The main problem with raw power was that it fundamentally required infrastructure.
Alex sat silently cross-legged on his narrow bed at the group home, his eyes firmly closed, purposefully cycling refined mana through his core in slow, perfectly measured pulses.
It was Tuesday night…
exactly ten days since the disastrous homecoming dance.
Ten days since Jeremy Creek died and his magical reserves had instantly doubled in a single, violently blinding instant.
The massive influx of new mana was fully, safely integrated now.
It quickly responded to his direct will as naturally as his original reserves did…
no frustrating lag, no stubborn resistance, and absolutely no lingering alien aftertaste.
Whatever highly complex process his core had used to forcefully convert Jeremy’s volatile meteor energy into deeply structured mana had been incredibly thorough.
The raw electricity was completely gone.
What solely remained was pure, incredibly versatile magical power.
And it simply wasn’t enough.
Alex slowly opened his eyes and stared blankly at the peeling wall of his tiny room.
A strong second-year Hogwarts student.
That was exactly what his power currently equated to.
Back in his very first life as Harry Potter, he had been fiercely dueling seasoned Death Eaters by his fifth year, and casting a fully corporeal Patronus at the young age of thirteen.
In the Marvel Universe, he had been intensively studying directly under the Ancient One within months of his exposure, and confidently wielding massive dimensional magic before his first year was even out.
Here, he could cast a simple Lumos without physical strain.
He could confidently manage a decent Alohomora.
He could probably handle casting a basic Shield Charm if he really, really pushed himself to the absolute limit.
And that was approximately the absolute ceiling of what his current, limited reserves would realistically allow.
It was utterly pathetic.
But the terrifying Jeremy Creek incident had clearly shown him something incredibly important…
the meteor freaks were essentially walking, breathing magical batteries.
Every single one of them carried a deep reservoir of highly mutated energy that his hungry core could rapidly absorb, convert, and perfectly integrate.
The more he harvested, the faster he would grow.
The much darker question was whether or not harvesting absolutely required killing.
Alex firmly did not want to be a serial killer.
He had certainly been many things across his three long lifetimes…
a legendary wizard, a hardened warrior, a Supreme Sorcerer, a literal cosmic entity…
but he had never, ever been a cold predator who ruthlessly hunted the helpless for personal gain.
Jeremy Creek had already been actively dying.
The brutal absorption had been completely involuntary…
his starving core acting on raw instinct, pulling energy directly from a rapidly collapsing system right before it uselessly dissipated.
That was vastly different from calmly walking up to a healthy, living person and maliciously draining them dry.
At least, that was exactly what he repeatedly told himself.
The uncomfortable truth was significantly more complicated.
His core had been completely starving.
It had greedily reached for Jeremy’s abundant energy the exact same way a dying, starving man blindly reaches for fresh bread…
without rational thought, without any hesitation, and absolutely without mercy.
And the deeply euphoric sensation of that massive energy violently flooding into him had been…
Alex sharply cut the dark thought short.
He desperately needed to find a viable alternative.
A safe way to deeply study the volatile meteor energy.
To fully understand its complex cellular structure.
To actually learn whether extraction was physically possible without guaranteed lethality.
Advanced equipment.
Secure space.
Rare materials.
Real money.
He had absolutely none of those things.
Alex reached quietly into the single drawer of his battered bedside table and pulled out a crisp business card.
Heavy cream stock.
Elegant embossed lettering.
Lex Luthor.
LuthorCorp Fertilizer Plant No. 3.
Smallville, Kansas.
On the back, in handwritten blue ink, a private, personal phone number.
If you ever need anything, call that number.
Alex turned the thick card over thoughtfully in his fingers.
He had been quietly carrying it with him for over a week.
He hadn’t called.
Not because of stubborn pride…
pride was a foolish luxury he had completely abandoned two lifetimes ago.
And not because he simply didn’t trust Lex…
trust was carefully earned, not blindly assumed, and Lex had honestly done absolutely nothing to earn true distrust yet.
This was real life, not the ink and paper comics.
He could certainly reference the known trajectories of their past lives, but he would absolutely never take their ultimate choices in the comics for granted.
He had always firmly believed in the strict, unbreakable policy of Equivalent Exchange, whether in this current life or any of his past ones.
When he finally called Lex Luthor, he would confidently come with something incredibly valuable to offer.
Alex dropped the card and lay back heavily on his creaky bed, staring blindly at the dark ceiling.
He possessed three entire lifetimes of deep, unparalleled knowledge.
