Alexander did not react immediately.
The discipline was partly caution and partly disbelief.
A man who had already awakened in 1980 inside another person’s body had little right to reject one more impossible event, but accepting a phenomenon did not mean trusting it.
The blue-white text remained in front of him when he blinked.
It remained when he looked toward the wall.
It remained when he closed his eyes.
The display was not projected into the room.
It existed at the junction of sight and thought, perfectly legible regardless of light or direction.
Helena showed no sign of seeing it.
She had taken off her shoes and curled one leg beneath herself in the chair, a posture the original Alexander remembered only from private family rooms.
Exhaustion had lowered her defences.
She watched the rain against the window and occasionally checked that he was still breathing.
Alexander needed privacy without alarming her.
“I’m going to try to sleep.”
“Good.”
“You should as well.”
“I will sit.”
“That was not what I suggested.”
“I know.”
He allowed his eyes to close.
The screen brightened against the darkness.
More text formed.
Date: 4 May 1980
National Binding: Federal Republic of Germany
National Sporting Prestige: 693,584
Personal Prestige Balance Synchronised: 693,584
Free Five-Star Football Talent Granted
Imperial Support Corps Activated
Tool Module Available
Bloodline Module Dormant
Alexander read every line three times.
The opening balance was enormous, but a number meant nothing without prices.
The free football talent sounded even more important, though the word talent could mean anything from improved learning to instant mastery.
He attempted to speak mentally.
Explain purpose.
The response appeared without a voice.
The Great Nation Sports System converts national sporting prestige into host-directed development across supported sports, entertainment fields, specialist traits, Tool restoration, and bloodline functions.
The language was clinical.
There was no greeting, personality, or claim that he had been chosen to save Germany.
Alexander began with the question most system protagonists asked too late.
What obligations do I owe?
None beyond user-selected transactions.
Are there compulsory quests?
No.
Failure penalties?
No.
Defeat produces no point deduction.
Can the system remove purchased abilities?
No.
Can it harm me for refusing instructions?
The system issues no compulsory instructions.
A smile threatened to reach his face.
He suppressed it until he heard Helena’s breathing settle.
The system was not a master disguised as assistance.
It did not need emotional loyalty, national obedience, or public worship.
It functioned as a tool whose limits and costs he would need to understand.
That suited him perfectly.
He opened the football panel.
Host: Alexander Maximilian Falkenberg
Age: 17 years, 8 months
Broad Football Talent: 5.0 Stars
Natural Human Maximum: Approximately 4.5 Stars
Current Technical Development: 37/99+
Current Tactical Development: 31/99+
Current Match-Mental Development: 44/99+
Current Physical Expression: 48/99+
Adult Maximum Potential: 99+
Five stars did not equal instant ability.
It represented a ceiling beyond ordinary humanity.
That distinction resolved the first apparent contradiction in Alexander’s understanding.
The original body remained technically mediocre because potential had arrived seconds ago.
Muscles, neural patterns, and experience could not be assumed merely from the ability to develop them.
Yet the panel also showed that the ceiling itself had changed.
He opened the talent scale.
Half a star represented casual participation.
One star could produce a respectable local amateur.
Two stars marked the possibility of lower professional sport.
Three stars meant elite all-star ability.
Four stars meant a generational athlete capable of defining an era.
Four and a half stars represented the highest natural level—names who became synonymous with their sports.
Five stars stood beyond them.
Not automatically better in every match.
Not immune to poor training, bad decisions, or circumstance.
But, if fully developed, more complete than any naturally born historic legend.
Alexander had spent his previous life admiring footballers whose weakest elite attribute still exceeded the strongest quality of ordinary professionals.
The idea of possessing a higher ceiling in speed, balance, technique, spatial perception, passing, shooting, movement, and tactical learning should have felt childish.
It felt like justice granted too generously.
He checked whether the talent applied only to one position.
It did not.
Football talent supported the complete sport.
The body could develop as a centre-forward, second striker, winger, attacking midfielder, or deeper creator if age reduced pace later.
It influenced athletic learning as well as technique and tactical comprehension.
Alexander opened another tab.
Dream Training
Six tiers appeared.
Bronze: 1:1
Silver: 5:1
Gold: 20:1
Platinum: 100:1
Diamond: 300:1
Legendary: 1,000:1
He selected Legendary and read the explanation twice.
Natural sleeping time would be multiplied by the chosen tier.
One real hour at Legendary level produced one thousand fully conscious hours inside the simulation.
Eight hours of sleep would provide eight thousand experienced hours.
Not a vague download.
