Super Rich: Starting the game by going back ten years to buy Bitcoin

At exactly 5:00 AM, my watch vibrated.

Li Yichen opened his eyes. The incandescent light bulb on the ceiling had never been turned off, and its glare made his eyelids twitch. As he sat up, his lumbar spine cracked twice, like he was stepping on dry twigs.

On the worktable next to the cot, a silver-gray device occupies an entire wall.

Nanoscale synthesis stage.

He spent three days disassembling and reassembling the monster from a ten-axis industrial machine tool—a machine with a precision of picometers, one trillionth of a meter. It is the only one of its kind on the entire planet.

Li Yichen took a swig of ice-cold black coffee, the bitter taste shooting from the back of his tongue to the back of his head, forcefully suppressing his drowsiness.

I walked to the control panel, sat down, and placed my fingers on the keyboard.

"Ling'er, start the first batch of synthesis procedures."

"Received. Culture medium temperature stable, magnetic field confinement ready, atomic deposition system online." Ling'er's voice was a half-tone lower than usual, without her usual joking tone. "First batch target—one million. Begin."

On the screen, a microscopic image magnified 100,000 times slowly unfolded.

On the surface of a specially made silicon-based culture plate, atoms are stacked layer by layer. The process is incredibly slow—to the naked eye, the image appears almost completely still, with only the counter in the lower right corner ticking.

A nanorobot, one-third the size of a red blood cell, contains over three hundred functional units: sensors, miniature propellers, molecular scalpels, and drug delivery modules—all housed in a shell invisible to the naked eye.

Build with blocks.

Use atoms to build blocks.

Li Yichen's job is to make manual fine-tuning at every critical point—the automatic program of the synthesis stage can run 95% of the process, but only human hands can handle the remaining 5% of precision.

I sat there for fourteen hours straight.

Ling'er forced a meal reminder three times in the middle of the meal. He ate two mouthfuls of cold rice and then just pressed the button to turn it off the third time.

The first batch of one million units rolled off the production line in the early hours of the following day.

Ling'er completed the function test, and all the data was green.

"Yield rate: 99.97%. Perfect."

Li Yichen didn't respond, but lay down on the cot and fell asleep in three seconds.

-

Day sixteen. Late at night.

The seventh batch of 100 million nanorobots is undergoing functional testing in a simulated human environment. Li Yichen leaned against the control panel, dozing off, his head slowly drooping.

"elder brother!"

Ling'er's voice exploded, like someone smashing a plate next to her ear.

Li Yichen instantly straightened up. On the screen, a glaring red warning box filled the entire panel.

"What's going on?"

"The seventh batch—has run into problems." Ling'er's holographic figure floated in front of the panel, her hands rapidly swiping through the data stream. Her usual carefree expression was gone. "In the simulated vascular environment test, about three percent of the individuals experienced clustering and adhesion. Multiple nanobots stuck together, forming microthrombi."

Microthrombi.

Injecting it into the human bloodstream and blocking capillaries—this is a very dangerous situation.

Li Yichen's drowsiness vanished in an instant. He pushed back his chair, stood up, and strode over to the microscopic monitoring terminal.

On the screen, in a simulated image of the inner wall of a blood vessel magnified 50,000 times, dozens of nanobots clustered together as if attracted by a magnet, blocking the center of the lumen.

"reason."

Ling'er's data panel refreshed rapidly, and the result was locked three seconds later.

"Biocompatible coating. Thickness deviation of 0.2 nanometers. Electrostatic adsorption occurs in a specific plasma protein environment, causing individuals to stick together."

0.2 nanometers.

One half-hundred-thousandth the diameter of a human hair.

That tiny deviation is enough to kill.

Li Yichen stared at the data for ten minutes. His face was expressionless. His breathing was steady. But the knuckles of his ten fingers, gripping the edge of the control panel, were turning bluish-white.

"Destroy them all."

Ling'er's holographic figure paused for a moment.

"Brother, seven batches in total. That's seven hundred million pieces. Three days' worth of effort."

"Destroy them all."

The voice was so flat it sounded like someone saying the weather was nice today.

Ling'er remained silent. On the control panel, the "waste disposal" program was activated, and the data of 700 million nanobots was highlighted in red and reset to zero.

Three days. All for nothing.

Li Yichen loosened his grip on the edge of the control panel, leaving ten faint white marks on his fingertips. He turned and walked to the sink, splashing ice water on his face, the chill seeping into his bones.

"Let's start over."

-

Four o'clock in the morning.

The coating parameters have been recalibrated. The film thickness control precision has been reduced from ±0.5 nanometers to ±0.1 nanometers.

The cost is that the synthesis speed is halved.

After Ling'er finished the new construction schedule calculation, her voice was slightly tense: "At the new speed, about five billion more are needed. The completion time may be a bit tight."

She tilted her head to look at him and added, "And this time, we can only succeed; there's no room for failure."

"Then we won't make any more mistakes."

"What if another scrapping of the same scale occurs—"

"No more."

Li Yichen interrupted her without even looking up; his fingers were already on the keyboard.

It's not confidence. It's what's left after all other options have been burned away.

-

Day .

My phone vibrated.

Li Yichen was hunched over the control panel, staring at the data, when he reached over with one hand to glance at it. Liu Guoliang.

connected.

The voice on the other end was very low, with an echo in the background—it sounded like a call was being made in a hospital corridor.

"Brother, I have something to tell you. Commander Xiao's kidney function dropped again this morning, and he's now on dialysis twice a day. His periods of wakefulness are getting shorter and shorter."

Li Yichen tightened his grip on his phone.

Liu Guoliang paused for a moment, and there was something indescribable in his voice.

"When he woke up today, he said something to me. He asked me to tell you—don't put too much pressure on yourself. It's okay if you fail; he has no regrets in his life."

The only sound in the workshop was the low hum of the synthesis table.

Two seconds of silence.

"Tell Commander Xiao that we won't fail." Li Yichen's voice was hoarse, but he enunciated each word clearly. "It's almost over."

"Is it nearing its end?"

"A maximum of eight days."

A long sigh of relief came from the other end of the phone. It was as if a stone that had been hanging for a long time had finally loosened a little.

"Okay. I'll tell him."

It paused for a moment.

"Brother, take care of yourself too. Don't end up getting yourself killed while trying to save Commander Xiao."

"Don't worry, Brother Liu, I'm tough."

It's over.

Li Yichen placed his phone face down on the table. He didn't move his hand, nor did he move himself.

Ling'er floated in mid-air, and for the first time ever, she didn't say anything.

three seconds.

He turned around and sat back down at the nanosynthesis table.

-

The last eight days.

Synthesis—Detection—Synthesis—Detection.

Same equipment, same operation, sixteen hours a day in a row. It's so tedious it can drive you crazy.

But—zero scrapping.

Five billion units. Yield rate: 99.98%.

-

On the morning of the twenty-eighth day.

The last batch of nanorobots slid off the synthesis stage and were sealed into a biological culture medium container.

A total of 5.3 billion.

Ling'er completed the entire self-inspection process. Four hundred and seventy-two procedures correspond to four hundred and seventy-two verification items—

All green.

Li Yichen stood in front of the silver-white nanomedical pod. It was two and a half meters long, shaped like a space hibernation pod from a science fiction movie, with a slightly curved canopy and indicator lights that shimmered with fine light.

It is as quiet as a work of art.

He stood in front of it for a full minute.

His eyes were bloodshot, his fingers had calluses, and his cheekbones were more prominent than they had been a month ago. But the line at the corner of his mouth had curved upwards slightly.

Ling'er floated on his shoulder, her voice soft.

"Brother, it's done."