A comprehensive twenty-first-century education completely filtered through the unique lens of a man who had worked directly alongside the absolute most brilliant minds in two entirely different universes.
There simply had to be something buried in all of that worth real money.
Wednesday…
The Smallville Public Library
The Smallville Public Library was a modest, single-story brick building squarely on Main Street that smelled perpetually of old, dusty carpet and cheap furniture polish.
It prominently featured exactly six public-access computers arranged neatly along the back wall…
chunky, beige machines laboriously running Windows 98 with ancient dial-up internet connections that actively made Alex’s teeth ache with deep impatience.
But they had working keyboards.
And they had functional monitors.
And they could reliably run a basic web browser.
That was quite enough.
Alex sat down heavily at the far corner terminal at exactly four o’clock…
the blessedly quiet hour situated right between the noisy after-school rush and the older evening patrons.
The elderly librarian, Mrs. Greeley, offered him a small, polite nod of recognition.
He had been coming in here religiously since his very first week in Smallville.
She probably just assumed he was diligently doing his high school homework.
He was definitely not doing homework.
Alex quickly opened Notepad and began to type furiously.
The current year was 2001.
clumsy, incredibly enthusiastic, and growing at a terrifying pace that actively frightened the adults attempting to supervise it.
The massive dot-com bubble had explosively burst just the previous year, leaving behind a barren landscape of totally crashed IPOs and completely abandoned websites.
But deep underneath the smoking wreckage, something new was already stirring.
The few strong survivors…
Google, Amazon, eBay…
were rapidly consolidating their massive power.
And the absolute next major wave of internet culture was already quietly forming.
Browser games.
In Alex’s first life, he had watched the massive browser game explosion entirely from the sidelines…
a quiet kid growing up exactly parallel with Neopets and Runescape and the endless, addictive cascade of Flash games hosted on Newgrounds and Miniclip.
In his wild second life, over in the Marvel Universe, Tony Stark had arrogantly dismissed all browser games as simply “baby’s first dopamine loop”…
right before spending three straight, unbroken hours obsessively playing Bejeweled on Pepper’s work computer and stubbornly refusing to admit it.
Alex was absolutely not going to sit here and invent Candy Crush.
The basic technology simply wasn’t there yet…
smart touchscreen phones didn’t actually exist and wouldn’t for another six long years.
But the core, addictive concept…
a brilliantly simple match-three puzzle game with highly polished graphics, deeply satisfying audio-visual feedback, and a carefully calibrated, psychological difficulty curve…
could absolutely work perfectly right now as a simple browser game.
Bejeweled had officially launched in 2001 strictly as a downloadable game.
It would eventually become one of the absolute most successful casual games in human history.
But the massive casual market was still completely, beautifully wide open.
There was plenty of room for a ruthless competitor…
especially one specifically designed from the ground up by someone who knew exactly what made these games so incredibly addictive, and exactly how to maximally monetize them.
Alex’s fingers flew in a blur across the clunky beige keyboard.
He wasn’t writing in any actual programming language the ancient library computers could successfully compile.
He didn’t need to.
What he was furiously writing was a massive design document…
a deeply comprehensive blueprint that painstakingly laid out every single element of the game in highly granular detail.
The exact grid system.
The specific gem types.
The cascading physics engine.
The deeply addictive scoring algorithm.
The psychological sound design specifications.
The satisfying visual feedback loops.
The meticulously tuned difficulty progression curve.
Alex typed furiously for three straight hours without stopping.
By the exact time Mrs. Greeley loudly announced the library was closing at seven o’clock, he had a massive, forty-page design document safely saved to a cheap floppy disk.
It vividly described an addictive game called Crystal Cascade…
a match-three puzzle game with a sleek fantasy aesthetic, massive cascading combo mechanics, a frantic time-attack mode, and a carefully designed difficulty curve that would easily keep players totally engaged for hours without ever realizing how much actual time had passed.
The lengthy document also proudly included something absolutely no other game designer in 2001 would ever even think to include: a highly detailed, deeply predatory monetization framework.
Not modern microtransactions…
the secure payment infrastructure simply didn’t exist for that yet.
But a brilliant tiered pricing model featuring a generous free demo, a reasonably paid full version, and an addictive “expansion pack” system that would reliably generate massive, recurring revenue.
In six short years, the entire industry would accurately call it “freemium.”
Right now, it was completely, undeniably revolutionary.
Alex casually pocketed the floppy disk, politely thanked Mrs. Greeley, and walked calmly home in the dark.
Tomorrow, he would eagerly start on the actual code.