Not a montage.
Eight thousand hours of sensation, repetition, coaching, and matches.
The system could recreate sporting environments, coaching, and teams from history between 1980 and approximately 2020.
It could simulate different eras, balls, pitches, tactics, weather, crowds, and pressure.
Injuries inside the dream could be reset.
Fatigue could be restored.
Situations could be rewound and repeated.
Ability could be trained up to the user’s current potential.
The wording mattered.
Five-star potential plus a thousand-to-one training environment meant the normal distance between talent and mastery could collapse in one night.
Alexander opened the limitations.
Dream Training developed technique, tactical understanding, reactions, decisions, experience, and match mentality.
It did not create adult height from nothing.
It did not replace real muscle growth, bone maturation, or aerobic adaptation.
Those still required the body and real-world time.
That was reasonable.
An eight-hour sleep could make him technically and tactically complete.
It could not turn a seventeen-year-old frame into its twenty-five-year-old physical form before breakfast.
He would not need that.
The current body was already tall and academy fit.
If the five-star transformation optimised its structure and Dream Training perfected how he used it, he could reach an elite age-adjusted level almost immediately.
Adult strength would become the last small layer, not the beginning of the journey.
He selected historical environments.
Names and teams seemed endless.
Ajax academies.
Bayern sessions.
Milan defensive units.
Barcelona passing structures.
Brazil’s attacking sides.
Liverpool pressing.
Real Madrid transitions.
German tournament teams.
Future sports-science laboratories.
He could practise against defenders not yet born and coaches whose ideas would not become common for decades.
Alexander tested the boundaries before allowing excitement to decide for him.
Can the simulation show me tactics that do not yet exist in 1980?
Yes.
Historical sporting environments are indexed through approximately 2020.
Can knowledge learned inside be explained in language appropriate to the present era?
The host retains all experience.
Communication remains the host’s responsibility.
That prevented another easy shortcut.
He could understand a future pressing structure, but a Bayern coach would not automatically accept terminology invented decades later.
Alexander would need to translate principles into movements, demonstrations, and concepts his contemporaries could use.
Do simulated people possess real consciousness?
No external human consciousness is captured.
Historical figures are high-fidelity training constructs.
He was relieved.
Repeating a duel against a perfect simulation of a defender was training.
Trapping an actual person inside thousands of private matches would have been something else.
Will eight thousand conscious hours make me psychologically a year older?
Experience remains authentic.
Host Protection and suitable Steel Mind development can prevent age-identity distortion, memory overload, and detachment.
Emotional maturity is not automatically granted.
The distinction mattered.
He could acquire a veteran’s match recognition without emerging as an eighteen-year-old mind pretending to be seventeen after one night.
The hours would feel real, but the system could integrate them as specialised training rather than allowing the dream to replace his ordinary life.
He also checked pain.
The simulation reproduced it.
A tackle could hurt, a hostile crowd could create pressure, and exhaustion would feel genuine until he selected restoration.
The environment was not a harmless game where failure carried no sensation.
That realism was why the decisions would become instinct.
Alexander had no desire to remove it.
Learning to avoid injury without ever feeling the tackle would be like studying finance without risking a mark.
The mind remembered consequences more sharply when they possessed weight.
His first impulse was to activate Legendary training at once.
He stopped.
The system had displayed specialist talents, physical transformation, and psychological warnings.
Entering eight thousand conscious hours without first protecting the body and mind would be reckless.
Alexander closed Dream Training and opened the specialist shop.
The categories filled his vision.
Steel Body
Cat Reflexes
Eagle Eye
Tactician
Steel Mind
Perfect Recovery
Ambidexterity
Predator Instinct
Aerial Dominion
Elastic Engine
Big-Match Aura
Each removed a cluster of limitations.
Each carried a price.
For the first time, the opening balance of 693,584 began to look finite.
Alexander heard Helena move.
He opened his eyes and dismissed the panel with a thought.
The room returned unobstructed.
“Not sleeping?” she asked.
“Thinking.”
“About football?”
“Among other things.”
“You nearly died this morning.”
“That is why the other things became urgent.”
She gave him the patient look of a mother accustomed to adolescent intensity.
Alexander turned towards the rain.
Outside, Munich remained unaware that forty years of football development had become one teenager’s private academy.
Bayern’s staff still believed Otto’s disappointing grandson would need weeks merely to return to light work.
They were correct about only one detail.
Alexander was not yet ready.
He required one purchase, one protected night, and eight thousand hours.
By morning, the gap between potential and mastery would almost cease to exist.
