Novel Full Chapter 614: Revelations (2)
Chapter 614: Revelations (2)
Liam placed the stone in the input section of the Molecular Assembler and the section sealed around it.
A holographic screen extended from the surface and he began typing — instructions, element target, purity threshold, output specifications — all of it visible on the livestream feed in real time.
The comment section reacted to each line as he typed it, people reading the specifications faster than he was entering them.
*he’s typing AU. that’s the chemical symbol for gold*
*95% purity. the rest will be trace elements from the source material*
*I studied chemistry for four years. I understood what he typed. I still don’t believe it.*
*the interface looks like nothing I’ve ever seen. what language is that*
*WAIT IS HE SPECIFYING THE ATOMIC ARRANGEMENT*
The machine registered the final instruction and began.
There was no dramatic noise, no visible heat, no light show. The Assembler simply worked with a low, steady hum. The holographic display above the input section showed activity in real time — atomic composition shifting, element percentages updating in continuous columns as the process ran.
Liam turned to the comment section while the machine worked.
He read through it at a speed that made clear he processed text faster than anyone watching, his eyes moving across the flood of incoming comments without hurry. When he found the thread he was looking for — people who had read the interface and were already working through the physics — he smiled.
"I know you’re all curious about the power consumption," he said. "It’s not much. Converting one kilogram of rock into a gold bar of equivalent weight consumes approximately 5 Gigawatts — which is insignificant once you’ve solved practical mass-to-energy conversion. Our reserves would last thousands of years at current operational levels. In the thousands of Petawatts, if I had to estimate."
The comment section registered the number and then detonated.
What Liam had just disclosed was staggering in a way that took a moment to fully arrive. Five gigawatts to transmute one kilogram of material was, by every current engineering standard, an insane amount of power delivered in seconds — roughly equivalent to five nuclear power plants running simultaneously for a single bar of gold. And he had called it insignificant.
The second figure was worse. The world currently consumed approximately 20 Terawatts of power annually across all usage — every factory, every vehicle, every city, every grid on Earth running simultaneously.
One Petawatt was 50,000 times that figure. Nova Technologies had just disclosed a reserve in the thousands of Petawatts, a supply exceeding total global energy consumption by a margin so large the comparison stopped being useful.
The comment section had understood this before he finished the sentence.
*5 gigawatts per kilogram and he called it not much*
*I’m an electrical engineer. 5 GW is what some entire countries run on. For ONE gold bar.*
*the world uses 20 terawatts total. he said thousands of petawatts like he was reading a grocery list*
*one petawatt is 50,000 times world energy consumption. THOUSANDS of petawatts.*
*every energy company on earth just became a historical artifact*
*OPEC is so not okay right now*
*he smiled when he said it doesn’t matter. HE SMILED.*
Liam glanced at the feed and liked what he saw. He was genuinely enjoying this — the particular satisfaction of watching the world’s assumptions about scarcity come apart in real time, one casual disclosure at a time.
He was lying about the reserve figure, of course. Thousands of Petawatts. Nova Technologies ran on zero-point energy — effectively infinite, tapped directly from the quantum vacuum that underpinned all of spacetime.
The mass-to-energy conversion system was a future product he was laying groundwork for and the Petawatt figure was a number large enough to be incomprehensible while still being technically finite. Both things served the moment.
He continued without breaking stride.
"Actually, this reminds me. We plan to release the mass-to-energy conversion technology as a consumer product. We’ve completed our testing and calculations. One kilogram of mass, fully converted, can power an average American household for approximately 2.3 million years. The product is part of Nova Technologies’ Phase 3 lineup and also part of our Global Restoration Project. More information on that will be released when it’s time."
He let it sit and the comment section took two full seconds — an eternity at its current speed — before it came apart completely.
The reason was arithmetic. The average American household consumed approximately 10,500 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year — the lights, the appliances, the heating, the cooling, everything running across twelve months.
One kilogram of mass, converted at full efficiency through practical mass-to-energy conversion, produced enough energy to sustain that household for 2.3 million years.
Not 2,300. Not 230,000.
2.3 million.
