Chapter 16
Fifty points.
A measly 50 OP stood between me and the next stage of development.
I could, of course, take the path of least resistance.
The garage was stuffed with materials, and I could easily throw together another useless but system-recognized craft.
But something inside me, the part that had just tasted the cold, sticky fear of a real hunt, rebelled against that idea.
Build garbage for points while supernatural predators were circling?
No.
That was not the path of a survivor.
That was the path of a future corpse.
I needed a weapon.
Something that would give me a real edge if they came back.
And they would come back.
The classical weaknesses of vampires in this world were well-documented enough to work with, and that gave me room to move.
Thoughts churned rapidly.
A garlic aerosol bomb?
Too situational and non-lethal.
An automatic crossbow with aspen bolts?
Effective in principle, but requiring a level of accuracy I did not yet have.
Silver bullets?
Those required a firearm, which meant a whole separate headache with New York's licensing laws.
Then a sharp image surfaced from an old film about a brutal, half-breed vampire hunter working in the dark.
Ultraviolet light.
Powerful, concentrated ultraviolet radiation that turned vampires to ash.
That was it.
Elegant, technological, and targeted directly at their primary vulnerability.
Decision made.
For this kind of problem, I did not begrudge spending one of my three remaining Intellect Potions.
The world narrowed, stripping away everything irrelevant.
For the next hour I was not just a man with a problem.
I was a high-speed search algorithm tearing through terabytes of data across engineering forums, physics papers, and electronic component catalogs.
Connections that an ordinary brain might take weeks to form were building themselves in fractions of a second.
A blueprint began to take shape on the laptop screen: not something from the system, but mine.
I called it the UV Projector "Daylight" in my mind, though a blunter and more honest name had already rooted itself in my gut: the Vampire Ash-Maker.
Now it was just a matter of turning the idea into metal and plastic.
Radiation Source: At the heart of the device had to be several high-power UVC LED chips, twenty watts each.
Industrial-grade monsters, the kind normally used in water sterilization systems.
I found a supplier online and handed over three hundred dollars for the best available units without negotiating.
You do not cut corners on survival hardware.
Power Supply: Standard batteries would choke immediately.
These LEDs demanded not just voltage but enormous current output.
The solution came from the world of racing drones and radio-controlled cars: several lithium-polymer battery packs for high-performance models, soldered together into a single block capable of delivering the sustained current the array required.
Another hundred and fifty dollars gone.
Cooling System: This was the genuine engineering challenge.
Up to seventy percent of the energy running through a UVC LED at that power level does not become light.
It becomes heat, and not the manageable kind.
Without active cooling, my expensive chips would burn out in three seconds flat.
A passive heatsink was not going to cut it.
The Potion-boosted brain, however, had already found an answer: clean, ruthless, and elegant.
I built a combined thermal management system, mounting a thermoelectric cooler, a Peltier element, directly onto the copper substrate of the LED matrix.
The cold side pressed against the matrix, pulling heat away from the chips.
The hot side drove that heat into a massive copper heatsink salvaged from a decommissioned server rack, with a high-speed fan mounted on top.
When powered on, the whole assembly produced a low, predatory hum that I found quietly satisfying.
For the optical element, I had to spend on a fused quartz lens, since ordinary glass simply would not transmit the harsh UVC spectrum.
Everything went into the gutted housing of a heavy-duty construction work light.
Assembled on the garage workbench, the finished device was unsettling even to me.
It looked like a prop from a science fiction action film: bulky, utilitarian, and specifically lethal to one particular category of intelligent being.
I added a control board with a large power button and a mode switch between continuous beam and disorienting strobe, then stepped back and looked at what I had made.
I had done this without blueprints.
Without the system's guidance.
I had defined the problem myself, found the solution myself, and built it myself.
I was growing as a creator.
And the system, fortunately, appeared to agree.
[Simple engineered construction "UV Projector" created. Complexity: Minimal. Received +50 OP!]
The sting of "Minimal" was familiar by now.
