The Forge Society was barely two weeks old, and already it felt like something sacred.
Li Wei arrived at the workshop every morning before the sun rose, carrying bags of components and old engineering manuals he'd borrowed—or rather, permanently borrowed—from the university archive. Xu Yanyue came later with new tools and her usual sarcasm. Lan Jie stayed silent, always focused, but her pace was relentless.
ForgeOS had reached its first milestone: stable shell boot with memory management and basic hardware recognition. It wasn't pretty, but it worked.
Now, they faced the real bottleneck: hardware.
A Stone Wall
The computers they'd pieced together ran on recycled CPUs and frankensteined memory sticks. Li Wei had stretched their lifespan with predictive patching and micro-throttling, but it was like patching a rusted pipe with duct tape.
"We need custom silicon," he said, hunched over a whiteboard. "Eventually. Something we can control, from substrate to signal."
Xu Yanyue frowned. "Do you know how expensive that is?"
Li Wei looked at her. "I do. That's why we'll start with what we can make."
She folded her arms. "You're telling me you're going to make microchips... from scratch?"
"No," Li Wei said calmly. "Not microchips. Not yet. Just logic modules. Hand-etched, simple instruction set processors. Enough to control low-level devices and run microfunctions."
Lan Jie looked up. "Like FPGA blocks?"
"Exactly," he nodded. "But homemade."
The Clay Furnace
They started with the basics: substrates.
Li Wei sourced old glass panels from discarded CRT TVs and microwave oven parts. Using a modified toaster oven and sanded quartz, he created a rough process for etching simple conductive paths.
"Baking silicon in a clay furnace?" Xu Yanyue asked with a raised eyebrow.
"It's more like training for the real thing," Li Wei said. "Material science isn't about miracles—it's about refining dirt until it behaves like thought."
They crushed leftover copper wire into fine powder, mixed it with binder, and screen-printed crude circuit patterns. The resolution was terrible, but it was enough to make blinking signal paths on test boards.
It wasn't beautiful. But it was theirs.
Cost of Vision
Every experiment drained their budget. The $300 Li Wei had left from his part-time tutoring job vanished within days—half of it went into a proper etching kit, the rest on a silent inverter generator.
Xu Yanyue dipped into her personal savings—another $200.
"I want it back," she muttered.
"You'll get ten times that," Li Wei promised.
Lan Jie offered no money, but brought an old lathe her uncle had discarded. With a little maintenance, they could now cut and shape custom casings for their boards.
But it wasn't enough.
"We need more capital," Li Wei said during a late-night planning session. "At least $2,000 to scale basic production and order high-purity copper sheets."
Xu Yanyue raised a brow. "And how exactly do you plan to earn that? Sell your blood?"
"No," he smirked. "We're going to sell software."
ForgeShell Lite
Li Wei repackaged a lightweight version of their operating shell — stripped-down, fast, and designed to run on low-spec machines like internet cafés and budget school systems.
It didn't look like much, but it booted in five seconds, used minimal memory, and came with a clean file explorer that put bloated legacy systems to shame.
They called it ForgeShell Lite.
"This could replace kiosk OS setups," Lan Jie observed. "Or be used for older embedded systems."
"Exactly," Li Wei nodded. "We sell it cheap to computer repair shops and service centers. They install it on junked machines, sell them again with 'custom OS'—we get a cut."
Yanyue smirked. "So you're not just a mad scientist. You're a capitalist."
Li Wei just smiled. "One needs fuel to keep the forge burning."
First Flame
They set up a small website hosted through a free local domain provider. No ads. Just one clean page:
"ForgeShell Lite — Fast, Free, Future-Ready. Built for the forgotten machines of the world. Download now. Commercial license: $10/unit."
To seed downloads, they walked into used PC shops around the district, offering to demo ForgeShell Lite on-site. Some owners dismissed them immediately. Others let them try, then chuckled at the results.
But one shopkeeper, a wiry man named Mr. Tao, tried it on his old test rig—and it booted faster than any system he'd used.
"$10 per unit?" he asked. "You get me 20 licenses, I'll sell them preloaded."
They shook on it.
It wasn't glamorous, but by the end of the week, they made $180. Then $260. Then $430.
The forge had fire.
Fracture and Firelight
But fire draws attention.
One night, a pair of older boys from another university IT group showed up uninvited. They'd heard rumors of a "garage OS" and wanted to see for themselves.
"You coded this?" one asked, scrolling through the shell interface on a demo rig.
"Yes," Li Wei said evenly.
"No way. This is just a Linux reskin."
"Check the kernel flags. It's clean."
They didn't believe him. But before they left, one of them snapped a picture of the whiteboard covered in notes.
"Be careful," Xu Yanyue said after they were gone. "If this gets out…"
"They'll copy us," Li Wei said. "But they won't understand what they're copying."
He erased the whiteboard and rewrote only one word in its center:
Independence.