Read Novel Full Chapter 688: Yet, Another Nova Night
Chapter 688: Yet, Another Nova Night
The latest update from Nova Technologies did far more than simply elevate the fifty thousand Lucid users into a post-screen era and push the global public’s desperation to a boiling point. Across the terrestrial corporate landscape, the announcement triggered a massive, asymmetric shockwave.
For global institutions, the Lucid Immersive and Camera update was a double-edged sword—offering unprecedented, frictionless economic reach to those who had already adapted, while handing immediate death sentences to those anchored to the old world.
Inside the headquarters of legacy consumer electronics and professional camera manufacturers, the mood was one of absolute, funereal despair.
For decades, the camera industry had survived on incremental, heavily marketed upgrades. Corporations spent billions of dollars on research and development to slightly improve sensor sizes, optical image stabilization, and battery life, charging thousands of dollars for heavy, fragile equipment.
In a single afternoon, the Lucid Camera rendered the entire global imaging market obsolete.
During an emergency board meeting at one of the world’s premier digital camera manufacturers in Tokyo, the chief technology officer pulled up the technical specifications of the Skittle-sized Lucid modules. He pointed out the 64K resolution, the aerodynamic gravitational anchoring, and the 168-hour continuous battery life. He bluntly informed the board that even if they liquidated their entire corporate valuation into pure R&D, they would not be able to replicate a fraction of that technology within the next century.
Action camera brands, professional cinematography equipment manufacturers, and smartphone giants realized simultaneously that they were no longer selling premium tech; they were selling heavy, low-resolution relics.
The devastation extended directly into the heart of the global entertainment industry.
In Hollywood and across the streaming empires of Silicon Valley, executives and legendary directors were forced to confront a terrifying new baseline for visual media. For a century, cinema had been defined by the frame—the director controlled exactly what the audience saw, composing a flat, two-dimensional window into a story.
Lucid Immersive destroyed the frame.
By allowing viewers to step inside the content, walk around the actors, and explore the spatial depth of the environment, traditional film and television suddenly felt flat, restrictive, and archaic. Studio executives realized that their multi-million-dollar green screen sets and traditional rendering pipelines were entirely incompatible with a medium where the viewer could simply turn their head and look behind the camera.
Worse still, the barrier to entry for this new, superior medium had dropped to zero. A nineteen-year-old independent creator using a Lucid device and Lucid Studio could now capture 64K dual-perspective footage, automatically generate a navigable 3D environment, and publish an immersive short film in an afternoon—entirely bypassing traditional production houses, casting agencies, and streaming distributors. The legacy gatekeepers of culture had been bypassed overnight.
Yet, while the hardware and entertainment sectors faced extinction, a different sector of the corporate world was experiencing a golden age of unprecedented profitability.
For the retail conglomerates, fashion houses, and consumer goods manufacturers who had already paid the ten-thousand-dollar activation fee for the Nova Technologies Institutional Terminal, the update was a miraculous windfall.
When the Institutional Terminal first launched, businesses understood it as a powerful backend management tool. What they had not realized was that Nova Technologies was quietly building flawless, high-fidelity 3D digital twins of their entire global catalogs in the background.
When Lucid Immersive went live, these early-adopter corporations woke up to find that they suddenly possessed fully rendered virtual flagship stores accessible to anyone on Earth.
A high-end apparel brand based in Paris watched its real-time analytics dashboard explode as thousands of avatars walked through its virtual doors. Because of the atomic-level fabric physics and the proportional avatar modeling, the company’s historical plague—the massive logistical and financial drain of online clothing returns due to poor sizing—dropped to absolute zero. Customers weren’t guessing their sizes; they were seeing the physical truth of the garment draped over their exact digital proportions.
Retailers realized they no longer needed to maintain vastly expensive physical storefronts in prime real estate districts like Manhattan, London, or Tokyo. They didn’t need to pay exorbitant commercial rent, hire floor staff, or manage localized physical inventory. They simply listed their products on Lucid Market, let consumers try them on virtually, and allowed Nova Express to fulfill the physical delivery from a centralized, low-cost warehouse in minutes.
The global economy was violently bifurcating. The institutions that relied on artificial friction, terrestrial limitations, and incremental upgrades were collapsing. Meanwhile, the institutions that integrated into Nova’s borderless, frictionless rails were discovering a scale of commerce that had previously been theoretically impossible.