For a system that treated the Extremis formula as a standard recipe, my creations were nothing more than a child's sandcastles while the adults built nuclear reactors.
I had made my peace with that, more or less.
The projector went into inventory, my first real trump card against creatures of the night.
And with a balance of 250 OP, I could finally move to the most important item on the agenda.
Time to spend some points.
The system window opened obediently.
Technologies tab, Arcanum section: the path that was becoming almost familiar.
Eight disciplines looked back at me, each promising a different kind of power for a different price.
Which first: the Muscle Stimulator or the Protective Field Generator?
For contrast, I decided to start with what was supposedly the more ambitious of the two.
I navigated to the Electricity discipline, selected the blueprint, and mentally confirmed the expenditure.
100 OP poured into the recipe.
I immediately regretted it.
If the Intellect Potion was a stream of crystal-clear knowledge flowing into the mind, this was an information tsunami made of broken glass and molten metal.
A storm of data, alien concepts, fractal geometries, and physical laws that had not yet been discovered in this world tore through my brain.
The headache was not just severe.
It was crushing.
"Hell..." I rasped into the empty garage when the room stopped spinning and my vision cleared.
An initial assessment of the technology, now permanently burned into my memory, produced not excitement but a quiet, settled horror.
Protective Field Generator.
Arcanum Classification: Artifact, Spatial Manipulation Device.
A compact unit the size of a cigarette case, capable of projecting a unidirectional force barrier one meter in diameter.
The shield stopped most kinetic threats, from pistol rounds to shrapnel.
It sounded like the perfect personal defense tool.
But the component list, adapted by the system to the realities of the Marvel world, made me want to sit down on the floor and just quietly despair.
The device consisted of three modules, and each one was its own private engineering nightmare.
Power Module: Primary power source, a compact strontium radioisotope thermoelectric generator, an RTG, the kind used in deep-space probes and ultra-premium medical implants.
Not something you picked up at a supply store.
This was restricted technology, and accessing it legitimately would require at minimum a fabricated identity credible enough to pass as a senior nuclear physicist on a classified project.
And that was just the power source.
The energy storage component called for a bank of solid-state graphene supercapacitors whose construction required vacuum-environment nanomaterial processing equipment.
That could not be assembled in a garage, and whether it could be purchased commercially in any form was a question I could not yet answer.
Field Emitter: The focusing element was a synthetic sapphire single-crystal doped with evenly distributed nanoparticles of Vibranium.
I glanced at the box of ore sitting in inventory.
I had the metal.
What I did not have was a high-temperature crystal growth furnace or the equipment for nanodispersive deposition of the hardest metal on the planet.
The distance between owning a block of marble and being able to sculpt the David from it.
The projection grid, a lattice of tungsten microfilaments, was almost simple by comparison.
Theoretically orderable.
Expensive and specialized, but not impossible.
Unlike the nuclear battery.
Control Module: This was where the system finished the job.
The frequency stabilizer required a resonant tuning fork precision-machined from Uru.
I thought of my half-kilogram ingot.
I did not even know how to scratch Uru, let alone shape it to micron tolerances.
The only component in this module that did not induce immediate despair was the control chip, a custom microprocessor, which appeared to be the system's technological substitute for some magical artifact from the original recipe.
Weak consolation against everything else on the list.
And then there was assembly.
The construction requirements included a vacuum deposition chamber for conductor sputtering, laser calibration to micron accuracy, and an ISO Class 3 cleanroom.
Without a fully equipped high-tech laboratory worth several million dollars, this blueprint was simply a beautiful and completely unusable picture.
This was a case where the system had handed me a schematic for a starship while neglecting to mention that a planetary factory was required to build it.
By the time I developed to the level where those resources were accessible, the need for a device this basic would probably have disappeared entirely.
The Forge's gacha was unpredictable.
What would it give me next?
Intuitive component substitution?
Access to Kamar-Taj's library?
Ready-made tactical armor pulled from another universe?
