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For the next two years, from age ten to twelve, I barely left my room outside of school and my mandatory morning physical maintenance.
I plunged entirely into the architecture of the magical world’s internet.
The coding languages here were slightly different from Earth adapted to integrate with elemental processors rather than traditional silicon but the underlying logic was identical.
Boolean operators, loops, arrays, and object oriented frameworks were universal concepts.
The System absolutely feasted on this environment.
Unlike physical skills, which were capped by my biological age, cognitive and conceptual skills had no such ceiling.
Every line of code I wrote, every brute force script I compiled, and every firewall I dismantled fed directly into my progression.
Do you know how to actually practice your hacking skills?
It’s not by immediately hacking into government systems; it’s by hacking into piracy sites that change their domain every month.
I hacked them purely for target practice.
After I leveled [Programming] to Lv.
47, the System granted me knowledge related to masking my digital footprint, which allowed me to build a flawless, custom VPN.
Then, I escalated.
I started hacking small company websites, then medium sized pirated streaming sites.
After two years of relentless grinding, I could hack into any system that was connected to the public internet.
Of course, I was not omnipotent.
I couldn’t hack isolated systems, closed networks, or Air gapped computers.
> [Programming: Lv.
63]
I had originally thought hacking banks would be as easy digitally as it was shown in the movies, but high tier banks used Air gapped systems.
They weren’t connected to the public network at all.
If I needed to hack a bank’s internal computer, I would have to physically go there and install a virus on site, which I obviously couldn’t do.
But I found another way to generate quick cash if I needed it: ATMs.
If I was ever in need of a small amount of money, I could take my laptop near an ATM and digitally withdraw cash.
There were risks, naturally.
ATMs were placed on high traffic commercial streets, usually guarded by at least one Tier 3 Novice Mage.
If I drew massive amounts of cash, I would definitely be pinged by the system’s security.
But if I only drew small denominations?
No one noticed.
You might doubt how I could run complex hacking algorithms with the crappy processing unit of my civilian laptop.
That’s where you would be mistaken.
Why would I use my own processor when I had the Mage Association’s state of the art processors at my disposal?
I hacked into their network through my father’s desktop at work.
I used the excuse of “I want you to be the first to play my new game,” and navigated him to download a file from a website I had created.
After that?
BOOM.
I was in.
It was as simple as that.
Once I had a backdoor into their servers, I never needed to worry about processing power again.
However, I could only access the files of Bo City residents because each Mage Association branch had its own localized network, completely separate from other cities.
I could hijack the surveillance cameras in the commercial district.
I could spoof IP addresses so flawlessly that my digital footprint looked like it was coming from a server farm in the capital city of Beijing, rather than a cramped house in the Southern District.
And with this god like access, I decided it was time to execute my master plan.
I was going to build the technological titans of my past life.
I was going to code this world’s equivalent of Amazon, Uber, or WeChat.
I would revolutionize civilian life and become a billionaire overnight, securing all the funds I would ever need to purchase high tier magical cultivation resources.
Before writing a single line of commercial code, I used my skills to snoop through the corporate registries and financial databases of the country’s top tech firms.
I wanted to see how the market was structured and who my competitors were.
What I found over the next forty eight hours completely shattered my grand, optimistic illusion.
I leaned back in my desk chair, the blue light of the laptop illuminating my face in the dark room.
My screen was filled with classified corporate acquisition documents I had illegally decrypted from a prominent Shanghai law firm’s server.
The reality of the magical world’s economy was brutally, unforgivingly feudal.
In my past life, if a brilliant college dropout created a revolutionary app in his garage, he became a billionaire.
He went public, retained his shares, and became a tech titan.
In this world, the rules of capitalism were entirely subservient to the rules of magic.
Laws and patents were strictly enforced among the unawakened masses, but the moment a civilian company generated real, substantial wealth, the magical aristocratic families the apex predators of society simply took it.
I scrolled through horrifyingly clear examples:
Aero-Deliver.
Three years ago, a brilliant civilian programmer in Guangzhou developed an algorithm that flawlessly optimized delivery routes using local wind currents, drastically cutting shipping costs.
The company exploded in value.
Six months later, the prestigious Zhao Family Conglomerate filed a vague “magical copyright” infringement lawsuit.
