The order processed. His account balance dropped to nearly zero. Just the few hundred dollars he'd kept liquid for living expenses.
James closed the laptop and walked away.
Nothing to do now but wait.
---
The waiting was harder than he expected.
James maintained his training schedule to keep himself from obsessing over the stock price. Five AM cardio. Seven AM strength training. Nine AM breakfast and research. Eleven AM at Hoshi's dojo for martial arts.
The dojo was humbling.
James had been training for three months now. He knew the basics of several martial arts from books and videos. His enhanced intellect let him understand the theory perfectly. But theory and practice were completely different things.
He got destroyed in sparring. Repeatedly.
On Wednesday, he was paired against Marcus, a seventeen-year-old who'd been training at the dojo for four years. Marcus was good. Not exceptional, just solidly trained.
He made James look like a complete beginner.
The match started with both of them in neutral stances. Marcus moved first, a quick step-in with a straight punch. James tried to parry but was too slow.
The punch clipped his shoulder, throwing him off balance.
Marcus followed up immediately. Swept James's lead leg. James went down hard on the mat.
"Again," Hoshi called from the side.
They reset. James tried a different approach this time, moving laterally to create angles. Marcus cut him off easily, threw him with a textbook Osoto Gari. James hit the mat again.
"Again."
Reset. James attempted a takedown. Marcus sprawled, took his back, sank in a rear-naked choke. James tapped before it was fully locked in.
"Again."
Reset. Same result. Marcus was in complete control.
After the fifth throw, Hoshi stopped the session.
"James, you're thinking too much," the instructor said. "Analysis doesn't replace instinct."
James stood up, breathing hard. His ego was bruised worse than his body. "Then how do I build instinct faster?"
"You don't. Instinct takes years."
Years he didn't have.
James bowed to Marcus and headed to the changing room. He showered, got dressed, and left the dojo feeling frustrated. The gap between knowledge and ability was wider than he'd thought.
That evening, he researched more about accelerated learning. Found studies on mental rehearsal, sleep learning, and spaced repetition.
Found a Soviet training manual from the 1970s that discussed using electrical stimulation to enhance motor learning in Olympic athletes.
The Neural Interface idea kept growing in his mind. Taking shape. Becoming more detailed.
He spent hours refining the design. The system would need to track full-body movement in three dimensions. Would need to map that movement to virtual avatars with perfect physics.
Would need an AI sophisticated enough to analyze technique in real time and identify micro-corrections.
The AI was the hard part.
In 1995, AI was primitive compared to what James knew from his original world. But his enhanced intellect could potentially bridge that gap. Could write algorithms that shouldn't exist yet. Could create pattern recognition systems years ahead of current technology.
If the stock paid off, he'd have the capital to try.
...
Two weeks after James made his investment, his phone alert went off during a research session at the library.
He grabbed his phone. Stock alert. Helix Genomics.
Previous close: three dollars and twelve cents.
Current price: eight dollars and forty-seven cents.
James's heart hammered. He opened his laptop, pulled up financial news.
The headline jumped out at him.
"Helix Genomics Announces Promising Results in Phase 2 Gene Therapy Trials"
The article was posted an hour ago. The company's gene therapy treatment had shown significant efficacy in human trials. Patients with muscular dystrophy were showing measurable improvement.
The results exceeded expectations. Phase 3 trials were being fast-tracked.
The stock had jumped nearly three times its value in a single day.
Read till chapter 13 on Patreon at marvelstark