Basic materials science. Biotechnology and genetic engineering. Energy systems. Artificial intelligence. Industrial machinery.
Those were the five core technological pillars that had carried humanity into the stars.
In the future Ethan came from, every serious breakthrough eventually touched one of them.
War machines that could replace armies.
Inertial cognition modules embedded in industrial systems.
Biochips that awakened smart-brains inside human minds.
Gene correction, adaptive bodies, orbital factories, starship hulls, automated mining fleets, synthetic crops engineered for dying worlds.
Everything.
Too much of it, really.
That was the problem.
The future had given him knowledge broad enough to redraw civilization, but knowledge and capability were not the same thing.
Ethan could remember the shape of thousands of inventions.
He could remember why they mattered.
He could even remember the logic behind many of them.
What he could not do was build most of them here.
Not yet.
He leaned back in his chair and looked at the order confirmations on-screen.
The truth was ugly and simple.
He lacked materials.
That was why basic materials science had become one of the five pillars in the first place.
People liked to treat advanced technology as if it began with ideas. It did not.
Ideas without material support were philosophy with better marketing.
Every serious piece of future technology rested on substances this era either could not produce at all or could not produce cheaply, cleanly, and at scale.
A biochip required substrate architecture no current facility could handle.
Gene modulation required carrier matrices that did not exist on any legal catalog.
High-end combat platforms required structural materials modern Earth would have treated as science-fiction even if someone handed over the formulas.
The same was true for aerospace hulls, energy-dense field systems, and most of the better industrial frameworks.
If a civilization could not make the material, then the design might as well have been a bedtime story.
He exhaled slowly.
That was the bottleneck beneath all the others.
Not talent.
Not vision.
Not even funding, at least not in the narrow sense.
Materials.
With enough money, he could push some present-day fields forward by half a step and still make fortunes large enough to bend entire industries.
But every leap carried risk, and risk had to be measured against the weakness of his current body.
He was not the man he had been in the future.
No gene reinforcement.
No tuned metabolism.
No combat-grade reflex enhancement.
No synthetic recovery systems quietly fixing the damage of overwork from the inside.
Right now, if the wrong person panicked and put a bullet through his chest, he would die as easily as anyone else.
Missiles and bombs were not the problem.
One handgun was enough.
That irritated him.
It also kept him honest.
He rubbed at his wrist, opened another supplier page, and muttered, "What I really need is a rich benefactor with terrible judgment."
The room stayed silent.
He clicked through another invoice.
"A billionaire widow. Divorced tech heiress. Lottery winner with a savior complex. I'm not picky."
Still silent.
He snorted once at himself.
That would have been convenient.
Unfortunately, the universe had never shown much interest in convenience.
He closed the supplier tabs and pulled up the current Arcane Realm client instead.
Even a stripped-down 2D PC build had nearly broken his patience.
His hands still felt numb if he typed too long without stopping.
That alone was enough to confirm what was already made obvious.
Continuing to brute-force everything personally was stupid.
Not impossible.
Stupid.
The consciousness transfer interface had to be achieved.
That much had not changed.
Once he had a usable intermediary layer between his mind and a machine environment, everything else would accelerate.
Development speed, design precision, system testing, simulation work, future-knowledge extraction—every one of them would improve.
And unlike a true smart-brain, this first step was barely within reach.
Barely.
He stared at the blank corner of the screen for several seconds.
Other people did not have smart-brains in this era.
He did.
Or rather, he had the remains of one.
That was the strange part.
When Ethan had first opened his eyes in this body, the Civilization Archive inside him had not been completely dark.
The archive's carrier core—what later centuries would have classified as a civilization-grade inheritance substrate—had still held a trace of usable energy.
Not much. Just enough for one meaningful interaction.
His smart-brain had responded then.
Weakly, but unmistakably.
That had been the moment he made the first real decision of his second life.
He had not used that last reserve to ask pointless questions or indulge emotional panic.
He had used it to force-transfer the most immediately useful packet of information he could think of: the Maple Town branch data, early magical-civilization structures, localized progression logic, and the specific worldbuilding skeleton he needed to turn Arcane Realm from a product into a trap.
That was why he knew so much.
Not because memory alone was perfect.
Because, in the first hours after his return, he had burned the Archive's fading reserve to move a clean data block into his own brain.
After that, the reserve had collapsed.
The smart-brain went dark with it.
So did the carrier core.
Since then, both had been sleeping.
He drummed his fingers lightly on the desk and frowned.
That sleep was not permanent.
The problem was energy.
A present-day human body could not sustain a smart-brain directly, not without killing the host or frying the interface.
He needed an external path first, a way to wake the system without forcing it to draw through his baseline biology.
And the Archive had only one early-stage fuel source available to him.
Faith.
Even in the future, the term had annoyed scientists.
It sounded religious. Superstitious. Primitive.
Unfortunately, reality did not care what vocabulary people found embarrassing.
Faith-power existed.
It could be measured indirectly, routed conditionally, stored briefly, and applied to certain inheritance-class systems even though no complete scientific model had ever explained why collective belief, trust, attention, and emotional projection could condense into a usable form of energy under the right circumstances.
Magic civilizations had made peace with that fact long before humanity did.
Humanity, being humanity, had spent decades insisting the phenomenon either had to be fake or would eventually be renamed into something respectable.
It never became more respectable.
It just became useful.
Ethan looked at the Arcane Realm login assets and felt his mouth flatten.
"How do I get faith-power in a hurry?"
He already knew part of the answer.
Attention.
Recognition.
Projection.