They buried the creator in legal fees, forcibly bought the company for pennies on the dollar, and ousted the founder.
The Zhao family now enjoyed a monopoly on civilian logistics, while the creator was working as a IT guy in the very company he had founded.
Right here in Bo City, I found records of three local civilian startups: a water purification company, a construction firm, and a textile manufacturer.
The moment their profit margins crossed a certain threshold, the Mu Family swooped in.
They didn’t use lawsuits; they used “protection.” They offered to protect the companies’ supply lines from magical beasts in exchange for an eighty percent equity stake.
It was extortion, plain and simple.
I closed the decrypted files, rubbing my tired eyes.
My brilliant plan was a suicide mission.
If I built an empire like Uber or Facebook, I wouldn’t become a billionaire.
The moment the app gained national traction, the Zhao family, the Mu family, or the Magic Association would kick my door down.
They would trace the IP, find a twelve year old kid in Bo City, and legally (or illegally) strip the company from my hands.
I would be left with crumbs or worse, I might accidentally put a target on my family’s back.
In a world where a teenager can summon lightning from the sky and vaporize a city block, contract law is merely a suggestion.
I even found records showing that the magical world’s equivalent of Facebook had its founder’s shares diluted by the American Mage Association down to a mere two percent because they wanted to control the flow of information.
Just because he was unawakened at the time, they steamrolled him.
Even if he awakened later, the resources required to advance to a new rank were firmly controlled by that very same Association.
So, I scrapped my grand plan for a digital empire.
“I can’t build something revolutionary,” I muttered to myself, staring at the ceiling.
“If I build a gold mine, the wolves will just eat the sheep and take the gold.”
I needed a different approach.
I needed something that generated a massive, continuous stream of revenue, but looked so utterly worthless, undignified, and trivial that the aristocratic mages wouldn’t even stoop to look at it.
Mages cared about power.
They cared about prestige, magical artifacts, elemental seeds, and territorial control.
They despised the mundane.
What makes billions of dollars but carries absolutely zero social prestige?
A slow, wicked smile spread across my face as the memories of my past life flooded my mind.
Games.
Not massive, sweeping virtual reality epics.
Not complex, lore heavy magical simulators.
I was talking about cheap, frustrating, endlessly addictive, ad riddled casual games.
I researched the gaming industry within magical society, and what I found was hilarious.
No magical families were interested in it.
The only time family members invested in the sector was to pacify their own children.
The unawakened civilian population of this world was massive billions of people who worked boring jobs, rode boring trains, and lived in constant, background fear of magical beasts.
They were starved for cheap dopamine.
I didn’t need to spend months coding a massive infrastructure.
I didn’t need a team of artists.
I opened a new compiler window and went to work.
With my [Programming: Lv.
64], writing the physics engine for a 2D side scrolling game took me exactly fourteen minutes.
I decided to recreate the most infamous piece of digital frustration in human history: Flappy Bird
To adapt it slightly to the culture of this world, I replaced the yellow bird with a poorly drawn, pixelated griffin.
I named the app ‘Derpy Griffin’.
The mechanics were intentionally infuriating.
You tapped the screen on a mobile phone, or hit the spacebar on a PC, to make the griffin flap.
You navigated through a series of randomly generated, green magical pillars.
If you touched a pillar, you died.
You got one point for every pillar you passed.
That was the entire game.
But the monetization was where the true genius lay.
I integrated a relentless advertisement algorithm.
Every three times the player died, a five second unskippable ad for a civilian product (like toothpaste, cheap cars, or instant noodles) would play.
There were no microtransactions to “pay to win” the game was entirely free which meant there was zero barrier to entry.
I spent some time convincing my dad to open a small corporate entity in the name of “Zhang Studios.” It was surprisingly easy since my dad worked in the Mage Association’s logistics department and knew how to file the paperwork.
We put it under my mother’s name, since she was now a full time housewife taking care of my grandma.
Even though the earnings I projected were high, it wouldn’t be enough for the top level families to be interested, because all the income was generated purely from in-app advertising, a sector they considered peasant work.
On a quiet Sunday night, I uploaded the game to the global civilian app store.
I didn’t spend a single cent on marketing.