Alexander treated the system balance as investment capital.
That meant refusing to be hypnotised by its size.
Six hundred and ninety-three thousand, five hundred and eighty-four points could purchase extraordinary abilities.
It could also disappear quickly if he behaved like a child filling a basket because someone else had promised to pay.
He began with broad sporting talent.
The prices rose sharply.
0.5 Stars: 10 points
1.0 Star: 50 points
1.5 Stars: 200 points
2.0 Stars: 500 points
2.5 Stars: 1,500 points
3.0 Stars: 4,000 points
3.5 Stars: 10,000 points
4.0 Stars: 30,000 points
4.5 Stars: 60,000 points
5.0 Stars: 120,000 points
Upgrades charged the difference between a person’s current total and the desired level.
Moving a 3.5-star athlete to four stars therefore cost 20,000, not 30,000.
Alexander had received five-star football talent for free.
That single grant saved 120,000 points and, more importantly, created the one athlete he planned to enhance without restraint.
Specialist talents used another scale.
Five stars cost 80,000.
Four and a half stars cost 40,000.
Four stars cost 15,000.
Narrower scope made them cheaper than broad sporting ability, but stacking many at the highest level remained expensive.
The economic logic became obvious.
Alexander could create several generational athletes, or one mythical athlete surrounded by a smaller number of carefully supported champions.
He could not turn every child in Germany into a five-star phenomenon without exhausting the system.
He approved of the limit.
Power without allocation choices became decoration.
He examined how prestige points were earned.
International victories, tournament championships, Olympic medals, world records, and historic individual achievements produced rewards.
System-linked Tools and bloodline members could generate points.
German athletes Alexander supported could also contribute under defined conditions.
Buying a foreign club did not make every victory inside it produce prestige.
That prevented a circular empire in which he purchased hundreds of teams and farmed unlimited points without cultivating specific athletes.
The system valued sporting significance.
A football World Cup would dwarf minor events.
A historic record before a global audience would earn more than one set in obscurity.
Defeats produced no deduction.
They simply produced no reward.
Alexander mentally separated the economies.
Sporting prestige would purchase talent, specialists, Tools, and dream development.
Money would purchase companies, land, media rights, clubs, coaching, and infrastructure.
Fame would create access.
Legal control would make access permanent.
The system did not offer business talent, legal talent, scientific talent, engineering talent, or political genius for purchase.
Those fields would still require people, education, discipline, and future knowledge.
That prevented him from becoming omnipotent through one menu.
It also made his family background more valuable.
Helena noticed that his eyes were moving beneath closed lids.
“Are you in pain?”
Alexander dismissed the panel.
“No.”
“You have been lying perfectly still for nearly twenty minutes.”
“The doctor asked me not to move.”
“You have never obeyed an instruction that completely.”
He turned towards her.
“How much do I actually understand about the Adler companies?”
The question surprised her.
“Less than your grandfather wishes and more than you pretend.”
“And how much independent capital would he trust me with?”
“Today?”
“When I leave the hospital.”
Helena studied him as though this were another neurological test.
“Perhaps a small portfolio after your Abitur.”
“How small?”
“One or two million marks.”
“I want twenty.”
She laughed.
Alexander did not.
The laughter faded.
“For what?”
“A family-backed investment vehicle.
Technology, property, and media first.
Separate ownership for image rights and intellectual property.
Professional managers.
Written investment cases.
No personal spending.”
“You are seventeen.”
“Which makes mistakes easier to classify as education.”
“Twenty million marks buys extremely expensive education.”
“It also compounds for longer.”
Helena shifted closer.
“What technology?”
He needed to appear brilliant without reciting a future textbook.
“Semiconductors.
Smaller computers.
Software.
Electronic storage.
Companies making the components and systems that allow offices to replace paper processes.”
“And media?”
“Sport.”
That answer required less caution.
“Broadcast rights are undervalued because broadcasters think of matches as programmes.
Paid television will treat them as a reason to subscribe.
Recorded archives will matter internationally.
Clubs barely understand merchandising or direct relationships with supporters.”
Helena’s humour disappeared entirely.
“Who told you this?”
“Nobody in one conversation.”
That was true.
“Then how did you reach it?”
“I read.
I watched.
I finally connected interests I had treated separately.”
She leaned back.
“And property?”
“Land near transport, stadiums, exhibition centres, and cities likely to grow.
Own the permanent ground.
Let operating companies take the risk above it.”
Helena did not answer immediately.
The original Alexander had occasionally repeated ideas heard at adult dinners.
He had never arranged them into a strategy.
