The universe is built on constants. The speed of light. The gravitational constant. Planck's length. These are the rigid steel beams that hold the architecture of reality together, ensuring that when you put a coffee mug down on a table, it doesn't phase through the wood or explode into a supernova.
For twenty-six years, I, Shigu, was just another variable within those constants. I was a creature of average height, average weight, and unremarkable ambition, floating through the gray haze of a corporate data entry job in downtown Tokyo. My life was a series of linear progressions: work a year, get a two percent raise. Exercise for a month, lose half a kilogram. Save for a decade, buy a cramped apartment.
Linearity is safe. Linearity is understandable.
But the universe, in a moment of cosmic glitch or divine prank, decided to change my equation. It introduced an exponent.
It started on a Tuesday.
I remember the day because the air conditioning in the office was broken, and the humidity was clinging to my shirt like a second, sweaty skin. I was staring at a spreadsheet, row 4,021, debating whether to get another coffee or simply bang my head against the desk until I passed out.
Then, it appeared.
There was no fanfare. No thunderclap, no angelic choir, no radioactive spider bite. Just a semi-transparent blue text box hovering in the upper left quadrant of my vision. It looked like a cheap user interface from a mobile game.
**[Daily Growth System Initialized.]**
**[Current Status: Baseline.]**
**[Effect: All physical attributes will increase by 10% every 24 hours.]**
I blinked. I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my palms. I looked again. The text remained, stubborn and serene, overlaying the face of my irritated supervisor, Mr. Tanaka, who was currently marching toward my cubicle.
"Shigu-san," Tanaka barked, his voice grating. " The quarterly reports. Why are they not in my inbox?"
I looked at him. I looked at the blue box.
"I'm working on them," I said. My voice sounded normal. My body felt normal.
"Work faster," Tanaka snapped, tapping my desk with a rolled-up magazine before walking away.
At the time, I thought I was hallucinating. A brain tumor, perhaps? A stroke induced by boredom? I ignored it. I went home, ate a convenience store bento, and went to sleep.
When I woke up the next morning, the blue text had changed.
**[Day 2.]**
**[Growth Applied. Current Multiplier: 1.1x.]**
I sat up in bed. I felt... good. Not incredible, just well-rested. Lighter. I swung my legs out of bed and stood up. I stretched, and a satisfying pop echoed from my spine. On a whim, I dropped to the floor to do a pushup. I usually struggled to hit twenty before my arms turned to jelly.
I did fifty without breaking a sweat. I stopped not because I was tired, but because I was confused.
"Ten percent," I whispered to the empty room. "It's just ten percent."
Ten percent doesn't sound like much. In the world of finance, a ten percent return is a good year. In the world of retail, it's a mediocre discount. In the context of a human body, it's barely noticeable. If you can lift 50 kilograms, the next day you can lift 55. Big deal.
I went to work. I typed faster. I walked with a bit more bounce. I felt like I'd had three energy drinks but without the jitters.
Day 3: **1.21x**.
Day 4: **1.33x**.
Day 5: **1.46x**.
By the end of the first week, I was roughly twice as strong, twice as fast, and twice as durable as I had been on Tuesday. I accidentally crushed a ceramic cup in the breakroom when I tightened my grip. I apologized, blamed it on a hairline fracture in the mug, and cleaned up the shards. The shards sliced my thumb, but the skin didn't break. The ceramic crumbled against my flesh like dry biscuit.
That was the first flutter of fear.
I sat at my desk that afternoon and opened a blank spreadsheet. I didn't do the quarterly reports. I did the math of godhood.
I typed `1` in cell A1.
In cell A2, I typed `=A1*1.1`.
Then I dragged the corner of the cell down.
I watched the numbers cascade.
Day 7: ~1.94. (Double strength).
Day 14: ~3.79.
Day 30: ~17.44.
I stared at the screen. By the end of the month, I would be seventeen times stronger than an average human. If I could bench press 60kg at the start, I would be pressing over a ton.
But the spreadsheet didn't stop there. The nature of compound interest is that it looks like a gentle slope until it suddenly becomes a vertical wall.