The Protective Field Generator went into the deepest drawer of the mental filing cabinet.
One hundred OP, invested in knowledge I would not be able to apply for a very long time.
Frustrating, but genuinely instructive.
One hundred and fifty OP remaining.
Fingers mentally crossed, I fed them into the Muscle Stimulator.
A new wave of information, another bout of headache, but this time the experience was completely different.
Structured.
The feeling of a complex problem that was nonetheless solvable.
I exhaled with such relief that the room tilted slightly.
Unlike the generator, this was within reach.
Theoretically, with the right components assembled today, I could brew the first few doses before nightfall, and recover the spent OP with interest.
Muscle Stimulator.
Arcanum Classification: Alchemic Drug, Temporary Bio-Amplifier.
A single-use injector that urgently pushes muscular strength, speed, and endurance to peak human performance, and in some parameters meaningfully beyond it.
It did not rewrite DNA the way the Super-Soldier Serum did.
It operated at the cellular level instead.
The active substance, clusters of unstable ozone, bonded to ATP in the muscle tissue and triggered what the recipe described as a kind of nitrogen ignition: forcing cells to release energy ten to fifteen times more intensely than normal.
High-end doping, but without the crash afterward.
The palladium stabilizer in the formula functioned as a precise thermal dissipator, removing metabolic byproducts and preventing cellular burnout.
Duration of effect: fifteen to twenty minutes.
A perfect window for a fight or a hard escape.
The recipe was genuinely non-trivial.
After the monstrous generator blueprint, though, it read like instructions from a children's chemistry kit.
Time to source the components.
I put together a mental list while simultaneously working through supplier options online.
Base, Active Substance: Synthetic testosterone.
The main problem.
Prescription-only in pharmacies, and not available everywhere.
Workarounds would be needed.
I flagged this one for the end.
Stabilizer: Colloidal palladium solution.
I had the raw ore, but why complicate things unnecessarily?
A ready-made laboratory solution was available from chemical suppliers.
A hundred-milliliter vial ran approximately two hundred dollars.
Straightforward.
Binding Agent: Purified bovine serum albumin, BSA.
Also uncomplicated.
Commercial labs sold it as a powder.
Another two hundred dollars for a quantity that would last through dozens of batches.
Catalyst: Titanium mesh, fine grade, 100 mesh.
A fifteen-by-fifteen-centimeter sheet, sufficient for a significant number of doses, ran about a hundred dollars from industrial filtration suppliers.
Solvent: Isopropyl alcohol.
Already on the shelf.
The shape of a plan was emerging.
Most components were within reach.
The testosterone was the bottleneck.
The recipe permitted substituting its precursor, diethylamine, but effectiveness dropped noticeably.
Not acceptable.
I needed the original, at maximum potency.
There were people in this city with the right equipment and the right instincts for a request framed correctly.
I just needed to find the right one.
I got back to the garage as dusk was beginning to settle over Brooklyn.
The workbench was lined with the day's acquisitions in neat rows: vials of colloidal palladium, a container of snow-white albumin powder, coils of titanium mesh.
Close to a thousand dollars in reagents, a portion of it spent on accelerating certain lab suppliers who had a habit of moving slowly.
Enough material here for dozens of doses of the Stimulator.
All of it meaningless without the one missing ingredient.
It was only six in the evening, but it felt as though an entire week had passed since morning.
Thursday had been so relentlessly eventful that it could have supplied a month of ordinary life.
Standing in front of the last and hardest obstacle, I felt the fatigue and the creeping headache arrive together.
The testosterone problem.
Ideally I needed to resolve it as quickly as possible.
But how?
Buying it through legitimate channels was impossible.
Taking it directly from a pharmacy or a warehouse?
With inventory, the mechanics were trivial: reach out, will the target container into a cell, walk away.
But that move would light up a beacon visible to every powerful organization in the city.
I had already attracted vampires.
Adding a pharmaceutical corporation's security apparatus on top of that was not appealing.
