Lucian told himself he wasn't going to obsess over it.
Submitting All Eyes to Freewrld had felt bold in the moment, almost reckless. But the days that followed were worse than the submission itself. Every few hours he found himself logging back in, pretending he was just browsing, pretending he wasn't checking for validation.
On the fourth night, he gave up pretending.
"Just check and get it over with," he muttered.
He logged in.
The interface loaded slowly, its dark minimal design unchanged. For a brief second, nothing seemed different. Then the notification indicator blinked.
His level had increased.
New sections unlocked.
Scripts. Tools. Restricted archives.
Lucian leaned back in his chair, staring at the screen. A slow grin spread across his face.
"Well… shit."
He clicked into the tools section, expecting variety. What he didn't expect was refinement.
The repository was brutally clean. No flashy banners. No ego-driven usernames screaming for attention. Just structured uploads sorted by category and version history.
He scrolled.
Upload dates caught his attention first.
Months ago.
A year ago.
Two years ago.
"These have been here this whole time?" he whispered.
He downloaded a networking script at random. Opened it.
And stopped.
The code wasn't just good.
It was disciplined.
Functions were segmented with precision. Variables carried intent. Error handling was subtle but complete. Nothing wasted. Nothing ornamental. It wasn't trying to impress anyone. It was built to work.
Lucian felt something shift inside him.
Not insecurity.
Excitement.
"So that's the level."
He opened another script. Then another.
A WiFi utility ran leaner than his equivalent. Smarter process management. Cleaner architecture. Then he found it — a monitoring tool not identical to All Eyes, but close enough to feel personal.
It automated reports.
Generated summaries.
Parsed logs without manual tweaking.
His version worked. It did its job. But it needed him. It required manual configuration and oversight.
This one didn't.
Lucian leaned forward, elbows on his desk, eyes reflecting the code.
"Okay," he said softly. "I see where I stand."
He didn't sulk.
He studied.
For hours, he read line by line. Traced logic. Understood flow. He wasn't copying yet. He was dissecting.
Eventually, he turned toward the wall behind his desk.
Sticky notes covered it—early architecture diagrams, flow maps, scribbled optimizations he had once been proud of. Now they looked amateur.
Lucian stared at them in silence.
Then he began tearing them down.
"Outdated."
Rip.
"Overbuilt."
Rip.
"Messy as hell."
Within minutes, the wall was empty.
He didn't try to "fix" All Eyes.
He didn't try to improve his old scripts.
He abandoned them.
If he was going to level up, he wasn't patching old foundations.
He was rebuilding.
The next morning he bought more sticky notes. Thicker stacks. Brighter colors. Enough to cover the entire wall again.
He started fresh.
New architecture sketches.
Cleaner modular breakdowns.
Better separation of function layers.
He began creating new tools inspired directly by what he saw on Freewrld. Some were experiments. Some were deliberate reconstructions of scripts he had studied. A few, in the beginning, were near copies—rewritten manually so he could internalize structure.
He didn't pretend otherwise.
"If I'm going to copy," he muttered one night, "I'm copying to understand."
Some builds failed.
Some ran beautifully.
He realized something important in the process: he wasn't equally strong everywhere. System-level intricacies frustrated him. Certain hardware-oriented tasks felt tedious.
But networking?
That was instinct.
Traffic filtering, pattern recognition, packet logic — those flowed naturally. When he worked on networking tools, everything aligned. His thoughts felt sharper. Cleaner.
Days blurred together.
Then the warning appeared.
Storage almost full.
Lucian frowned at the screen. "No way."
He checked manually. Multiple builds of new tools. Copied experiments. Raw log captures. Network datasets. Version branches. He deleted old unused scraps without hesitation.
Still nearly full.
"You've got to be kidding me."
The next day he spent his saved pocket money on second-hand external hard drives. He didn't hesitate. He didn't debate the cost.
Storage wasn't an expense.
It was fuel.
By the time he returned home, he had two terabytes of external capacity.
It solved the problem.
For a week.
Then the irritation started.
Plug in one drive.
Unmount another.
Search manually.
Reconnect mid-task.
"This is fucking stupid," he muttered, staring at the mess of cables.
He remembered something he had read months ago—building simple local storage servers using repurposed hardware. Centralized access. Encrypted partitions. Automated handling.
His eyes slowly moved toward a box in the corner.
The Nox Kit.
He had bought it out of curiosity—more ambition than direction at the time. Inside were development components, including Arduino Zero boards he hadn't properly used.
Lucian walked over and opened the box.
"Guess you're not collecting dust anymore."
He didn't want more storage.
He wanted control.
The next few days were brutal.
Documentation after documentation. Videos that explained half the story and skipped the other half. Forum posts contradicting each other. Configuration attempts that broke things in new and creative ways.
He slammed his palm lightly against his forehead one night.
"Why does fixing one thing spawn three more problems?"
Permission conflicts.
Mount instability.
Drive detection inconsistencies.
He repurposed components from the Nox Kit, experimenting with detection handling and control flow. The first attempts were unstable. The second were worse.
Three weeks passed in fragments.
Pendrives proved unreliable in the setup. Hard drives stabilized better under revised configurations. Slowly, painfully, the system began behaving predictably.
Then one evening, everything held.
Mounted storage remained accessible across his local network. Encrypted partitions functioned without throwing errors. Data transfers stayed consistent.
Lucian stared at the screen.
No crashes.
No warnings.
Just quiet stability.
"I did it," he said under his breath.
He leaned back in his chair and let out a slow exhale. Not triumph. Not ego.
Satisfaction.
He stood up and surveyed his room.
The desk was chaos.
Cables twisted together. Adapters scattered. The Nox Kit open. Four pendrives tossed uselessly aside. Two external hard drives humming steadily, activity lights blinking like patient heartbeats.
The wall behind him was full again—
structured, intentional, alive.
He picked up one of the abandoned pendrives and rolled it between his fingers.
"So what the hell do I do with you now?"
The room was silent except for the low hum of spinning disks.
Lucian looked back at his newly built storage system.
It wasn't elegant.
It wasn't perfect.
But it was his.
Built through frustration.
Built through understanding.
Built because he refused to stay at the level he thought was enough.
He set the pendrive down slowly.
If this was what he could build just for storage…
What would happen when he started building something that mattered?
The hard drives hummed quietly in the dark.
And Lucian began clearing space on his desk.
Not to clean.
To prepare.