Sunday morning arrived with a clarity I hadn't felt before. The sun was bright, the sky clear, and my mind was already running through the plan I'd built before sleep took me.
I needed money. Not thousands. Hundreds of thousands.
The drones cost me almost everything I had. The guns, the components, the apartment, the lawyer—it all added up faster than I could replenish. And I had more expenses coming. The emancipation paperwork would need filing fees. The rent would come due again in three weeks. And the next phase of my plan—the one that involved biology, chemistry, and things I hadn't even begun to price out—would cost more than everything I'd spent so far combined.
I needed to sell faster.
---
I sat at my desk with my laptop and a stack of receipts. The plan came together in my head like a machine assembling itself.
I had receipts for high-end electronics. Phones, laptops, tablets, cameras, gaming systems. Each receipt could generate infinite copies of the item, as long as I had the original. But I'd been selling one item at a time, meeting buyers in person, doing cash transactions. It was slow. It was risky. It was inefficient.
The drones changed everything.
I pulled up the FreeTrade app and started listing. Not one item. Not ten. Hundreds.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. 70 percent of retail. Brand new, sealed.
Dell XPS Desktop. 70 percent off retail. Top specs.
Sony A7R IV Camera. 70 percent off. Professional grade.
iPad Pro. 70 percent off. Latest model.
MacBook Pro. 70 percent off.
I listed everything I had receipts for. Phones in every color, laptops in every configuration, cameras with lenses, gaming consoles with controllers. Each listing had a simple instruction: drone delivery within two hours. Cash only. No questions.
Within minutes, the messages started coming in.
---
The operation ran out of my apartment.
I set up a production line in the second bedroom. The printer was running constantly, spitting out copies of receipts. I'd take each copy, use Contractual Reclamation to create the item, and pack it in a plain cardboard box. The boxes stacked up around me, a mountain of electronics worth more than most people made in a year.
I had thirteen drones. Each one was capable of carrying up to five pounds—enough for a phone or a camera, but not for a laptop. I solved that by using multiple drones per delivery. Two drones carried a laptop between them. Three carried a desktop. Four carried a TV.
The routes were simple. A buyer would message me with their address. I'd program a flight path into the drone's navigation system—just coordinates, nothing traceable—and send it out. The drone would land at the delivery point, drop the package, and wait while the buyer put cash in a sealed bag I'd provided. Then it would fly back.
It worked perfectly.
The first delivery was a phone to a house across town. I watched through the drone's camera as it landed on the doorstep, its propellers whirring, its package held in a simple sling. A man opened the door, looked at the drone, looked at the package. He picked it up, opened it, checked the phone. He nodded, pulled out a thick envelope, and put it in the bag. The drone took off, bag in hand, and flew back to me.
Eight hundred dollars. In and out in fifteen minutes.
---
The problems started around the tenth delivery.
I was managing three drones simultaneously—one dropping off a laptop in the north end, one picking up payment for a tablet in the south, one hovering over a buyer's house waiting for them to come outside. The sensory input was manageable, the coordination smooth. My cognitive enhancement had come a long way since I first started controlling multiple drones.
But then a buyer didn't want to pay.
I watched through the camera as a man in his forties opened the box, pulled out the MacBook Pro, and closed the door. The drone was still sitting on his porch, the bag for payment empty on the ground beside it.
I waited. One minute. Two. Five.
He wasn't coming back.
I sent the drone a command. It lifted off, flew to the back of the house, and found an open window. Through the camera, I could see him sitting at his kitchen table, the MacBook open in front of him, his fingers moving across the keyboard.
I routed a second drone to the location—this one carrying a small speaker. It hovered outside the window, and through the speaker, my voice came out, flat and cold.
"Put the money in the bag."
He looked up. His eyes went wide when he saw the drone. He stood up, knocking his chair back, and grabbed the MacBook like he was going to run.
The second drone moved into position. The camera on the first drone showed me exactly where he was standing. The second drone was armed.
"Put the money in the bag," I said again. "Or I'll put holes in your walls until you do."
