With a heavy sigh, Victor tossed his phone onto the mattress beside him; he simply wasn’t in the mood to mindlessly scroll.
His gaze drifted lazily across his surroundings.
The apartment was a small, cramped studio, complete with nothing but a tiny, bare-minimum bathroom.
The entire place barely spanned 30 square meters.
His bed was shoved right up against his study desk, leaving almost zero space to comfortably cook a proper meal.
Not that it mattered much—he primarily survived on instant, pre-cooked meals anyway, so the lack of a culinary setup didn’t exactly break his heart.
The studio had the classic, disorganized aesthetic you’d expect from a teenage guy living entirely on his own.
“Well, it could be worse,” Victor muttered aloud to the empty room.
“Plus, the rent is dirt cheap.”
Being underage meant he couldn’t legally hold down a job yet, leaving his aunt to cover all of his living expenses.
Although she never once complained—and actively tried to spoil him with extra allowances—Victor had always been incredibly stubborn about money.
He went out of his way to minimize the financial burden he placed on her.
That fierce desire to save her cash was the exact reason he had insisted on moving into this budget-friendly shoebox of an apartment near his school.
He was profoundly grateful to his aunt’s family for stepping up to raise him.
Because of that gratitude, he carried a quiet, constant sense of indebtedness; he refused to let them bleed their hard-earned income on his behalf.
Lying there on his bed, a sudden, rare spark of independent resolve flared up inside him.
“I’m about to turn eighteen, damn it! It’s time I make my own money!” he exclaimed, sitting up with a fleeting burst of genuine excitement.
But the moment he actually started brainstorming ways to generate an income, his motivation instantly deflated right back to zero.
He possessed a massive, newly unlocked archive of Earth memories, sure.
The problem?
He had spent the absolute entirety of that previous lifetime studying, practicing, or engineering music.
And he had literally just promised himself a few minutes ago that he would never touch the industry again.
“There is no way I’m breaking my own vow that fast,” he said, a wry, self-deprecating smile crossing his face.
“Besides, even if I lacked the shame and tried to build a career by shamelessly plagiarizing Earth’s library, there’s zero guarantee I’d even succeed here.” He shook his head grimly at the thought.
After spending the last few hours systematically analyzing his dual lifetimes, the reality of this world’s infrastructure was finally starting to settle in.
If there was one thing the citizens of the Federation worshiped above all else, it was music or anything related to that.
The sheer scale of consumption here was mind-boggling.
Back on Earth, the average person listened to roughly 2.5 to 3 hours of music a day.
In the Resonance Federation, that statistic was turned completely on its head.
Official demographic studies showed that the average citizen consumed a staggering 11 to 12 hours of music every single day.
Half of their entire twenty-four-hour existence was spent continuously plugged into a soundscape.
And that was just the baseline average.
The individuals who spent their lives listening to music 24/7 weren’t considered rare, eccentric outliers; they were a completely normal demographic of the population.
Compounding the issue was the fact that this world boasted thousands of years of advanced, modern history, meaning their existing musical heritage was utterly massive.
As much as Victor deeply loved Earth’s masterpieces, he lacked the scale of knowledge required to seamlessly adapt and translate those pieces to fit this society’s complex laws.
After all, he was still biologically stuck in the adolescent half-tier.
The popular local singers dominating the airwaves in Camnora City were at least Tier 3 Scholars.
The true interstellar superstars?
They commanded breathtaking Tier 6 or Tier 7 abilities.
Their sheer breadth of technical skill and acoustic theory was so stratospherically high that even with a whole extra lifetime of Earth’s musical knowledge under his belt, Victor wouldn’t even be able to glimpse their shadow.
And that wasn’t the only massive roadblock standing directly in his path.
The music scene in this world wasn’t consolidated into a single, easily penetrable corporate hub; it was a sprawling, multi-planetary network.
The Resonance Federation systematically divided its musical hierarchy into five distinct regional tiers.
The first tier consisted of City-Level Artists—aspiring rookies, casual hobbyists, or localized street musicians.
While the vast majority were standard Citizen-level performers, the truly popular artists dominating a specific city’s scene were usually Tier 3 Scholars.
Armed with portable synths or compact instruments, they performed live in bustling city squares, neighborhood parks, or cozy coffee shops.
They were fiercely loved by their local communities, and their music was primarily shared across localized city internet forums.
The second tier stepped up to State-Level Artists.
These were all true professionals who had graduated from university at the Scholar level.
Backed by corporate entertainment companies managing their careers, they formed the absolute backbone of local state culture.
