Chapter 135. The Government’s Investment

The realization that eight assignments were not a technical glitch but a brutal reality brought a strange sense of relief. Specifics were always better than the unknown. There was nothing to celebrate about it: the prospect of becoming a completely overworked workhorse looked miserable. Especially with the requirement to take on work that could get me killed. But on the other hand, the government had clearly assessed my potential and decided to squeeze every last drop out of it. That was probably supposed to motivate me and awaken a sense of genuine patriotism. Probably.

It reminded me of being enrolled in school. Like it or not, you went to class and studied. There was no way to opt out of basic education. You had no choice but to attend, but you could still plan your strategy for those years of educational confinement. You could play the resentful teenager, sabotage your teachers' lessons, endure the principal's endless lectures, and ultimately walk away with frayed nerves and the realization that you had wasted your time. Or you could give one hundred and ten percent in every subject. School taught me one thing pretty clearly: excellent grades and involvement in extracurricular activities opened doors to the Ivy League. Laziness and sabotage shut down every opportunity, leaving you stuck on the sidelines of your career.

Having made my decision, I closed my email and went back to studying chemistry. I needed to finish the job. Three hefty textbooks and their accompanying workbooks were waiting on the desk, covering a university-level biochemistry course that would take an ordinary student years of studying to master.

I crammed the entire mountain of information into my memory in a single night.

By morning, my head was pounding as if red-hot needles had been driven into my temples at an angle, but the job was done. There was not a single blank space left in the workbooks. Every problem had been solved in what was now my flawless, almost typeset handwriting. In hyperfocus, I worked like my mother's sewing machine: my hand recorded formulas without stopping while my eyes simultaneously scanned the pages and fed the information into my brain.

The information had not settled yet, and even my palace of memory was still in chaos. Any attempt to think through benzene rings or protein bonds triggered a flash of searing migraine pain. But I already knew how to deal with the side effects.

[Special Command: Instant Sleep Until Fully Restored.]

The switch clicked, and my consciousness went dark.

I woke exactly seven hours later. My thoughts were crystal clear, and the heaviness in the back of my head was gone. The only reminder of my overnight marathon was a savage, primal hunger that had my stomach twisting itself into a knot.

I stepped out of my room into the living room and immediately noticed something unusual: silence. There was no whistle of air being cut by Krav Maga strikes, no sound of her drilling Brazilian jiu-jitsu holds, and none of that stony, detached expression on her face. Mom was not in the room.

My breathing stayed steady, and my pulse did not even twitch. My new physiology filtered out all the unnecessary panic. Apparently, I could now watch the bloodiest horror movie imaginable with a perfectly steady heart rate from the opening credits to the end.

Instead of guessing, I pulled out my smartphone. There was one missed message from her on the screen, sent while I had been unconscious.

Mom: Session ended automatically. I'm tired. Going to sleep.

Dry, concise, straight to the point. Just the way I liked it. To be safe, I quietly cracked open the door to her bedroom. Mom was asleep, completely bundled beneath the blanket. Platinum strands were scattered across her pillow, and her glasses rested neatly on the nightstand.

I noted the time the message had been sent and compared it with the start of her training session. Allowing for a margin of a couple of minutes, she had worked nonstop for twenty-eight hours straight. So there it was: the absolute limit of her evolved physiology, whose endurance had improved but had not yet reached its peak.

I stepped closer and used [Special Command: Deep Restorative Sleep] on her. That would let her body process all the fatigue toxins in the minimum amount of time. I had more than enough mental resources right now to avoid cutting corners on little things like this.

Leaving her to sleep it off, I went to the kitchen. No one had restocked the supplies after yesterday's pancakes. I opened the refrigerator and took stock of the generous assortment of food I had bought in advance for exactly this situation. My stomach growled at the sight of raw meat and vegetables. I was ready to eat tomatoes straight from the fridge if that was what it took to settle the discomfort in my gut.

I could have pulled myself together, chopped the ingredients by hand, and spent several hours standing over the stove. But why waste time on routine when I could just scroll past it like an annoying advertisement?

[Special Command: Cook a Large Amount of Delicious Food.]

Using a superpower for something as mundane as cooking was probably the height of military indiscipline. But then again, what was the point of having a superpower if I only used it to clear portals? At this rate, I might as well turn myself into a strictly military tool.

The impulse traveled into my central nervous system, and I was pulled into hyperfocus as usual. A flash, and all of reality contracted into a tiny point through which I watched my own hands. They washed vegetables, chopped herbs, and sent steaks onto a scorching-hot skillet at a speed so frantic that the movements were almost imperceptible to the naked eye.

