Read Novel Full Chapter 750: A Different Kind Of Horror
Chapter 750: A Different Kind Of Horror
Liam looked at his friends, waiting for them to recover from the shock. And it took a while.
He didn’t rush them. He simply stood there, hands in his pockets, letting them work through it at their own pace. Ten minutes passed. Then fifteen. They still hadn’t fully come back to themselves, and honestly, he understood. He’d have needed time too, probably, if their positions were reversed.
Matt was the first to find his voice, though it came out in pieces.
"Liam," he said. "How— how strong are you? Actually. I need like a number or something."
Before Liam could answer, Yanxia spoke up from where she was still perched against his side, entirely unbothered by the question, the diamond still clutched in her small fist.
"Papa is stronger than me," she said simply. "And I’m an Earth Immortal."
The group went quiet in a completely different way than before. Then, almost as one, they took a slow, cold breath.
They knew what an Earth Immortal was. Months of digging, of asking Lucy questions, of piecing together whatever they could about the cultivation universe, had given them a rough map of that world’s power structure — the tiers, the realms, the terrifying scale of what "strong" actually meant on the other side of the veil.
An Earth Immortal was not a small thing. It was a being who had already left behind everything a normal person could imagine, a level where a single stray thought could probably level a mountain range if the person behind it wasn’t careful.
And Yanxia — sweet, sulky, koala-clinging Yanxia, who complained about being bored and hogged Liam’s side like a pillow — was one.
And Liam was *stronger than her.*
"...Okay," Kristopher said faintly. "Okay. That’s — okay."
"I take back the question," Matt said. "I don’t want the number anymore. I changed my mind. Please don’t tell me the number."
Liam chuckled at their expressions, equal parts amused and a little sympathetic. He’d forgotten, sometimes, how much of a leap it was for them — normal people, brilliant and resourceful in their own right, standing next to something that had stopped being human by any measure a while ago.
"Come on," he said gently, nodding toward the shuttle. "Let’s get you all back inside for now."
They nodded, slow and dazed, and shuffled toward the shuttle without much more conversation, still visibly working through the same three or four thoughts on an endless loop. Liam watched them go, and privately suspected it would be a while before any of them felt normal again. He was right. It would take days.
While they recovered, he had something else to attend to.
He drew the small containment field around the metallic hydrogen tighter for a moment, studying it. If he was going to give this away, it needed to actually last — not sit stable only because he was personally holding a field of pressure around it every second.
"I’ll be back shortly," he told his friends, who nodded without really looking at him, still lost in their own heads.
Then he vanished from the spot and appeared in the fab section of the industrial base, standing right in front of the molecular assembler. And he got to work.
He set the small, gleaming mass of metallic hydrogen into the assembler’s containment chamber and pulled up the interface.
He quickly worked out the atomic structure, the binding energy required, the precise lock that would keep the hydrogen locked into its metallic phase without him having to spend a single further thought maintaining it.
After he was done, the assembler read the sample down to the individual proton, mapping every atom, every bond, the exact crushing arrangement Jupiter’s own pressure had forced onto it
. Liam watched the data scroll past and made some adjustments, here and there, refining the lock structure.
It was delicate work. Metallic hydrogen did not want to be tamed. Left alone, it would revert in an instant, snapping back to ordinary gas and dispersing before anyone could blink.
What he was building instead was a kind of scaffold at the atomic level, a structure woven directly into the sample itself that would hold the metallic bonds in place, requiring no outside force to keep it from collapsing.
***
Down on Earth, the reaction had already outrun anything the world had seen that day.
In boardrooms across a dozen countries, in the middle of the night in some, phones had started ringing the instant Liam said the words random person.
Executives were pulled out of bed. Department heads were dragged from dinners. Within the hour, emergency meetings were being convened by institutions that hadn’t called an emergency meeting in years — some that had never called one at all.
At a materials science institute in Germany, the director stood at the head of a table full of bleary-eyed senior researchers at two in the morning, a paused frame of the livestream projected on the wall behind her — Liam’s hand, the faint metallic gleam nestled in his palm.
"So, let’s be clear about what we are looking at," she said. "That is, if it is what it appears to be, the single most valuable scientific object on the planet. Not the most valuable object we own. The most valuable object that exists. There is no comparison for it. There is no market price, because there has never been a second one to compare it to."
"If it’s real," someone said.
"It’s real," she said flatly. "You saw the same feed I did. The color, the way it held its shape, the way it behaved. That’s not a prop. Nobody fakes that texture." She looked around the table. "The question isn’t whether it’s real. The question is how we get it."
That same conversation, in one form or another, was happening in a hundred rooms at once.
At a semiconductor firm in Taiwan, engineers argued over projected valuations that kept climbing every time someone opened their mouth — a stable superconducting material meant chips that ran without resistive loss, meant computing power multiplied beyond anything on any roadmap, meant obsoleting every rival overnight if they could reverse-engineer even a fragment of the sample’s structure. Someone floated a number. Someone else laughed at how low it was and floated a higher one. By the end of the call, the figures being discussed had stopped sounding like money and started sounding like a joke, except no one at the table was joking.
At an energy conglomerate in the Gulf, the conversation turned toward propulsion and power storage — a fuel source of that density could rewrite the economics of everything they’d built their empire on, and the people in that room understood that whoever controlled the sample controlled the next century of energy technology. They didn’t discuss whether to pursue it. They discussed how much they were willing to spend chasing a thing that wasn’t even for sale.
And that was the maddening part, repeated in boardroom after boardroom, briefing after briefing. It wasn’t for sale. There was no bid to place, no offer to make, no auction to win. Liam had said he would give the literal treasure to a random person, and there was no lever anywhere in the world that turned a billion-dollar offer into an advantage against a random draw held by a man nobody could reach, threaten, or buy.
Some of them tried anyway. Statements were drafted — official, dignified, utterly useless — expressing interest in "responsibly acquiring and studying" the sample "for the benefit of humanity," should the eventual recipient wish to discuss a transfer. A dozen institutions posted some version of the same message within the hour, each one carefully worded, each one essentially begging.
A few, less dignified, went further. Recruitment notices quietly circulated inside two or three of the largest research bodies — not for new hires, but for anyone on staff who happened to have watched the livestream live, on the theory, however thin, that being present for the draw might matter, or that Nova’s process for choosing might somehow favor viewers with a scientific background.
It was a desperate, grasping idea, and everyone who proposed it knew it, and they proposed it anyway, because the alternative was doing nothing at all while the most important discovery in a century of physics floated somewhere out there, about to land on a stranger who might not even understand what they were holding.
That thought — what if they don’t even know what they have — ran through every single one of those meetings, and it terrified the scientists more than anything else.
A physicist would understand the sample’s value instantly. A random person, plucked from a global audience of billions, might not. They might sell it for a fraction of its worth to the first company that showed up with a checkbook. They might lose it, drop it, hand it to a child to play with. An object worth more than entire nations’ research budgets, resting in the hands of someone with no idea what they held, was a nightmare scenario every institution in the room could picture with sickening clarity, and not one of them could do a single thing to prevent it.
So the meetings ran long into the night across a dozen time zones, full of numbers that made no sense against an item that had no price, full of strategies aimed at a process none of them understood or controlled, full of the same bitter, familiar helplessness that had defined every dealing with Nova from the very beginning.
They could offer anything. It wouldn’t matter. The only thing that would decide who received the most valuable object on Earth was luck — plain, indifferent, unbuyable luck — and for the first time in the history of any of these institutions, the smartest, richest, most powerful people in the room found themselves reduced to hoping.