Day 60: ~304.
Day 100: ~13,780.
My breath hitched. In three months, I would be thirteen thousand times stronger than a human being.
I dragged the cursor down to Day 365.
The spreadsheet threw an error. The number was too large for the cell width. I expanded it.
`1.28 x 10^15`.
One quadrillion.
In one year, I would be a quadrillion times stronger than I was today.
I closed the laptop. My hands were shaking, or at least, I thought they were. I looked down at my hand resting on the cheap particle-board desk. I tried to stop the trembling by pressing my palm flat.
*CRACK.*
The desk didn't just break; it detonated. My hand went through the wood, the metal supports, and the computer tower mounted underneath, burying itself into the concrete floor below. The sound was like a gunshot.
Silence swept across the office. Heads popped up over cubicle walls like frightened meerkats.
Mr. Tanaka came running. "Shigu! What on earth did you—"
He stopped when he saw the hole. He saw my hand, buried wrist-deep in the foundation of the building.
I slowly pulled my hand out. There was no dust on it. No scratches. My skin looked polished, pristine.
"I quit," I said.
***
Fast forward three years.
Time is a funny thing. When you are waiting for a bus, five minutes is an eternity. When you are becoming a god, three years is a blink.
I don't live in Tokyo anymore. I couldn't. Cities are made of glass and paper. They are fragile constructs designed for fragile creatures. When you weigh the same as a normal man but possess the density and potential energy of a collapsing star, you cannot walk on sidewalks. You cannot open doorknobs. You cannot hold a lover.
I live in the Atacama Desert now, in a facility I built myself. "Built" is a generous word. I hollowed out a mountain range by flicking my fingers and let the debris settle into walls.
It is quiet here. The stars are bright.
I sat at a table made of pure tungsten—a gift from a government that pretends I don't exist but desperately hopes I remain happy. On the table sat a small velvet box.
Inside was a raw diamond. It was the size of a walnut, uncut, rough, and beautiful. It was the hardest natural substance on Earth. The Mohs scale stops at 10. This stone was the pinnacle of earthly durability.
I wanted to test my control.
That was the struggle now. Not growing stronger—that happened automatically, every morning at 6:00 AM, a fresh layer of divinity painted over my soul—but *restraining* it.
My power was no longer measured in numbers. The spreadsheet I had made three years ago was a joke. A quadrillion times stronger? That was year one.
Year two was the exponential of the exponential.
Year three... well.
The blue status screen still appeared every morning, but the numbers had become abstract.
**[Day 1,095.]**
**[Multiplier: ∞ (approaching absolute limit of local reality).]**
I looked at the diamond.
"Just a tap," I whispered. My voice didn't carry far. I had learned to speak by barely moving my vocal cords, effectively whispering. If I shouted, the shockwave would flatten the nearest town, which was fortunately three hundred miles away.
I extended my index finger. It looked like a normal finger. Pale, slender, with a neatly trimmed nail. It didn't look like a weapon that could poke a hole through the moon.
I lowered my fingertip toward the diamond. I focused everything. Every ounce of willpower, every scrap of mental discipline I had cultivated over three years of meditation and isolation. I visualized a feather landing on water. I visualized a mother touching a newborn's cheek.
*Be gentle. Be nothing.*
My finger made contact with the rough surface of the stone.
There was no resistance.
It didn't crack. It didn't shatter into large pieces.
There was a high-pitched *hiss* as the binding energy of the carbon atoms was instantly overwhelmed. The diamond didn't break; it atomized. It turned into a puff of gray dust that swirled around my finger like smoke.
The force of my "gentle touch" continued downward. It went through the tungsten table—a block of metal half a meter thick—melting and warping it as if I had plunged a hot knife into butter. The force traveled into the bedrock of the mountain floor.
A tremor rumbled through the Andes.
I pulled my hand back and sighed. The sigh created a gust of wind that scattered the diamond dust and stripped the paint off the far wall.
"Failed again," I muttered.
I slumped back into my chair. The chair groaned—a specially reinforced titanium alloy frame—but held.
