CHAPTER 75: HEADACHES

Evening of the next day.

Liam could be seen smiling from ear to ear. He had finally done it. After four long days of almost nonstop coding, he was finally done building the AGI.

He looked at the more than 1.2 million lines of codes and smiled, and the other attached codes documents, and smiled even more.

After writing codes deep into the night yesterday, he wanted to stop but when he realised that he only has about just some thousands more lines to go, he decided to forgo the sleep and code throughout the night till now.

And he was glad he made that decision as he had finished crunched down what was probably a day or two more of work into some hours.

With the AGI’s code infrastructure now completed, the next thing to do was to run it and train it.

With unrestrained excitement, Liam moved the cursor to run and clicked on it.

Immediately, the more than one million lines of codes vanished, surprising Liam for a moment but the surprise didn’t last long as the next moment, he saw a black chat window open up.

Liam smiled when he saw this, as it was exactly what he wanted and was expecting. His fingers tapped the keys as he started imputing training instructions into the AGI through the chat window.

He wanted to tell it to go through the internet and gather every single data and information it can get from it, but since it’s not advisable to point a newborn AGI at the open internet and let it drink from the firehose.

What he will be doing is a staged, curated crawl with strict guardrails, starting from high-signal, legally clean sources, then he will expand gradually with filters and his evaluations.

By doing this, Liam won’t be the one creation those situations where AI systems go through internet, see the dark things humans do and decides that the best solution to our problems is a global scale extinction.

Liam started the AGI training, as he told it to go through all language and dictionaries websites.

This was crucial as language is the foundation of communication and if the AGI doesn’t understand what simple hello is, then there was no way that it would be able to understand the high level knowledge on the internet or be able to communicate with him.

The language training will take a while, so while he wait, he decided to order dinner and finally do what he has been putting off since morning.

"System, sign-in."

[Ding!]

[Congratulations, Host, you received $10,000,000]

[You received 0.05% shares of

***

Liam nodded in satisfaction when he saw the rewards. He wasn’t expecting anything special today after the golden haul of yesterday. Though he was slightly surprised by the cash reward.

The $10m has now increased his account balance to $78m. And he was now ever closer his target.

His gaze moved to the second reward. It was another 0.05% of

It had become a familiar number at this point, but that didn’t make it any less impressive. He quickly did the math in his head.

0.05% shares equated to $1.7 billion, meaning that his holdings in the company alone is now valued at $30.7b.

With all his assets added up together, his net worth stood at nearly $50 billion. All achieved in two weeks.

Liam exhaled softly, with a smile.

"Tomorrow’s weekly sign-in... what’s it going to be this time?"

The thought stirred genuine curiosity. The first weekly sign-in had been wild — a $5 million cash, the Bellemere Mansion, and luxury hyper cars.

The second had been monstrous: $50 million in cash, 1% of JP Morgan, 0.5% of Applē, a custom McLaren, and twenty attribute points.

Tomorrow would be his third.

Would it top the others? More shares? More property? Something he couldn’t even begin to predict?

System, you’ve set a high bar for yourself... Maybe too high a bar.

He was tempted to ask aloud, but he knew the system wouldn’t answer. It never revealed the rewards beforehand. That mystery was part of its design — a way to keep him on edge, always looking forward.

Either way, he would be back in Los Angeles before then.

That had been his plan all along. The jet would take him out of Geneva in the morning, and by noon he’d be back at Bellemere.

He had told himself it was for convenience and for the samples Daniel had arranged, for the Nevada site, for the company headquarters in Los Angeles.

But if he was honest with himself? It was because he was homesick.

He missed the quietness of Bellemere Mansion. The grand staircase, the warm smiles of the maids, the private home theatre and his bed.

Geneva was beautiful, but Bellemere was his and he couldn’t wait to return.

As that thought warmed him, another cold realization slammed into him, sobering his expression.

Raw materials.

His stomach dropped slightly as the words formed in his mind.

The molecular assembler. It could build anything — but only with the right inputs.

And what were those inputs? Everything. Literally everything.

Iron, copper, silicon, platinum, uranium, rare earth metals, even radioactive isotopes. Every single element in the periodic table.

In large quantities.

"Why didn’t I think of this earlier...?" Liam rubbed his temples, already feeling the headache forming.

He could already imagine the red flags. A "new" company trying to acquire tons of raw metals, rare isotopes, and restricted materials. Uranium. Plutonium. Tritium. These weren’t things you could just buy off the shelf.

Would governments even allow it? Would the U.S. quietly flag him as a national security threat before he even had the chance to build his first prototype?

"Hopefully JP Morgan’s resources can smooth things over. Otherwise..." He sighed heavily.

He didn’t finish the thought. Instead, he leaned back in the chair and close his eyes briefly.

Maybe — just maybe — this was why the system had given him one ton of pure gold bars yesterday.

Raw material. The most basic of them all. A universal fallback.

"System, are you telling me something with these rewards?" He chuckled tiredly.

He sighed again and shook his head. There was no point dwelling on it now. He’d been coding for four straight days, pouring every ounce of his enhanced cognition into the AGI. Even if his body didn’t feel tired, his mind deserved a breather.

The AGI will take at least a whole day to go through the language training and Liam’s evaluation, before it can proceed to the next phase.

But his moment of quiet didn’t last long as his phone started ringing, and it was a call from Daniel.

"Daniel," Liam answered immediately.

"Mr. Scott," came Daniel’s calm voice. "I wanted to let you know that the samples have arrived at Bellemere Mansion. The eagle and starfish tissues have been delivered and secured by Evelyn and the household staff. They are stored properly in a private, temperature-controlled compartment."

"Good. That’s perfect," Liam smiled in satisfaction.

"There’s more," Daniel continued. "Construction crews have already broken ground in Nevada. The site will be fortified before any external contractors are brought in. It will be discreet."

"Excellent. You’ve handled this beautifully, Daniel."

There was a small pause before Liam spoke again.

"There is one more thing I need from you."

"Of course," Daniel replied smoothly.

"I’ll need an axolotl sample. Live tissue. Arrange it through legitimate scientific channels, as you did with the others."

There was a pause of curiosity.

"An axolotl?"

"Yes," Liam confirmed.

"Understood," Daniel said without hesitation. "I’ll begin arrangements immediately."

"Good. And there’s something else." Liam leaned back in his chair, his eyes narrowing slightly.

"I need you to set up a network of shell companies. Fronts that can be used to acquire raw elements in bulk — metals, isotopes, anything and everything from the periodic table. Uranium, plutonium, rare earths, all of it. Don’t make any purchases yet. Just create the structures. When I’m ready, I’ll give the word."

Daniel’s silence lingered for only a second before he replied, his tone as calm as ever but Liam could sense the slight tension underneath. "It will be done. By the time you return to Los Angeles, the framework will be in place."

"Good," Liam said quietly. "That’s all for now."

"Very well, Mr. Scott. Safe travels tomorrow."

The line clicked off.

Liam set the phone down, exhaling slowly. He had expected resistance — questions, at least. But Daniel hadn’t asked. He had only agreed.

That was the kind of professional Liam needed at his side.

Before he could reflect further, a knock came at the door. Mason’s voice filtered through. "Sir, your dinner has arrived."

The door opened, and the female staff member wheeled in a polished silver cart. She set the dishes neatly on the low table, bowed politely, and withdrew without a sound.

Finally. Time to eat.