The entire recorded history of human civilization was approximately 6,000 years. One kilogram of mass — the weight of a standard water bottle sitting on a kitchen counter — contained enough energy to power a home for 383 times that entire span.
*2.3 MILLION YEARS*
*from ONE KILOGRAM*
*I weigh 70 kilograms. I am apparently a power station.*
*the whole history of human civilization is 6,000 years. one water bottle powers your house for 383 of those.*
*energy poverty. gone. utility bills. gone. oil wars. GONE.*
*he said it’s part of Phase 2 like there’s more after this*
*THERE’S MORE???*
*he mentioned a Global Restoration Project like it was a footnote*
*the casual devastation of this man is genuinely not human*
*OPEC is having a medical emergency at the moment. Somebody please check up on them*
*I know it’s still Tuesday but I feel like I’m in 4056!*
The Molecular Assembler completed its process while the comment section was still working through the energy figures. A soft tone indicated the output was ready and Liam moved to the finished products section, reached in, and lifted out a gold bar.
It caught the light immediately with the particular warmth of high-purity gold, dense in the hand, the surface smooth and unmarked. He turned it once, examining it, then looked at the holographic display.
"The process consumed 2.5 Gigawatts," he said. "About half my estimate. Not bad."
*NOT BAD. HE SAID NOT BAD.*
*half his estimate meaning 2.5 GW is rounding down*
*this man’s casual is everyone else’s impossible*
*2.5 gigawatts and it’s a rounding error to him I need to go outside*
He held the bar up to the camera for a moment — letting the feed capture its weight, its color, the complete ordinariness of a gold bar that had been an ordinary rock four minutes ago — then lowered it.
"I want to give this to someone," he said. He turned to face the comment section directly, watching the names blur past at a speed that would have been unreadable to anyone else. His eyes tracked the feed without effort, scanning without looking like he was scanning. "Let me find someone."
The comment section understood what was happening and responded accordingly.
*PICK ME*
*me me me me me*
*I will do anything*
*I have been on LucidNet since midnight I deserve this*
*PICK MEEEEE*
He watched the names blur past for another moment. Then: "StarfallNomad. That’s a gold bar for you. Drop your address with your Lucid AI assistant if you have a device. If not, send it to the LucidNet-facing email. It will be delivered within the hour after the stream ends."
The comment section went in three directions at once.
One thread was pure reaction to the giveaway — shock, celebration, the particular grief of someone who had been watching since midnight and had not been selected, which expressed itself mostly in caps lock.
The second thread noticed something the first had missed.
*wait. he’s giving away a gold bar on the same livestream where he just told us gold can be made from rocks*
*StarfallNomad is receiving a gold bar that is already worth less than it was an hour ago because of this livestream*
*the gold bar he’s giving away is crashing its own value in real time*
*the irony of this gift is immense*
*StarfallNomad is getting a bar of a metal whose price just fell off a cliff because of the man handing it to them*
*still worth more than anything I own though*
The third thread was doing math on who StarfallNomad was and whether anyone knew them, which was its own rapidly developing situation.
Liam set the gold bar down on the surface beside the Assembler and picked up the wood branch.
"Now the diamond," he said, placing the branch into the input section. The machine sealed and the holographic interface extended again. He began typing, reading the specifications aloud as he entered them.
"Twenty-four carats — that’s 4.8 grams by weight, for those keeping track. Perfectly flawless. No inclusions, no surface irregularities, structurally identical to a naturally formed stone." He read something on the display and paused. "The Assembler is telling me there’s enough carbon in this branch for several diamonds at this size. We’ll make one." He typed the final line. "And I’m going to make it green."
*GREEN*
*a green diamond*
*the rarest natural color for a diamond and he’s just choosing it like a paint swatch*
*green diamonds form from radiation exposure over millions of years. he typed it in.*
*the Hope Diamond energy but green and made from a stick*
*StarfallNomad got gold. someone is getting a green diamond. I can feel it.*
"We’re good to go," Liam said, and entered the final instruction.
The Assembler began again with the same low hum, the same real-time display updating as carbon atoms reorganized themselves from the lattice of wood fiber into the precise tetrahedral structure of diamond, layer by layer, the process running at a speed no natural formation had ever approached.