**Chapter 3 – BrainLine and the First Step**
**Mumbai, 7:45 AM – Two Days Later**
Arjun Verma sat hunched over a borrowed laptop in the dim corner of a run-down internet café. The fan above him spun slowly, doing little to chase away the stale heat. Yet his fingers moved with a quiet urgency—code flying across the screen like a river of possibilities.
The last line of the interface went live.
**"BrainLine AI Initialized – v0.9 Public Beta"**
He leaned back and stared at it, bloodshot eyes gleaming. He hadn't slept. He had barely eaten. But none of that mattered.
His mind was sharper than ever, infused with the knowledge transferred from Nav01—the clone simulation of Naveen Kapoor. His understanding of AI, interface logic, and minimal-hardware deployment had grown exponentially. And BrainLine was the fruit of it.
It wasn't flashy. It didn't promise miracles. But it worked.
An app that could create a personalized, AI-driven schedule based on task urgency, user habits, and even estimated energy cycles. It analyzed usage patterns and offered suggestions that improved productivity by at least 20% in early testing—tested, of course, by clones in the System World.
The app now sat in an obscure corner of GitHub, tagged under "productivity tools." Just another project in a sea of code.
But Arjun knew better.
All it needed was one spark.
---
**System World – 2x Time Active**
Inside his mind's domain, the System World had changed.
What had once been a blank slate was now dotted with the early signs of a digital civilization. The clone lab had grown into a small tech campus. Modular glass buildings, energy-efficient power nodes, simulation pods, and a new training quadrant had all been erected.
Arjun had spent twelve hours inside—twenty-four in System Time—engineering systems to scale clone training. He created time-looped knowledge vaults where clone minds could run simulations endlessly, drawing from research databases, preloaded textbooks, and experimental AI labs.
Nav01 was no longer a lone operator. Two virtual assistants—AI generated within the System World—helped him cross-reference theories and test algorithms.
> \[System Level: 1 – Knowledge Threshold: 28% Complete.]
The bar glowed faintly. The system responded to his growth.
He wasn't leveling through combat. He was leveling through cognition.
And he was learning how to game that very metric.
---
**Real World – Day of the Launch**
Arjun exited the café and walked into the chaotic pulse of Mumbai. The streets buzzed with honking rickshaws, overloaded trucks, and pedestrians moving like water through cracks. His own life moved just as fast—uncertain, unstable, yet forward.
His UPI balance still showed ₹143.
But that number didn't bother him anymore. He had something more valuable than currency: momentum.
He moved toward a co-working café where he knew a small tech meet-up was happening. Not the formal startup types—just underground devs, solo hackers, and indie programmers who tested each other's tools.
He had visited it once, long ago. Never dared to speak. But today, he wasn't here to watch.
He took out a small printed QR code—linked directly to his GitHub repository.
"Mind if I show something?" he asked a group of four young men huddled over a React dashboard.
They looked up, skeptical.
"Who are you?"
"Someone you'll remember if you test this app."
He handed the QR card.
Within minutes, one of them had it installed.
Their reactions were modest at first—curious. Then confused. Then impressed.
"This algorithm adapts to my habits?" one asked.
"It predicted my break time… and it was right."
"It adjusts your peak work hours dynamically," Arjun explained. "And if you let it run a day, it improves."
"You made this?"
"With a team," he lied. "Sort of."
They passed it around.
"Post this on r/IndiaDev," someone suggested. "It might get attention."
They did.
By evening, Arjun's GitHub had fifty clones, and his inbox showed a message:
> **Subject: Interview Request – ByteForge Weekly (Tech Blog)**
> "We saw BrainLine on Reddit. Your logic design is impressive. Would you be open to a short feature?"
He read the message twice.
Then smiled.
---
**System World – Later That Night**
Nav01 had finished debugging a modular adaptive framework. Arjun watched as the clone recreated a simplified cloud system using free open-source modules he hadn't even heard of before.
> Clone: "Should I begin integration with other domains?"
"Yes," Arjun said. "Also… let's begin early-stage research into speech-based predictive analytics."
He turned toward the whiteboard and updated the goal chart.
**New Objective: Reach Knowledge Threshold 50% – Unlock Level 2.**
With Level 2, he could scan two more individuals.
Two more minds. Two more legacies to absorb.
Outside, the world saw him as a broke nobody.
But inside the system, he was building an empire of intellect.
And no one knew.
---
**End of Chapter 3**