He stared at the drone. At the small, black cylinders mounted underneath it. At the barrels that were pointed directly at his chest.
He moved fast after that. The envelope went into the bag. The bag went into the drone's sling. The drone took off, and I watched him sink back into his chair, his face pale, his hands shaking.
I felt nothing.
---
It happened three more times that day. Different buyers, different neighborhoods, same result. A warning shot into the ceiling. A speaker playing the sound of a gun cocking. A drone hovering outside a bedroom window at two in the afternoon, its camera staring through the glass.
Each time, they paid.
I was becoming something I didn't entirely recognize. The kid who'd hesitated before saving that woman in the alley was gone. In his place was something harder. Something that understood that in this world, in any world, power was the only language people respected.
I didn't like it. But I didn't stop it either.
---
By noon, I had fifty deliveries done. By three, a hundred. By six, when I finally stopped to take a breath, I'd moved over two hundred items.
The money was everywhere.
I'd started stacking it in piles on the living room floor—hundreds, fifties, twenties, organized by denomination, counted and recounted. The pile grew throughout the day, a mountain of cash that would have seemed impossible a month ago.
At the end of the day, I counted it all.
Four hundred thousand dollars.
I sat in the middle of my living room, surrounded by stacks of bills, and let the number sink in. Four hundred thousand dollars. In one day. And I still had receipts for more items. I could do this again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, until I had all the money I could ever need.
But I knew I couldn't. Too fast, too noticeable, too dangerous. I'd pushed hard today, and I'd gotten away with it, but the risk was building. Someone would notice. Someone would talk. Someone would come looking.
I needed to slow down. But first, I needed to get better.
---
The problem had been nagging at me all day.
My Cursed Energy control was sloppy.
I'd noticed it during the fight in the alley. When I'd reinforced my body, the energy had been uneven—too much in my legs, not enough in my arms, leaking out around the edges like water through a cracked pipe. During the Sky Manipulation training, I'd burned through my reserves faster than I should have, even with Yuta-level reserves. The technique was inefficient. I was inefficient.
I'd been so focused on building drones, on making money, on preparing for the future, that I'd neglected the basics. Cursed Energy manipulation was the foundation everything else rested on. If it was weak, everything else was weak.
I sat down in the middle of my empty living room, the cash pushed to the edges, and closed my eyes.
I reached inside myself, looking for that ocean of Cursed Energy I'd felt since the moment I woke up in this body. It was still there, vast and cold, stretching out beneath my consciousness. But now that I was really looking, I could see the problem.
The energy was there. But my control over it was like trying to steer a supertanker with a canoe paddle. I could push it, pull it, direct it in broad strokes, but the fine control—the precision, the efficiency—was missing.
I started with reinforcement.
The technique was simple: flood your body with Cursed Energy, making your muscles stronger, your bones denser, your skin tougher. Most sorcerers did it automatically, without thinking. I was doing it like a caveman banging rocks together.
I pushed energy into my right arm. Too much. My arm locked up, muscles spasming, and I had to release it before I hurt myself.
I tried again. This time, I pushed slowly, carefully, like filling a glass with a thimble. Energy flowed into my arm, spreading through the muscle fibers, the tendons, the bones. I held it there, feeling the strength build, but also feeling the waste—the energy that was bleeding out, dissipating into the air instead of staying in my body.
I pulled the energy back, then pushed it again. And again. And again.
Each time, I got a little better. A little more efficient. A little more controlled.
While I trained reinforcement, I also reached out with Sky Manipulation.
I didn't try to fly. I didn't try to redirect attacks. I just... touched the air. Felt it. Moved it. Used the tiniest possible amount of Cursed Energy to create the smallest possible effect. A breeze across my face. A ripple in the dust on the floor. A pressure change so subtle I could barely feel it.
The goal wasn't power. The goal was precision. To use as little energy as possible to achieve the effect I wanted. To make every drop count.
I sat there for hours, splitting my attention between reinforcement and Sky Manipulation, pushing and pulling, tightening and releasing. The cash sat around me in stacks, forgotten. The drones waited on their shelves, silent. The sun went down outside my window, and the room grew dark, and still I trained.