Earth’s economy was no longer transitioning; it had fundamentally transformed. And looming over it all, both in the sky and on the calendar, the sixty-day deadline for LucidNet Finance grew closer by the hour.
***
Time passed pretty quickly and another week had gone by in the blink of an eye. And yet, another twelve volunteers were cleared and departed from the Lunar Base, bringing the total number of departed volunteers to sixty seven.
And finally, it was already another Nova Night. Everyone were waiting for the pre-order link to drop or for the pre-order page to refresh.
Everyone held their phone, laptop and PC close, ready to test just how much their fast fingers game has improved in the past one month.
At midnight, UTC, the pre-order link dropped and instantly, the ten thousand Lucid devices was sold out.
After the Lucid pre-order was completed, what followed next was the Lucid Air pre-order. Nova Technologies had made seven thousand units available for this month, meaning that out of the ten thousand new Lucid users, seven thousand of them would get one.
The Lucid Air pre-order ended just as it began. And with that, everyone started waiting for the transparency report. But while they waited, the rest of the world was subjected to the gloating and celebrating post of some of the new Lucid users.
The newly minted "Digital Aristocrats" did not hold back. Armed with the knowledge that their lives had just permanently detached from terrestrial limitations, their posts were a mixture of pure adrenaline, disbelief, and unabashed gloating.
*I’M SHAKING. I literally cannot feel my hands!* read a viral post from a user in Munich, attaching a screenshot of his confirmed order. *The payment cleared, and my Nova Express section immediately pinged. It says a drone is three minutes away. I am standing on my balcony in the freezing cold right now. I CAN LITERALLY SEE THE DRONE DROPPING THROUGH THE CLOUDS!*
*Lucky you, a someone replied, *It used to take seven days for it be delivered but now, it’s just a few minutes.*
*To the 6.8 billion of you still staring at flat screens: I am so, so sorry,* another user broadcasted, her post skyrocketing to the top of the trending feed. *I just unboxed it. I put the headset on two minutes ago. I am currently standing inside a virtual Prada showroom, and the atomic fabric physics are making me tear up. It scanned my body. I’m looking at myself in a silk dress, and it’s completely real. I am never taking this off. Goodbye, physical world.*
The users who had managed to secure the dual package—the headset and the Lucid Air—were even more ruthless in their celebration.
*Lucid AND Lucid Air secured!* a newly verified user in Seoul posted, attaching a picture of the sleek black router sitting on his desk. *I officially have twenty-four-hour days. I’m going to sleep in the real world and spend the next eight hours building my storefront in The Hub with zero ping. Just emailed my resignation to my terrestrial boss. Digital Aristocrat status achieved. See you on the other side, peasants.*
For the billions of standard users reading these posts on their smartphones and laptops, the gloating was pure psychological torture. The comment sections beneath the celebration posts became a chaotic mix of congratulations, intense jealousy, and bitter despair.
*I had a macro set up to click the microsecond the clock hit zero, and I still missed it,* a user in Toronto complained, receiving hundreds of thousands of sympathetic likes. *I have to spend another thirty days buying clothes that don’t fit and watching movies on a flat piece of glass like a caveman. I hate all of you.*
*My neighbor just got his delivered,* another user posted, uploading a grainy smartphone video from his window. The video showed a sleek Nova Express drone hovering silently over a suburban driveway, dropping a pristine black box before vanishing back into the night sky at hypersonic speed. *I watched him run out in his pajamas to grab it. I have never felt this much envy in my entire life.*
Within twenty minutes of the pre-order window closing, all ten thousand physical devices had been successfully delivered globally by the Nova Express fleet.
Across the world, ten thousand people slipped the sleek, immersive frames over their eyes for the very first time.
The divide between the 70,000 Lucid holders and the rest of humanity had never felt wider.
But as the initial wave of euphoric gloating began to settle into the digital ether, the global community’s attention naturally pivoted back to the center of the platform.
The global feed quieted down. The frantic refreshing of the timeline stopped. Across government intelligence agencies, corporate boardrooms, and billions of civilian screens, all eyes locked onto the official Nova Technologies account.
It was time for the Month 8 Transparency Report.