My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible - Chapter 516 A Problem

Chapter 516  A Problem

Liam was on his bed, Lucid on, scrolling through LucidNet.

The pre-order reactions had settled into their familiar pattern. Post after post of people lamenting four consecutive months of failure, each one finding a slightly different way to describe the same outcome.

Someone had made a thread titled “Month 4 and I remain deviceless. An ongoing tragedy.” It had forty thousand replies, most of them a single word: You and us both, brother.

He scrolled through them with a quiet smile.

Then he found the post.

Two confirmation emails. Side by side. One for a Lucid. One for Lucid Air. The timestamp on both was from the same night, minutes apart.

Liam stopped scrolling.

He read the post twice. Then he looked at the emails in the screenshot more carefully, checking the formatting, the domain address, the confirmation codes. They were real. Both of them.

He sat back.

The odds of winning one device in a single pre-order event were already effectively incalculable against a pool of hundreds of millions of simultaneous attempts. The odds of winning both, in the same night, in separate queues, were something that existed more as a philosophical concept than a mathematical one.

Lucy’s validation system had no known exploits. He knew this not because he’d been told but because he understood what he’d built. The Lucid ecosystem ran on a programming architecture that had no equivalent on Earth — not a refinement of existing languages but something structurally different, written from first principles. Bots failed not because the system detected and rejected them but because the system didn’t process requests the way conventional infrastructure did. There was nothing to exploit. The queue wasn’t a queue in any sense that existing automation tools could interface with.

Which meant the person in the screenshot had simply been lucky. Genuinely, absurdly, statistically impossible lucky.

He looked at the replies beneath the post. Thousands of them, arriving faster than the counter could update. Some were congratulatory. Most were a specific flavor of despair that only emerged when someone witnessed luck so extreme it stopped feeling random and started feeling personal.

“I refuse to accept this person is real.”

“What did you do. What did you sacrifice. Tell me everything.”

“I’ve been awake since 11 PM for this. I’m going back to sleep. Congratulations I guess.”

Liam laughed quietly, alone in his room.

He kept scrolling.

He found the Transparency Report a few minutes after it dropped, the notification appearing on his feed the same way it appeared for everyone else. He opened it without particular urgency, and started reading it slowly, from the executive summary through to the closing statement, and somewhere in the middle of the creator economy section he stopped and reread the numbers from the beginning.

The truth was that he had never paid close attention to the company’s financials. That had always been Lucy’s domain — platform operations, backend infrastructure, the ecosystem architecture that made everything run. Daniel handled his personal finances and the family office. Between them, the practical machinery of Nova Technologies’ commercial existence had always been managed without requiring his direct attention.

He hadn’t looked away deliberately. He simply hadn’t looked.

Now he was looking.

$6.32 billion in viewer gifting. $595 million in in-game purchases. $2.5 billion in net company revenue. In month four. From a platform that had launched with two thousand devices and a single announcement.

He read the creator economy distribution table twice. The bottom fifty percent of creators — ten thousand people — had earned between $48,000 and $720,000 each in a single month. The floor of the ecosystem was $576,000 annually. For the least successful participants.

He sat with that number for a moment.

He remembered the first Transparency Report. Lucy had prepared it, posted it, and summarized the key figures for him in a few sentences. He’d registered the numbers as significant and moved on because there had been seventeen other things demanding attention that week. Month two had been similar. Month three he hadn’t read at all.

Seeing it now, in full, for the first time with his complete attention — it landed differently.

Pride wasn’t quite the right word. He had built something that was producing this. Not accidentally and not arbitrarily but because of decisions made carefully, a structure designed to distribute value rather than concentrate it, a creator share set at seventy percent because sixty wasn’t enough and eighty made the platform unsustainable. The numbers in the report were the result of those decisions compounding over four months.

He read the reaction threads. The finance person whose brain broke on the bottom fifty percent floor. The person who needed to go outside after the median household income comparison. The platform economist quietly noting that the infrastructure cost relative to revenue was something they couldn’t calculate because they didn’t know what Nova Technologies’ infrastructure actually cost.

He smiled at that one.

Then he scrolled further and found the comment.

Forza is absolutely fucked.

240,000 likes. Replies almost entirely agreement without elaboration.

He remembered the name from the report. Top streamer in Eternal Realms. $116 million for the month. He’d registered it as a data point when he read the gaming section and moved on.

Now he stopped.

He pulled up the user file. A document unfolded across his Lucid screen, clean and organized, the way Lucy formatted everything.

He read it. Then he read it again.

Forza was sixteen years old. He lived with his parents in a mid-sized city outside Barcelona. His real name was in the file but Liam didn’t use it — the kid had chosen a handle and that choice deserved respect.

Over four months, Forza had earned $165 million. $6.7 million in his first month, which meant he’d been one of the platform’s top earners since the beginning. He had been sixteen years old when he won the first pre-order lottery.

$165 million. Sixteen years old. Living with his parents in Spain.

Liam set his Lucid down and looked at the ceiling for a moment.

The problem wasn’t the money itself. The money was real, earned, and entirely legitimate. The problem was everything surrounding it — the gap between having that amount and knowing what to do with it, the gap between a sixteen-year-old’s understanding of financial management and the reality of nine figures sitting in an account, and the specific vulnerability of someone that age when the figure became public.

The comment had 240,000 likes. Forza’s name was in the Transparency Report. Anyone paying attention now knew that a creator operating under that handle had earned $116 million in a single month on the Lucid platform. It would take minimal effort to connect that handle to a real person. It might already be happening.

Liam pulled the file back up and checked the withdrawal status.

Forza hadn’t withdrawn a single payment. Neither had most of the top earners, according to what he could see in the system. The numbers had accumulated month after month, sitting inside the platform’s payment infrastructure, growing larger in a way that seemed abstract until it suddenly wasn’t.

Nova Technologies was currently holding more than $5 billion in unpaid creator earnings.

That figure had a specific shape to it. The top earners — the people for whom the numbers were most extreme — were also the people least equipped by prior experience to manage what those numbers meant. They hadn’t been wealthy before the platform. Most of them had been ordinary people who were very good at something and had found an audience. The Lucid ecosystem had transformed that skill into income at a scale that had no precedent and no roadmap.

Nobody had prepared them for this. There was no preparation that would have made sense before the platform existed.

And now the money was sitting there and the gap between having the money and knowing how to protect it was a vulnerability that other people — people with interests that were not the creators’ interests — would eventually move to exploit.

Liam thought about Forza specifically. Sixteen. Parents probably had no framework for this either. No financial advisors. No legal structure around the earnings. No understanding of tax implications across international jurisdictions, or of how to protect against the specific risks that came with being publicly known as the holder of significant wealth at a young age.

The kid had earned $165 million by being good at a game and interesting to watch.

He deserved to keep it. All of it. And keeping it required infrastructure he didn’t have and probably didn’t know he needed.

This was his responsibility. Not because the platform had created the problem — the platform had created an opportunity — but because the people sustaining the ecosystem deserved to have the ecosystem protect them in return.

If the top creators made decisions from ignorance that hurt them, that hurt their relationship with the platform, and that hurt the ecosystem, and that eventually hurt the thing he’d built.

But that wasn’t the primary reason.

The primary reason was simpler. A sixteen-year-old kid in Spain had made $165 million playing a game and deserved to have someone make sure that money actually changed his life the way it should, rather than becoming a source of damage because nobody had shown him how to hold something that large.

Liam immediately put a call to Daniel.