My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Chapter 749: The Most Valuable Item In The Science Community

Liam’s friends’ jaws were still hanging.

Unlike the rest of the world, which was struggling to understand how Liam had done any of it, they at least had a frame for it. They knew about the cultivation universe and the magic universe. They knew Liam was something far beyond an ordinary person.

But knowing and seeing were two very different things, and even with everything they knew, they still found the whole thing impossible to fully wrap their heads around.

Matt opened his mouth, tried to form a sentence, and got stuck somewhere in the first word. He tried again. Nothing came out. He simply closed his mouth and stared.

"He..." Alex started, then gave up too.

"Went into Jupiter," Kristopher finished for him, faintly.

Liam glanced back at them and saw the state they were in — all of them frozen, brains clearly working overtime and getting nowhere. He chuckled to himself. Even his friends, who knew, looked like they’d been hit over the head.

’Guess I overdid it a little,’ he thought, though he didn’t regret it.

He turned toward Elise, but really toward the livestream, and spoke.

"Since Matt spoiled a few things today," he said, with a small smile, "I’ll make it up to everyone. The metallic hydrogen I brought back —" he lifted the gleaming, softly glowing mass in his hand, still held stable in its shell of pressure "— I’ll give it away. To one random person, chosen after this stream ends."

He let that land for a moment.

Then he looked at Elise. "You can end it now."

Elise blinked, still half-dazed, and nodded slowly. "...Right. Yeah."

She lifted her hand to the broadcast controls, and with one small tap, the stream went dark.

And around the world, screens went black — and behind them, minds went blank.

People sat staring at the dead feed, unmoving, unable to process the last ninety seconds. A man had gone into Jupiter without protection and come back unharmed, unmarked, unbothered, clothes still pressed. And then, as though it were an afterthought, as though it were nothing at all, that same man had said he would give away the keepsake he’d carried out of the most dangerous place in the solar system.

To a random person.

It took the world a moment to understand what that even meant. And when the science community understood, it very nearly lost its collective mind.

Because to a physicist, to a materials scientist, to anyone who had ever studied the fundamental nature of matter, metallic hydrogen were two of the most tantalizing words in existence.

For a hundred years, it had been a ghost. Theorized in the 1930s. Chased ever since. Metallic hydrogen was hydrogen crushed so hard that it stopped being a gas and became a metal — and it was, on paper, one of the most extraordinary substances the universe could produce.

A theoretical room-temperature superconductor, a material that could carry electricity with zero loss, which would rewrite power grids, computing, transport, everything electrical humanity had ever built.

A theoretical super-propellant, packing energy density beyond any fuel ever made, capable of transforming rocketry. It was, quite possibly, a miracle material and no one had ever held a stable, usable piece of it.

Because that was the cruel part. Every attempt to make it had failed or barely succeeded for fractions of a second, in microscopic amounts, inside diamond anvil cells squeezing harder than the center of the Earth, at costs that ran into fortunes for a speck too small to see.

And even when a lab claimed success, the sample would vanish the instant the pressure released, bursting back into ordinary gas. Metallic hydrogen did not want to exist outside of crushing pressure. It could not be kept. That was the wall the entire field had been beating its head against for a century.

And Liam Scott had just held up a fistful of it, which was still stable and glowing. Held together in the open, on the surface of a moon, in his bare hand.

That should not have been possible. Not acquiring it — though scooping it from the depths of Jupiter was itself beyond anything — but the keeping of it. He was holding a substance that physics said should have burst into gas the moment it left the planet, and it simply... hadn’t. It sat there in his palm, patient and impossible, kept in its metal state by nothing anyone could see.

In laboratories and universities and research institutes across the world, scientists who had watched the stream sat in stunned silence, and then erupted.

Group chats and private channels lit up all at once. Physicists who had spent their entire careers chasing metallic hydrogen — some of them the very people who had squeezed specks of it into brief existence and watched them die — stared at the frozen final frame of the stream and could not breathe.

The value of the thing was, quite literally, incalculable. A stable, macroscopic sample of metallic hydrogen wasn’t valuable the way a diamond or a painting was valuable — it was valuable the way the answer to a hundred-year question was valuable, the way an entire branch of future technology was valuable.

Whoever received it would hold in their hands the single most scientifically precious object on the planet, a physical piece of a theory that had haunted physics for a century, worth more than any building, any company, any hoard of gold.

And Liam was going to give it to a random person. Not a government. Not a research institution. Not the highest bidder. A random person, plucked from the crowd, as casually as one might hand out a party favor.

The panic that followed was a special kind of panic, one the world had not quite felt before. Because now there was a specific, singular, priceless object in play — and everyone wanted it.

Governments wanted it, for the strategic and scientific edge it would give whoever controlled it. Corporations wanted it, understanding that a stable superconductor was worth more than any industry they owned. Universities and research bodies wanted it with a desperate, career-defining hunger, knowing that whoever held the sample held the future of physics.

But none of them could get it. Because Liam hadn’t put it up for sale, or for grant, or for negotiation. He’d put it up for chance for one random person. And there was no lever in the world that let the powerful buy their way into a random draw held by a man who could not be reached, could not be pressured, and could not be bought.