This was my life. A world made of wet tissue paper.
I looked at my hand. It was perfect. Indestructible. I had walked through lava flows just to feel warmth. I had sat at the bottom of the Marianas Trench just to feel something akin to a hug from the pressure. But even the ocean felt like a light breeze now.
I was safe. I was immortal. I was the apex predator of the cosmos.
And I was so bored I wanted to scream.
But I couldn't scream. Screaming would cause earthquakes.
I picked up a tablet from the table. It was a custom-made device, encased in a block of rubber and steel, with a screen made of sapphire glass. I had to use a stylus to operate it because my fingers didn't register on the capacitive touch, and even if they did, I'd crush the glass.
I scrolled through the news.
*War in Eastern Europe.*
*Energy Crisis Deepens.*
*New Pandemic Strain Identified.*
Tragedies. Horrors. For the people living them, these were the end of times. For me? They were ants fighting over a crumb.
I could end the war in an afternoon. I could fly there—simply by jumping and ignoring gravity—and catch every bullet, dismantle every tank with my bare hands. I could generate enough electricity by running on a treadmill to power the planet for a century. I could isolate the virus by seeing it with my naked eye—my vision having surpassed the microscopic threshold months ago—and plucking it out of existence.
But I didn't.
Why?
Because I did that in Year 2.
I remembered the "Hero Phase." I had donned a mask. I had stopped a tsunami in Indonesia by punching the wave. The result? The shockwave from my punch saved the coast from the water but shattered every window in a fifty-mile radius and burst the eardrums of ten thousand people.
I had tried to stop a bank robbery in New York. I flicked a bullet out of the air. The deflected bullet traveled at mach 50, circled the globe, and destroyed a satellite.
Every time I tried to help, the collateral damage of my existence made things worse. I was an elephant trying to perform heart surgery. The scale was wrong. I didn't belong here anymore. I was a 3D being trapped in a 2D sketch.
I tossed the tablet onto the table. It slid through the groove I had melted earlier.
"1.1," I said. "Just 1.1."
The math was irrefutable. Tomorrow, I would be ten percent stronger than today. The gap between me and the world would widen. The loneliness would deepen.
I stood up and walked to the massive opening that served as my window. The desert stretched out, red and gold under the setting sun.
I needed a distraction. I needed a challenge. But the world had none to give. I had hunted the greatest beasts, climbed the highest peaks, and weathered the fiercest storms. They were all... boring.
"If the world cannot provide entertainment," I said to the empty wind, "then I must build a new world."
The idea had been gestating for months. A way to interact without destroying. A way to feel the thrill of struggle again, even if vicariously.
I couldn't reduce my power. The System didn't have an 'off' switch. The compound interest only went one way. Up.
But perhaps... perhaps I could raise the variables around me.
I looked at my hands. The hands that could crush diamonds into dust. If I couldn't be weak again, I had to make everyone else strong. Not just strong—monstrously strong. Strong enough to survive me. Strong enough to play with me.
A smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. It was the first genuine expression I had worn in months.
I turned back to the tungsten table and the ruined tablet.
"System," I said.
The blue box appeared instantly. It was the only thing in the universe that didn't break when I looked at it.
**[Listening.]**
"I want to spend some points," I said.
The System had a secondary function I had largely ignored. In addition to the passive growth, I accumulated 'Evolutionary Potential'—a byproduct of my overflowing energy. I had hoardes of it.
"Show me the interface for External Empowerment."
**[Accessing 'Order of Truth' Protocols...]**
**[Warning: Granting power to lower lifeforms may result in planetary instability.]**
"I'm counting on it," I said dryly.
"Initiate Project: VR-01. Mask the energy signature as a data stream. Target... everyone. Gamers. Outcasts. The hungry. The bored."
I sat down, careful not to shatter the chair.
"Let's play a game."
The sun dipped below the horizon, plunging the desert into darkness. But in my eyes, a new light was kindling. It wasn't the light of justice, or heroism. It was the manic, desperate gleam of a god looking for a toy that wouldn't break.
My power increased without limits. It was time the consequences did, too.