By the time I opened my eyes again, it was past midnight.
I checked my reserves. I'd been training for six hours, using Cursed Energy constantly, and I'd barely made a dent. But more importantly, I could feel the difference. The energy moved more smoothly now. More precisely. Less waste. Less leakage.
I estimated my control had improved by about thirty percent.
It wasn't enough. Not nearly enough. But it was a start. I'd train on the weekends, I decided. Push myself harder each time. Build the control until it was second nature, until I could use Sky Manipulation and reinforcement without thinking, without wasting, without limits.
---
I was about to go to bed when my eyes landed on the stack of receipts on my desk.
Among them were three I'd almost forgotten about. Receipts for hospital operations. Liposuction, technically—the removal of fat from one part of the body and transfer to another. I'd found them in a bin outside a plastic surgery clinic, a whole folder of them, thrown out by someone who didn't understand what they had.
I picked them up and read them again.
Patient: Confidential. Procedure: Fat grafting. Volume: 200 pounds total.
Two hundred pounds of fat, transferred from one person to another. A cosmetic procedure for people who wanted curves, who wanted bulk, who wanted to fill out their frames.
I looked at my body. Still thin. Still too thin, even after the gym membership. The four months of training had helped, but I was still lean, still wiry, still lacking the mass I needed to truly reinforce my body.
What if I used these receipts on myself?
I sat down on the floor, the three receipts in my hand. I knew this was dangerous. I knew it was stupid. But I also knew it could work. The same way the gym membership had given me four months of training, these operations would give me the physical mass I needed. Instantly.
I took a breath. Then I pushed my Cursed Energy into the first receipt.
The receipt burned. And I felt my body change.
It was like being inflated. Fat cells appeared under my skin, in my arms, my chest, my stomach, my legs. I watched in the reflection of my dark TV screen as my body swelled, filling out, growing. The thin boy who'd looked like a skeleton was gone. In his place was someone heavier. Someone thicker.
The first receipt added sixty pounds. I could feel it, the weight settling into me, changing my center of gravity, changing everything.
I used the second receipt.
Another sixty pounds. My clothes stretched tight against my skin. My breathing changed, became heavier, harder. I could feel my heart working harder, pumping blood through new tissue, through new mass.
I used the third receipt.
Eighty pounds. Two hundred total.
The change was instant and overwhelming.
I couldn't breathe. The weight on my chest, on my ribs, on my lungs—it was too much. I collapsed onto the floor, my hands clawing at my throat, my chest, trying to find air that wasn't there. My heart was pounding, skipping, stuttering. Pain shot through my left arm, up into my jaw. I was having a heart attack. I was going to die.
My vision was darkening at the edges. My mind, even enhanced, was struggling to think, to act, to do anything.
The receipts. I needed receipts.
I reached out with my Cursed Energy, not for a technique, but for the connection to my drones. One of them was in the next room, its camera facing the desk where my folder of receipts sat. I pushed through the drone's eyes, found what I was looking for, and dragged it into my field of vision.
A receipt for a cardiac unit. Emergency room visit. Heart attack treatment. Full recovery.
I grabbed it with a shaking hand and pushed my Cursed Energy into it.
The receipt burned. And the pain stopped.
My heart steadied. My lungs opened. The crushing weight on my chest lifted, and I gasped, sucking in air, feeling it fill me, feeling life pour back into my body. I lay on the floor for a long time, shaking, sweating, my clothes soaked through, my body still heavy with two hundred extra pounds.
I'd almost died. If I hadn't had that receipt, if I hadn't been able to reach it, I would have died. Stupid. Stupid and reckless and—
But it worked. I was alive. And I was two hundred pounds heavier.
I sat up slowly, carefully. My body felt wrong. Heavy. Awkward. The weight was distributed unevenly—too much in my stomach, not enough in my arms, too much in my legs, not enough in my chest. The hospital receipts hadn't been designed for someone building a fighter's body. They'd been designed for someone who wanted curves, who wanted bulk, who wanted to look soft.