One option remained: synthesize it.
But that required equipment my garage simply did not have.
A gas chromatograph.
A high-pressure reaction vessel.
A centrifuge capable of separating isomers.
None of it was here.
But...
At that "but," my fingers stopped their restless drumming on the tabletop.
An idea formed.
Slippery, risky, morally questionable, and thoroughly tempting.
"What do I have to lose?" I muttered to no one in particular, and scrolled to the contact I had saved just a few hours earlier.
Parker, Peter.
I rewrote the opening message several times, searching for exactly the right tone: friendly but not fawning, genuinely enthusiastic but not unhinged.
"Peter, hey! It's John Thompson, we crossed paths at college today. Listen, I've run into a scientific problem, and Mary Jane mentioned you might be the smartest person she knows. Somehow I don't think she was exaggerating."
After sending it, a brief pang of conscience hit me.
I was going to use this kid.
His generosity and his brilliance, both of them, for my own ends.
I pushed the feeling down without ceremony.
My survival was at stake.
It was not personal.
It was necessity.
Four minutes of waiting felt longer than it should have.
Then the screen lit up.
"Hey. She's definitely exaggerating. What do you need?"
He bit.
Modest, responsive, exactly the right temperament.
I typed out the story I had already worked through in my head.
"I'm doing some DIY biohacking, I guess you'd call it. Trying to get a chlorella cell culture to do something interesting. I can send you a photo of my setup so you don't think I've lost my mind :)"
Without waiting for a reply, I sent the photo.
I had chosen the angle carefully: a microscope in the foreground, a couple of flasks filled with green-tinted water for atmosphere, a small centrifuge, and a row of labeled reagent jars.
It looked like the project of an earnest biology student with more ambition than budget.
Harmless.
Intriguing.
"Wow. That's a serious setup for a home project."
Good.
He was impressed.
Now for the substance of the problem, packaged in the right scientific framing.
"Thanks. But I've hit a wall. I need one specific reagent to stimulate cellular metabolism, and I can't source it in pure form through normal channels. Without it, the cells don't respond to the catalyst at all. It's a steroidal base, structurally similar to testosterone, but I need maximum isomeric purity, otherwise the whole culture collapses."
"So the issue is contamination in commercial-grade samples?"
He had walked himself straight to the right question.
He was already solving it in his head.
"Exactly. I've burned through three samples and a lot of money. And then I thought, you probably have access to a properly equipped lab. Equipment I can only dream about from here. Any chance you could help out a hobbyist? Synthesize a couple of milliliters of clean product. All costs are on me, reagents and your time both."
That last line was the pivot.
It reframed a dubious request as something partially transactional.
I held my breath.
If he said no, the theft option came back onto the table.
"Hmm. In theory, yeah, it's doable. Nothing too complicated. I'm going to be in the university lab late tonight after classes. Can you make it to the main NYU building?"
"You're an absolute lifesaver, seriously. Just say the word and I'll be there."
I leaned back in the chair and let out a long, slow breath.
It had worked.
Hook, line, and sinker.
The testosterone problem was effectively solved.
The plan was assembling itself: collect the base ingredient, brew the first doses of the Stimulator, recover the spent OP, and spin the gacha.
And then, somewhere after all of that, figure out what to actually do about the fanged problem currently sitting in inventory inside a black Land Cruiser.
What state were they in right now?
Complete stasis?
Or something more permanent?
I had no answer to that yet, and while I was still this exposed, thinking about it was premature.
I would check when I had something more reliable than a UV work light to back me up.
Ideally, once the vampire situation was resolved properly at the root, rather than just kept at arm's length with stimulants and improvised hardware.
The next couple of hours I spent half-watching garage engineering videos on YouTube, though my thoughts kept drifting back to the upcoming meeting.
Finally, a message arrived from Parker.
"I'm here. Lab 304."
Time to move.
I called a cab.
The Honda would stay in inventory.
No loose threads, no patterns.
Paranoia was a survivor's best friend.
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