Riven's room felt smaller now.
Cramped. Chaotic. Full of things that used to excite him—wires, old chips, dusty books. Now they just looked… primitive.
He sat cross-legged in front of his busted desktop. His fingers hovered over the keyboard.
Let's see what I can really do.
The code flowed like water.
No hesitation. No errors. Every command perfect. He wasn't thinking—he was executing.
Thirty minutes later, he'd built a custom AI assistant from scratch. Real-time voice processing, adaptive learning, zero latency.
His junk CPU shouldn't have been able to handle it.
But it did.
Because he rewrote the firmware on the fly.
"Okay," he whispered. "That's insane."
His hands trembled. Not from fear—from adrenaline.
He scanned the room again.
So much junk. So much potential.
He grabbed a dead drone from the corner, stripped it down in seconds. Rebuilt the power core with a modded capacitor from an old vape battery. Rewired the flight chip.
In under ten minutes, the drone hovered.
Silently. Perfectly.
"No way," he whispered, grinning.
Before today, that would've taken him a week.
Now?
It felt like child's play.
"I can build anything."
And he wasn't just faster—he was getting faster by the minute.
Riven Kade didn't just learn 10x quicker.
He evolved.
And he had plans.
Big ones.