I just posted a link on a few popular civilian forums under an anonymous account, with a simple caption: “This game is actually impossible.
I bet no one can score past 10.”
Then, I closed my laptop and went to sleep.
The initial growth was slow.
By Tuesday, I had five hundred downloads.
By Thursday, it had reached two thousand.
But on Friday, the psychological virus took hold.
I was sitting in the cafeteria during lunch, eating a bowl of rice, when I heard a loud, frustrated groan from the table next to me.
“I swear to god, the hitbox on this stupid pillar is broken!” a sixth grader yelled, nearly throwing his smartphone across the table.
His friend laughed, pulling out his own phone.
“You just suck.
Watch this, I’m already at 14.”
“Shut up, pass me my phone, I can beat 14,” the first kid snarled, aggressively tapping his screen.
I watched in absolute silence, chewing my rice.
It was working.
The viral loop of frustration and social competition had ignited.
By the end of the second week, Derpy Griffin hit one million downloads.
By the end of the month, it hit twenty million.
The game was a cultural phenomenon among the unawakened youth and bored office workers.
It was everywhere.
People were playing it on the subway, in the bathrooms, and secretly under their desks during class.
And every time they died which was constantly an ad played.
I sat in my room late one night, the blue light of the screen reflecting in my eyes, and opened my company’s banking portal.
[Current Balance: 3,520,300 RMB]
My dad didn’t know it, but to run the game flawlessly across different global locations, I needed to pay approximately 150,000 RMB a month for server space.
I had slowly siphoned that initial startup capital from ATMs without getting caught.
But now, the next step was simple: use the clean money I gained from the game to pay for the servers, leaving me with a massive, legitimate profit margin.
Four and a half million yuan.
In a single month.
I stared at the number, my heart hammering against my ribs.
My father made a tiny fraction of this in an entire year.
A standard Primary Level magic tool cost roughly half a million yuan.
The magical elites didn’t care.
To the prestigious Mu Family, games played by civilians on their lunch break were as irrelevant as the dirt under their boots.
They were busy fighting over elemental earth veins and hunting commander level beasts.
They didn’t see the millions of yuan flowing silently into my account because they were too arrogant to look down.
The lifespan of a viral game like Derpy Griffin was naturally volatile.
People would eventually get sick of it.
That was exactly why most magical families looked down on the industry.
But what happens when this game begins its downfall due to lack of interest, and a brand new game drops from the exact same company?
That was my strategy.
I had already completed the code for my next game, Ruin Runner a cheap clone of Temple Run but I chose not to release it yet.
I already had enough money to last me until my magical awakening, completely securing my family’s economic situation.
So, I held off on releasing any new games, choosing only to update Derpy Griffin with different skins and new background locations to milk the ad revenue for as long as possible.
When my father finally checked the company bank account a month later, he literally fainted.
Seeing my father collapse in shock, my mother rushed over to look at the screen, and promptly fainted right next to him.
I just laughed at them for having such a “poor” mindset, before quickly reminding myself that I had been just as broke in my past life.
I thanked whoever had sent me here for giving me this wonderful new life, this incredible family, and most importantly, this overpowered System.
I closed the laptop and walked over to the window, looking out over the flickering streetlights of the Southern District.
In the distance, rising high above the smog, I could see the glowing runes of the Bo City Mage Association.
The agonizing waiting phase was finally drawing to a close.
I was thirteen.
In two short years, the national magical awakening ceremony would take place at Tianlan Magic High School.
I would place my hand on the Awakening Stone, and my true journey would begin.
But unlike Mo Fan, who would start from absolute zero, relying purely on his innate talent and a mysterious pendant to survive the brutal magical hierarchy…
I was going to enter the magical world as an apex predator in sheep’s clothing.
Whenever my Stardust awakened, I wouldn’t need to beg for resources.
I wouldn’t need to sign away my freedom to a prestigious family just to get a single piece of magical equipment.
I had the financial firepower to buy Spirit Grade elemental seeds, advanced magical armor, and top-tier cultivation accelerators the moment I needed them.
When I advanced to the corresponding magical ranks, I would seamlessly increase my financial status and corporate footprint in the digital world to match.
But for now, I just needed to be patient.
To be continued…