Alex sat at his desk with the biology textbook open in front of him.
The apartment was quiet except for the distant sound of sirens outside. He'd been reading for twenty minutes now and something felt different.
Very different.
The words on the page weren't just being read. They were being absorbed. Stored. Filed away in his mind like data being saved to a hard drive.
He flipped back three pages without thinking. Closed his eyes. And recited the entire section word for word in his head.
Cellular respiration.
The Krebs cycle. Electron transport chain. Every diagram. Every chemical formula.
Every footnote.
Perfect recall.
"What the hell?"
Alex opened his eyes and stared at his hands. They were shaking slightly. Not from fear. From excitement.
He grabbed his phone and pulled up a random Wikipedia article. Quantum mechanics. Dense. Complex. Full of equations he'd never understood before.
He read it once. Just once.
Then he closed the browser and reconstructed the entire article in his mind. Every concept. Every equation. The mathematical relationships between them suddenly made sense in a way they never had before.
His heart started racing.
'This isn't normal. This is way beyond normal study habits or good memory.'
Alex stood up and paced the small apartment. His mind was moving fast now. Analyzing. Connecting dots. He'd read about transmigration in web novels.
The protagonist always got something. A system. A cheat ability. Some kind of advantage.
He'd thought he got nothing.
But what if this was it?
"Enhanced cognition," he whispered. "The transmigration didn't give me superpowers. It gave me a better brain."
He needed to test this properly. Needed to know the limits.
The chemistry textbook sat on his bed. It was thick. Over six hundred pages of organic chemistry that the previous Alex had barely touched. The midterm exam covered the first two hundred pages.
Alex checked the time. 11:47 PM.
"Let's see what I can do."
He sat down with the textbook and started reading. Not skimming. Actually reading every word, every diagram, every practice problem.
And his mind just absorbed it all.
The periodic table and its patterns made immediate sense. Chemical bonding principles clicked into place like puzzle pieces.
Reaction mechanisms that used to confuse him now seemed obvious.
An hour passed. He'd covered eighty pages.
Two hours. One hundred and sixty pages.
By 3 AM, he'd finished the entire section needed for the exam.
All two hundred pages. And when he closed the book and tested himself, he could recall approximately ninety-five percent of the content.
Not just recall. Actually understand it. His brain was making connections between concepts automatically.
Seeing patterns. Recognizing how different chemical reactions related to each other.
Alex leaned back against the wall and laughed. It came out slightly hysterical.
"I'm a genius. Holy shit, I'm actually a genius now."
But even as he said it, he knew that wasn't quite right. This wasn't superhuman intelligence.
He wasn't suddenly smarter than Einstein or Tony Stark. His raw processing power was still human.
It was just peak human. The absolute maximum the human brain was capable of.
Perfect memory. Rapid pattern recognition. Enhanced learning speed. The ability to make intuitive leaps between related concepts.
Some people were born with this kind of mind. Most weren't. Alex had won the transmigration lottery.
'This is my cheat,' he thought. 'This is how I survive in a universe full of gods and monsters. My mind is my weapon.'
The implications started cascading through his thoughts.
With this kind of cognitive ability, he could learn anything. Master any skill given enough time and practice. More importantly, he could leverage his knowledge of future events with perfect precision.
No more vague memories of "I think Tony Stark announces something around this time." He could research exact dates. Exact stock prices.
Exact technological developments.
He could read every business book ever written and retain all of it. Study investment strategies and apply them flawlessly. Learn programming languages in weeks instead of years.
But there was a problem.
Alex looked down at his malnourished body. At his shaking hands. At the empty ramen cups in the trash.
His mind was incredible now. But his body was falling apart.
Enhanced cognition didn't fix malnutrition. It didn't heal the damage from weeks of barely eating. It didn't make his weak muscles stronger or his exhausted system more resilient.
If anything, it made him more aware of how badly he was failing physically. His brain was running calculations about caloric deficits and muscle atrophy and how many days until his body started shutting down from stress.
About two weeks. Maybe three if he was lucky.
'I need to monetize this ability immediately. Not over months. Not through slow, steady progress. Right now. Before this body gives out.'
Alex grabbed his broken phone and the legal pad. His mind was already forming a plan. Multiple plans. Backup plans for the backup plans.
His knowledge of future technology was valuable. But just posting vague predictions on a blog wouldn't generate real money fast enough.
He needed credibility. Needed to reach people who had capital to invest.
Tech investors. Venture capitalists. The people who would pay real money for accurate predictions about which technologies would dominate the next decade.
He opened his laptop. The screen flickered but worked well enough. Started searching.
"Tech investors 2010. Active venture capital firms. Technology blogs accepting submissions."
His enhanced mind processed the search results at incredible speed. Cross-referenced names. Identified patterns in investment portfolios. Figured out which investors were most likely to listen to bold predictions.
TechCrunch. The biggest technology blog in 2010. They published articles about emerging trends. About startup culture. About the future of technology.
And they paid writers.
Alex found their submission guidelines. Read through them in thirty seconds. Understood exactly what kind of content they wanted and how to pitch it.
His fingers started moving across the keyboard.
He would write an article. Not just any article. A manifesto about the smartphone revolution that was about to explode across the world.
He'd detail exactly why touchscreens would replace physical keyboards. Why app ecosystems would become the dominant software model. Why mobile internet would change everything.
And he'd make it so compelling, so detailed, so obviously correct that TechCrunch would have to publish it.
Then he'd leverage that publication into more writing gigs. Into consulting work. Into speaking fees.
Money.
Real money.
'First priority: establish credibility as a tech futurist. Second priority: convert that credibility into immediate income. Third priority: use that income to stabilize my physical health before I collapse.'
Alex looked at the clock.
3:17 AM.
He had maybe four hours before he needed to sleep. Four hours to write the most important article of his life.
His enhanced mind was already organizing the structure. Introduction. Thesis. Supporting evidence. Conclusion. Specific predictions with rough timelines.
"Let's change my life," Alex said to the empty apartment.
And he started writing.
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