead of the curve. And yet, Tesla wasn’t invincible. The market was still young, and no single company had a total monopoly.

Timothy’s mind raced as he scrolled through sales numbers and projections. "Two million EVs sold last year in the U.S., but projections show over twenty million by 2030," he whispered. That was ten times the growth in less than a decade. And that didn’t even count the demand in Asia and Europe.

More importantly, EVs weren’t just about cars. They were about batteries, software, charging stations, logistics, and even energy storage. Whoever controlled the ecosystem around EVs would control the future of transportation.

And with the reconstruction system, he wouldn’t just build an EV. He could leap ahead, design a battery with double or triple the energy density, slash charging time to minutes instead of hours, maybe even design motors more efficient than anything on the market. To him, what took companies decades of trial and error could be done in days.

According to Wikipedia, companies are eyeing for a hardware called solid-state battery, the so-called holy grail of EV technology. Unlike the lithium-ion batteries used today, solid-state promised higher energy density, faster charging, and, most importantly, safer operation. No risk of thermal runaway, no fire hazards.

Toyota, BMW, Hyundai, even start-ups in Silicon Valley were pouring billions into this research. But despite the hype, no one had cracked it yet. Manufacturing was the bottleneck. The materials were unstable, the production methods too expensive, and scaling up for the mass market? Practically impossible with today’s tech.

So what if he reconstructed a lithium-ion battery into a solid state battery? That would solve the problem right? Plus the manufacturing equipment and machineries to make one.

You’re wrong!

But why? Isn’t that the answer for dominating the EV market? Develop a more technologically advanced product years or decades away from the top companies.

Yes, that’s what an ordinary person would do but Timothy had already accounted for the risk associated when introducing a solid state battery. If he were to do what ordinary people do, he’d risk disrupting the entire ecosystem of the lithium-ion battery.

Because if there is a perfect solid-state battery that can be mass produced, car companies who relied heavily on lithium-ion would collapse overnight.

Battery manufacturers, suppliers, logistics chains, even mining industries that dug up lithium, nickel, and cobalt—entire billion-dollar networks—would crumble. No government in their right mind would allow one single player to destabilize that much of the global economy in a snap. It wouldn’t matter if the tech was real or not. They would crush him before he could even announce it.

Even Toyota or other companies developing their own research into the solid-state battery feared cannibalization. If their own design succeeded too soon, it would kill their existing lithium-ion lines, wipe out years of investment, and burn the very partnerships keeping them afloat. That was the danger of being too advanced.

Timothy rubbed his temple, the pill making his thoughts sharper, colder. "Then the answer isn’t solid-state... not yet," he muttered.

The safer play was to introduce something believable, an advanced lithium-ion design that looked like a natural evolution rather than a revolution. A battery that was years ahead, but not decades. A battery that offered two or three times the range, cut charging down drastically, and came with almost no fire risk.

And not only that, this could be the best starting point in his business career to justify introducing advanced technology. If this automotive venture was a success and grew bigger than BYD and Tesla, well, then he could shift slowly to solid state.

Timothy grinned. But before he could do all that, he needed to use his reconstruction system, and there is just a perfect place for that.