I needed to fix that as thag was my plan.
I found the gym receipts. Not the the prvious Gym ones frok yesterday —I'd used that already. New ones. Harder ones. CrossFit boxes, powerlifting gyms, MMA training centers. Receipts for three year memberships,for ultra body building bros, personal training, nutrition plans. I'd collected them over the past few weeks, knowing I'd need them eventually.
I used them one by one.
Each receipt burned. Each one added months of training, of discipline, of transformation. The fat that had been dumped into me was burned away, replaced by muscle, by density, by structure. My arms thickened. My chest broadened. My legs became pillars. The soft curves hardened into lines, into definition, into power.
I used ten receipts. Twenty. Thirty. I lost count.
When I finally stopped, I was different.
---
I stood up on legs that didn't shake. I walked to the bathroom, my footsteps heavy on the floor, and I looked in the mirror.
I didn't recognize myself.
The boy who'd looked back at me yesterday was gone. In his place was a man. Tall—I had to be six-two now, maybe six-three. Broad shoulders. A chest that filled out my torn shirt. Arms with definition, with veins visible under the skin, with the kind of development that took years of dedicated training.
My face had changed too. The sharp angles were still there, but softened now, filled in. My jaw was stronger. My cheekbones were higher. My amber eyes looked out from a face that was no longer a kid's face.
I stared at myself for a long time. I turned, looked at my profile, looked at my back, looked at the changes that thirty gym memberships had wrought.
I was... powerful. Not superhero powerful. Not Viltrumite powerful. But powerful in a way I'd never been before. In a way I'd never imagined I could be.
I flexed my arm, watching the muscle move under the skin. I could feel the strength there, waiting. Not from Cursed Energy. Not from techniques. Just... strength. The kind of strength that came from hours in the gym, from lifting, from pushing, from becoming something more than you were.
I smiled at my reflection. It was a strange expression on this new face, but it felt right.
---
I was about to go to bed when I saw the folder of dojo receipts.
I'd forgotten about them. A week ago, I'd found a stack of receipts in a recycling bin outside a martial arts academy. Karate, judo, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai, Krav Maga. Six-month memberships, private lessons, advanced training. I'd grabbed them without thinking, filed them away, moved on to other things.
Now, looking at my new body, I understood why I'd kept them.
I pulled out the receipts. Five of them. Five advanced martial arts. Karate for striking. Judo for throws. Brazilian jiu-jitsu for ground fighting. Muay Thai for knees and elbows. Krav Maga for the dirty, practical, anything-goes reality of combat.
I used them one by one.
Each receipt burned. Each one filled my mind with knowledge, with technique, with instinct. I felt my body learn—not through practice, not through repetition, but through the magic of Contractual Reclamation applied to services. The knowledge entered me like water into a sponge, soaking in, becoming part of me.
When it was done, I knew how to fight.
Not like a movie fighter. Not like a superhero. Like a real fighter. I knew how to throw a punch that would break bones. How to throw someone twice my size. How to defend against a knife, a gun, multiple attackers. How to use my body as a weapon, every part of it, from my fists to my elbows to my knees to my forehead.
I stood in my living room, alone in the dark, and I moved through the forms. Karate first—the sharp, linear strikes that focused power into single points. Then Muay Thai—the fluid, brutal combinations that used the whole body. Then judo—the throws and sweeps that turned an opponent's weight against them. Then jiu-jitsu—the ground work, the submissions, the endless chess match of leverage and position. Then Krav Maga—the direct, efficient, violent movements designed to end a fight as fast as possible.
My body flowed through it all like I'd been training for years. Because, in a way, I had. The receipts had given me the training, the hours, the repetition. The knowledge was in my muscles, in my nerves, in my bones.
I stopped in the middle of the floor, breathing hard, sweat dripping down my new body. It was six in the evening. I'd been at this all day—selling, training, transforming. But I wasn't tired. I was energized. Alive.
I wanted to fight.
---
I pulled on a hoodie—it fit differently now, tight across the shoulders and chest—and went out into the night.