They recorded high-quality, watermarked audio tracks in state-of-the-art studios, and their songs were broadcast daily across regional radio frequencies.
Because of their immense technical skill and experience, listening to them was practically a daily reflex for the population.
The third tier belonged to Continent-Level Artists.
These were monstrous musicians commanding at least a Tier 4 capability, universally referred to as Specialists or Professionals.
They possessed such a staggering depth of acoustic knowledge that Victor was thoroughly convinced that if any one of them were dropped onto Earth, they would instantly dominate the global music industry.
They sold out stadium concerts packed with hundreds of thousands of screaming fans.
More mind-bogglingly, a Specialist could effortlessly use their resonance to manifest fluid, moving scenes.
‘Just imagine,’ Victor thought, ‘someone singing a live song, and a fully animated music video literally materializes midair around them.’
Victor wasn’t demeaning Earth’s artists and musicians; he absolutely loved them.
Otherwise, he wouldn’t have fallen in love with music back on Earth, but they were just born in the wrong world.
Victor was sure that if legendary figures like Vivaldi, the Beatles, and others were born in this world, they would become famous throughout the whole federation and eventually reach Tier 7.
When Victor’s thoughts reached this point, he completely gave up; he was aware that although he had some musical talent, he didn’t have their level of talent.
Victor knew that the upper two tiers housed even more terrifying, god-like musicians, and his aching head simply lacked the cognitive budget to dwell on them.
“Well, it looks like plagiarizing music is entirely off the table,” Victor remarked sarcastically to the empty room.
“Not that I actually wanted to, anyway.”
‘But what about other industries?’ he mused, mentally scrolling through the massive library of Earth media stored in his head.
He remembered books, television shows, and movies.
He couldn’t help but wonder if he could copy a different art form to build his financial independence.
“TV and movies… yeah, I can discard those immediately,” he muttered, a grim look crossing his face as he recalled the mechanics of this world’s entertainment industry.
It wasn’t just the music scene that was ridiculously expansive; humanity had deeply integrated the Sound-to-Image capability into every conceivable facet of life, whether artistic or utilitarian.
When demographic studies stated that citizens spent half their day listening to audio, it wasn’t just referring to songs.
It included elaborate, audio-driven dramatic arts, theater, and immersive audiobooks.
Victor wasn’t a tech expert, but he knew that to even film a single scene in this world, an individual had to be a certified Scholar.
The cameras here didn’t operate on traditional Earth-like optics; they functioned entirely on the principles of human resonance.
“Well, at least the humans in this world don’t have to worry about AI stealing their jobs,” he said, a sudden memory from Earth flashing across his mind.
In this world, a mechanical AI takeover or mass human unemployment was a physical impossibility.
While an advanced artificial intelligence could easily process complex logistics, run data analytics, and automate basic physical tasks like moving mechanical arms or rolling wheels, it remained completely locked out of the core driver of society: the Sound-Imagery process.
One immutable law defined this universe: machines and AI are entirely incapable of replicating the human ability.
The creation of visual light from frequency required a distinct biological signature and conscious human intent—meaning a computer left on its own was effectively blind and powerless.
Although machines could record the sound and its attached image, it wasn’t able to manipulate it, and if it did, the image would disintegrate.
Even the screen on Victor’s phone, while visually mimicking an Earth smartphone, didn’t use an independent display matrix.
The videos that he watched or the messages that he received were sound wave data packets that the phone just transmitted, but it had no power to modify things.
On Earth, an AI could effortlessly spit out art and videos by running mathematical algorithms over massive, stolen datasets.
But in the Resonance Federation, if a supercomputer attempted to generate a hyper-realistic image by mathematically composing a flawless sound wave, the result was a resounding nothing.
Played through a speaker, that AI-generated audio track remained dead, empty noise.
The surrounding amplifiers would refuse to project a single pixel.
This was because the world’s Sound-Imagery Instruments strictly required the subtle, unique bio-electrical frequencies and neural patterns of a living human brain to trigger the visual transformation.
Without a genuine human “spark” attached to the line, a computer’s audio output was just hollow, useless static.
Because it was impossible for machines to replicate human resonance, technology could only ever record and replay, but never inherently create.
The entertainment industry was driven entirely by human ingenuity.
There were no AI-generated scripts, no automated songs, and no calculated animations.
“Seriously, how lucky are these people?” Victor sighed, running a hand through his messy black hair.
He vividly remembered that by the time he took his fatal tumble down that manhole on Earth, AI music was already aggressively decimating the livelihoods of countless independent musicians.
Here, a human’s artistic soul was the only currency that mattered.