The more real, larger-than-life, and symbolically loaded an image became inside a synthetic world, the easier it was to pull those emotional traces into a structured channel.
Running outside and starting a cult would technically work, but prison sounded inconvenient.
Becoming publicly famous could work too, but not yet.
Right now he was still too small.
If he walked onto a stage today and started making grand pronouncements, people would treat him like another internet lunatic with a superiority complex.
Which, to be fair, would not be entirely inaccurate.
That left the game.
Arcane Realm already had player attention.
It already had emotional investment.
It already had a growing population willing to project awe, irritation, hope, obsession, and status into its symbols.
If he wanted faith-power, then the fastest available route was to give that projection a target.
He sat there for another three seconds.
Then he said aloud, "Well. Dignity had a short life."
He grabbed his phone.
The first problem was that his camera was bad.
The second problem was that his photography skills were worse.
The test shots looked like a man getting ready to lose a custody battle over fictional dragons.
"No," Ethan said, deleting them. "Absolutely not."
An hour later he was outside.
Money solved many things.
Not elegantly, but quickly.
He found a high-end costume shop that mostly served convention crowds, indie productions, and rich people with hobbies too specific to explain at normal dinners.
After ten thousand dollars and a level of urgency the staff found both alarming and inspiring, he walked out several hours later with a custom dark-mage outfit that looked theatrical enough to work and expensive enough to avoid looking fake.
From there he went straight to a photography studio with excellent reviews and a staff young enough not to question strange clients as long as strange clients tipped well.
The session was absurd.
He knew it.
They knew it.
No one said it aloud because he was paying by the hour.
A stylist adjusted the collar twice.
Someone recommended a more dramatic angle.
A photographer told him to look 'like he'd survived something impossible.'
That part, at least, required no acting.
By the end of the shoot, Ethan had spent another ten thousand dollars and most of his remaining patience.
He went home, ate, slept, and let the photos finish processing.
The next afternoon the final edits came through.
He reviewed them in silence.
One stood above the others immediately.
In it, he wore a black-and-crimson robe cut like something between a battle garment and ceremonial armor.
The pointed mage hat looked worn instead of comedic, the edges distressed just enough to suggest history instead of cosplay.
Glowing runic embroidery climbed the sleeves and collar.
In his palm floated a suspended golden sphere wrapped in layered sigils and drifting light.
The background was a composited battlefield.
Armored soldiers.
Beast hordes.
Smoke.
A dragon shadow crossing a torn sky.
It was shameless.
It was melodramatic.
It was exactly what he needed.
He imported the final asset into the client, animated the smallest motions by hand, and set it as the new login screen.
No text.
No explanation.
Just an image large enough to occupy the emotional center of the frame.
Yes.
He had put his own face into Arcane Realm as a war-worn archmage overseeing a magical apocalypse.
Yes.
It was pathetic.
No, he did not care.
If embarrassment could be converted into usable energy, then this entire era would have been a fusion economy.
He was still adjusting the glow timing around the golden sphere when the front door opened.
"Boss, I'm back."
Leo's voice carried down the hall.
A second later he appeared at the office entrance with a large delivery box in one arm and the mildly offended expression of a man whose job had somehow become half corporate operations and half unpaid goods handling.
"There was a package on the porch," Leo said. "I brought it in."
He set the box down, crossed to the water dispenser, and emptied a cup in one long gulp.
His suit was still clean, but not as clean as it had been that morning.
The collar had loosened. One sleeve was lightly creased.
His day had clearly been spent dealing with institutions staffed by people who hated momentum.
Ethan glanced at him. "Why are you back again?"
Leo lowered the cup and stared.
For two full seconds he said nothing.
Then he took a breath.
"I work here."
"That does sound familiar."
Leo ignored that. It was either ignore it or commit a felony.
"I finished the registration," he said. "The company is legally formed. The business accounts are open. I called in a favor on the game-operations side, and the remaining approvals should clear today. I can pick up the final documents tomorrow morning."
Ethan's eyes lifted fully from the monitor.
That mattered.
Not emotionally.
Structurally.
A real shell. Real accounts. Real approvals. Real legal existence.
The company had just crossed another threshold.
"Good," he said.
Leo waited.
That was it.
Just one word.
He had spent the whole day arguing with clerks, nudging filings, leaning on old contacts, opening accounts, correcting forms Ethan had almost certainly never intended to read, and carrying the whole mess over the finish line, and the response he got was good.
He almost laughed.
Instead he said, "That's all?"
Ethan looked back at the screen. "Did something fail?"
"No."
"Then good seems accurate."
Leo closed his eyes briefly.
There were men who inspired loyalty.
Men who inspired fear.
Men who inspired the urge to hit them with office furniture.
Ethan somehow managed all three in rotating sequence.
At last Leo said, "You really are impossible."
Ethan clicked save on the updated login asset and let the animation begin its slow loop.
On-screen, the golden sphere turned in his digital palm while false runes burned softly in the dark.
"No," he said. "Just busy."
Then, after a beat, he added, "Tomorrow, once you bring the documents back, we start hiring."
Leo stopped in the doorway.
That was new.
That was progress.
He glanced back once, saw the login screen, and froze.
There was Ethan.
In dark robes.
Looking like the patron saint of manipulative game developers.
Leo pointed at the monitor. "I'm not asking."
"That's wise."
Leo left before he could say something career ending.
Ethan stayed where he was.
The login screen looped.
The package waited unopened.
The company was legal now.
The game was growing.
The smart-brain was still asleep.
Not for long.
He looked at the archmage version of himself, expressionless beneath a ruined black hat, and clicked the final confirm button.
Faith had to start somewhere.