The city was dark, the streets empty, the kind of night where things happened in shadows. I walked through the neighborhoods I'd come to know over the past weeks, the places where trouble gathered, where the light didn't reach.
I found them in an alley off 8th Street. Three men, surrounding a fourth who was pressed against the wall, his hands up, his face scared.
I didn't use Sky Manipulation. I didn't use Puppet Manipulation. I didn't use anything but my body and what I'd learned.
I walked into the alley, my footsteps loud on the pavement. One of the men turned, saw me, laughed.
"Look at this. Another hero."
I didn't answer. I moved.
The first man threw a punch. I saw it coming—my enhanced cognition tracking the arc, the speed, the point of impact. But this time, I didn't need to redirect it. My body knew what to do.
I stepped inside the punch, my left hand deflecting his arm, my right fist driving into his solar plexus. He folded, the air rushing out of him, and I followed with a knee to his face that sent him to the ground, unconscious before he hit.
The second man grabbed a bottle from a nearby crate and swung it at my head. I ducked under it—easy, so easy—and swept his legs out from under him. He hit the ground hard, and I stamped on his wrist, the bottle falling from his grip. A judo throw, perfect, effortless.
The third man ran.
I let him go. The fight was over.
I turned to the man against the wall. He was staring at me, his mouth open, his eyes wide.
"You okay?" I asked.
He nodded slowly.
"Go home."
He went.
I stood in the alley, breathing steady, my heart calm, my body humming with a satisfaction I hadn't expected. I'd just taken down two men in less than five seconds. No Cursed Energy. No techniques. Just strength and skill.
I found another fight an hour later. A woman being dragged into a car by two men. I broke one man's arm with a Muay Thai elbow, dislocated the other's shoulder with a jiu-jitsu lock, and walked the woman to a bus stop.
Another fight after that. A group of teenagers with knives, circling a kid who couldn't have been more than fourteen. I moved through them like water, my hands and feet finding targets, my body responding to threats before I consciously processed them. The knives clattered to the ground. The teenagers scattered.
I fought until midnight. Six fights. Six victories. No techniques, no powers, just the strength of my new body and the knowledge burned into my mind by those five receipts.
When I finally walked home, my knuckles were bruised, my hoodie was torn, and I was smiling.
---
I showered again, washing off the blood and sweat, and stood in front of the mirror. The face that looked back at me was still strange—still new, still not quite mine. But I was getting used to it. The height, the weight, the strength. It all felt like it was settling into place.
I thought about what I'd done tonight. Not the fighting—the fighting was just practice. But the selling. The transformation. The choices I'd made that brought me here.
I was different now. Not just physically. I was harder, sharper, more willing to do what needed to be done. The warning shots. The threats. The way I'd handled those buyers who tried to cheat me. I'd become something that the old me—the pre-void me—wouldn't have recognized.
Was that bad? I didn't know. I didn't care. I was surviving. I was growing. I was preparing for what was coming.
I sat down at my desk and pulled up my laptop. My fingers moved across the keyboard, pulling up university websites, course catalogs, PhD programs.
Tomorrow, after school, I was going to print receipts.
Not for phones or laptops or cameras. For knowledge. College courses, university lectures, PhD programs. If Contractual Reclamation worked on services—if it could give me gym training and hospital operations and martial arts—then it could give me education. Years of it, compressed into moments.
I'd start with biology. The science of life. I needed to understand how bodies worked, how they grew, how they changed. Because I had a plan for that. A plan that would take years to build, that would require knowledge I didn't have yet.
But I would have it. I would have all of it.
I closed my laptop and lay down on my bed, staring at the ceiling. Tomorrow was Monday. School. Mark Grayson. The beginning of something I'd been preparing for since I woke up in that void.
And I was going to learn. Not what they taught in class. What I needed to know. Biology, chemistry, physics, engineering. Everything that would help me build what I was building. Everything that would help me survive what was coming.
I closed my eyes and let the exhaustion pull me under. Through the connection to my drones, I could see outside. The city was vibrant
I slept deeply, dreamlessly