I eased smoothly out of hyperfocus. No crash, no headache. Purely mechanical work did not overload my neurons. Besides, I was still fresh from the restorative sleep I had taken recently. The only problem was the hunger, which had grown even more intense.

The entire culinary marathon took four hours. Even a team of professional restaurant chefs would have struggled to produce that much food from scratch in the same amount of time. In hyperfocus, my productivity could easily rival an automated factory assembly line.

Tables, cabinets, and every available counter space were groaning under the weight of the food. Every plate and container in the house had been pressed into service. There was not a single empty spot left in the refrigerator. Every shelf was packed with mousses, jellies, cakes, and other desserts that still needed time to set. Even with my current metabolism, that much food would have lasted me a week of nonstop eating.

And the best part, at least from my perspective, was that the whole process had taken maybe five seconds. All that exhausting household drudgery was over with a flick of a switch. It was probably little conveniences like this that made me love my superpowers. If I had a purely combat-oriented ability that was only useful for working in portals, I would have sunk into depression within my first month after awakening.

I grabbed a couple of plates with fresh salad and steak and headed back to my room and computer. I had mastered a university-level chemistry course, but I was not completely convinced that my knowledge was enough for actual practical work. Sure, I could rattle off the structure of the periodic table without hesitation, explain the valence of any element, or write out a chemical reaction. The basics were covered, and nobody was going to catch me out with some elementary gap in my knowledge. But my past experience dealing with tax inspectors and bureaucrats of every variety had taught me one hard-and-fast rule: when dealing with government agencies, it was better to have as much official documentation ready as possible.

I went to a specialized portal and registered for a professional chemistry exam that came with a government certification. I had no practical need for it, but there was no harm in having a few extra official documents with seals on them. The website said the certificate could also be useful when applying to university, which I definitely planned to do. Perfect.

The exam date was set, the fee was charged to my bank card, and the application page included a list of recommended reading. Without giving it much thought, I bought the entire set of digital materials, all ten volumes. For all I knew, the local study guides might contain details that the standard textbooks had missed.

I opened the first textbook, skimmed a couple of chapters, and realized I was simply bored. The language was dry, the explanations were padded, and the vast majority of the material repeated, almost word for word, what I had already crammed into my head overnight. A faint twinge of my old human laziness whispered that I should close the tab and forget about those ten questionable tomes. But I could not afford to be careless. Those were the study guides used to create the exam questions. Having access to resources like these and then failing the test out of sheer stubbornness would be the height of stupidity.

Still, boring work could always be delegated to autopilot. The important thing was to define the task precisely.

[Special Command: Study the entire collection of purchased chemistry literature. Perform an in-depth analysis. Save only unique information to long-term memory. Filter out all duplicates and basic information. Upon completion, generate a text report specifying the useful content found in each source.]

Back in college, I had done similar work manually while preparing term papers. Consolidating information from ten sources took at least a week of sitting around in libraries. This time, the entire process took exactly two hours.

Coming out of hyperfocus was abrupt but perfectly manageable. A dull hum lingered at the edges of my awareness, without any of the vicious migraine flashes. I pressed a palm to my forehead. My temperature had risen only slightly, and I barely felt hungry anymore.

Interesting. Last time, a comparable amount of data had fried my brain and knocked me out for half a day. Now, I had worked for only two hours and was left with nothing more than mild discomfort. Apparently, filtering out redundant information during input dramatically reduced the strain on my neurons. My brain was not wasting resources recording information that was already stored in my memory palace.

An open text file containing the final report filled the screen. Every book contained useful information, but only in tiny amounts. Taken together, roughly eighty-five percent of the text had gone straight into the trash.

I caught myself thinking that I was functioning more and more like a computational machine, but there was no point arguing with efficiency. Without hyperfocus, those tedious tomes would have cost me six months of my life.

So, chemistry was essentially settled. All that remained was to wait for the exam date. Next up was physics. I went to the website and, following the same process, ordered sets of textbooks and problem books in a couple of clicks.

A brief incoming-message alert interrupted me as I was putting together my study schedule. I straightened instinctively. The only people who sent me ordinary SMS messages were the Corps. Everyone else in my contacts had long since moved to messaging apps.

I unlocked the screen. Nearly half a million dollars had just been deposited into my account.

I read the notification again. The numbers had not changed.

What kind of game was the ministry playing? The classic carrot-and-stick approach? First dump the workload of eight departments on me, then toss me a bone to keep me from complaining?