“Your grandfather will test you.”
“I expect him to.”
“He will not provide twenty million because you frightened us.”
“He should not.”
“Your father will oppose it.”
“He should challenge it.”
That answer affected her more than the ambition.
The old Alexander had treated scrutiny as hostility.
“Why now?” she asked.
Alexander looked towards the monitor.
“Because I heard my heart had stopped and realised everything I intended to do existed only as intention.”
She reached for his hand again.
The emotional truth protected the hidden one.
He had died with plans that never became assets.
He would not repeat it.
“I will arrange a conversation with Konrad,” Helena said.
“After the doctors confirm your mind works.”
“It works.”
“He will decide that.”
Alexander accepted the small victory.
The first investment fund had moved from private thought into the family’s awareness before the system made its first purchase.
Helena did not leave the subject entirely.
“Twenty million cannot be one bet,” she said.
“It won’t be.”
“How would you divide it?”
Alexander answered carefully.
“Five million for property, though purchases should be staged.
Three for listed technology and semiconductor companies.
Two for media production and archives.
The rest remains liquid until private opportunities appear.”
“No sports cars?”
“The family already owns cars.”
“A yacht?”
“A depreciating object that requires staff?”
“Your grandfather would be horrified to hear luxury analysed that way.”
“Which grandfather?”
“Again, exactly.”
She smiled, but the proposed allocation had impressed her.
It contained the one quality Konrad valued above enthusiasm: cash left uncommitted.
“And if the technology companies fall?”
“A portfolio limits one failure.
We buy infrastructure and enabling technologies, not merely fashionable products.
If the thesis changes, we reassess.
If the market panics while the thesis survives, we buy more.”
“You speak as though you have watched several crises.”
Alexander held her gaze.
“I have read about enough of them.”
That was dangerously close to the truth.
He redirected the discussion towards governance.
“You approve each tranche.
Independent managers execute.
Lawyers review every structure.
One central accountant maintains consolidated records that no operating director controls.”
“You really have begun paying attention.”
“I told you.”
She did not promise support beyond arranging the conversation.
She no longer treated the fund as delirium.
He returned to the transparent menus.
One restriction required immediate attention.
Broad physical sporting talent may only be increased before the recipient’s nineteenth birthday.
After nineteen, a person’s fundamental athletic ceiling became fixed.
Specialist talents and dream experience could still be added, but broad potential could not.
Alexander had more than a year.
Future Tools and young athletes would need earlier decisions.
He opened the Tool Module briefly.
Three empty slots appeared.
Tools were restored or recreated individuals with full personalities, emotions, ambitions, and independent thought.
Their loyalty to Alexander was absolute.
They could disagree, advise, and improvise, but could never knowingly betray him or act against his ultimate interests.
At the beginning, eligible candidates had to be recently deceased West Germans with sufficiently intact bodies.
The system would provide a plausible survival explanation and preserve legal identity.
Additional slots cost approximately 100,000 points each.
Alexander closed the module.
He would not spend 100,000 for the pleasure of filling a roster.
Each early Tool needed a role worthy of decades: goalkeeper, central midfielder, and perhaps an athlete in another sport.
Then he returned to himself.
The first package should protect the body and make eight thousand dream hours safe.
Steel Body at Five Stars: 80,000
Cat Reflexes at Five Stars: 80,000
Eagle Eye at Four and a Half Stars: 40,000
Tactician at Four and a Half Stars: 40,000
Steel Mind at Four Stars: 15,000
Perfect Recovery at Four Stars: 15,000
Total: 270,000
The number looked enormous because it was.
It would leave 423,584 before Dream Training and any Tool expenses—enough for future decisions, but not careless generosity.
Alexander considered buying Predator Instinct, Ambidexterity, and Aerial Dominion immediately.
He rejected the temptation.
Five-star broad football talent already allowed him to develop finishing, both feet, and aerial ability.
Those specialists would later remove the final weaknesses from an already complete player.
They were not required before the first session.
Durability first.
Perception second.
Mental protection third.
An empire should secure its foundation before decorating the roof.
The confirmation window waited.
Alexander did not press it yet.
Purchasing Steel Body in a hospital might produce medical readings nobody could explain.
That was also why the hospital was the best place: privacy, monitoring, and a ready explanation for unusual sensations after an electrical injury.
He checked the time.
Konrad would arrive before evening visiting hours ended.
Doctors expected Alexander to remain overnight.
The schedule aligned.
He would negotiate for financial capital while still ordinary.
Then he would spend sporting capital on becoming something no member of either family had thought possible.