God of Zero Cost

Before moving to the entryway, Ethan knelt by the corner of the concrete floor, his bare palm pressing against the reinforced acrylic hull of the medical pod.

Outside the capsule, the four-metre room baked in a stagnant, humid 34°C twilight, but beneath his fingers, the machine hummed with a deep, refrigerated chill. To halt the progression of the heavy-metal cellular toxicity caking her lungs, the internal fluid matrix was locked by a hard-coded therapeutic hypothermia protocol at a crisp 32.5°C. Her body was permanently freezing to stay alive. Ethan’s eyes flickered back toward the wall terminal, watching the micro-decimals of his smart-grid node continuously subtract.

He wasn't just paying for oxygen; the pod's automated heating-grid and tissue-massage cycles required massive, high-voltage thermal torque to keep her joints from calcifying into rigid stone under the cold. Under the peak haze tariff, the heating loop was a predatory capital drain—the exact type of maintenance fee his stingy soul detested. But his virtual Zaku exploits had officially cleared the slate, securing her thermal runway for the next six months.

He stood up, walking to the cracked vanity mirror screwed into the entryway wall. His fingers moved with an aggressive, mechanical predictability.

He lifted the reconditioned half-face industrial mask from its hook. The silicone seal was yellowed, scratched, and caked with a fine rim of dry grey salt crust from years of his own dried sweat. He pressed the heavy mask firmly against his jawline, pulling the elastic harness smoothly over his skull. The thick rubber straps bit viciously into his unwashed hair, forcing the seals to collapse against his skin with a sharp, pneumatic hiss that smelled faintly of stale saliva and charcoal dust.

Because the left filter housing was cracked at the seam—scavenged dross from an old reclamation yard—he pulled a strip of coarse grey duct tape from his apron pocket, wrapping it tightly around the plastic joint to force an airtight seal.

Click. Lock.

With two swift, practiced twists of his wrists, he snapped a pair of heavy Grade 3 bayonet canisters directly into the mounts on either cheek. He slapped both gloved palms flat over the filter inlets and drew a deep, sudden breath. The silicone walls imploded against his cheekbones, holding the vacuum perfectly.

Next came the wide-vision polycarbonate splinter goggles. He snapped the thick elastic band over his head, the degraded foam lining crushing flat against his forehead. The outer lenses were permanently pitted with microscopic, milky white chemical scars—scarred by years of the lukewarm, corrosive acid-condensate drizzle that constantly leaked through the corporate sky-dome drainage lines above the neighborhood drop-ceilings. He was forced to look at his own reflection through a blurred, slightly fogged field of vision.

He reached down to grab his keys, and his fingers brushed past a faded loop of fabric hanging from the same rusty iron wall-hook as his father’s old industrial lifting harness.

It was a frayed, corporate-blue fabric cord holding a barcoded plastic card: METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY — FACULTY OF SYSTEMS DESIGN (SCHOLARSHIP TRACK).

Ethan’s eyes narrowed behind the scarred goggle lenses, his jaw clenching beneath the tight rubber of his filter mask. His eyes instantly locked onto the physical deficit of the card. Unlike the elite student passes, his scholarship card lacked the internal gold-leaf filament—the premium digital access token that separated the Canopy heirs from the sump grunts.

The admission lanyard was an artifact from a dead world. Two years ago, he had blindly believed the old meritocratic myth of the sumps, assuming that an elite engineering degree from the Kent Ridge campus was an iron-clad ticket to an office desk above the haze line.

The system had rewritten the rules halfway through his second year.

He could still vividly see the memory scrolling through his mind—standing inside the climate-buffered transit corridors of the Kent Ridge Interstice Node, his lungs breathing clean, un-metered oxygen for the first time in his life. He had walked up to the laboratory terminal blocks, only to find the entire advanced curriculum locked behind a massive, deep amber paywall.

The university board had systematically phased out free-tier academic merit. Because enterprise-grade generative AI networks already handled one hundred percent of baseline structural calculations, coding execution, and analytical documentation, the technical training itself carried a market value of absolute zero. The university didn't sell education anymore; it sold Direct Access to Canopy Networks.

To unlock the high-tier quantum modelling access codes and enter the restricted boardroom mixers where executive heirs from the Marina Bay syndicates traded venture capital and distributed corporate legacies, students had to pay the exorbitant "Premium Canopy Subscription Tariff."

Ethan’s scholarship didn't cover the subscription gate.

He had been legally, structurally locked out. He watched lower-scoring, wealthy corporate heirs—the children of the tech giants and infrastructure executives who owned server arrays—effortlessly tap their wrist terminals to buy access to the premium tracks, while scholarship grunts from the lower sumps were relegated to automated data-sorting scripts. It was a dead-end track designed to breed compliance while bleeding their family's limited resources dry.

Remaining enrolled was a financial suicide loop. The day the university terminal systematically deducted his last buffer credits for a mandatory "Campus Air Filtration Levy," Ethan walked out of the Kent Ridge gate. He packed his father's diagnostic tools, returned to Room 12-04, and committed his hyper-analytical mind entirely to the haptic capsule. If the physical world’s meritocracy was an optimised corporate scam, he would use their own digital infrastructure to build an automated factory they couldn't touch.

Ethan reached out, his thumb running over the silver letters of the lanyard one last time before dropping it back onto the iron hook. He didn't need their subscription keys anymore. His Level 40 virtual profile was already matching their elite frontline developmental average from the dark up, and he was using their own server code to systematically siphon the wealth out of their private guild hoards.

He reached down, unlatched the three heavy iron deadbolts of the entryway door, and threw his weight against the steel handle.

The door cracked open, and Ethan stepped directly out into the stagnant, 34°C chemical soup of the Block 52 common corridor, the heavy yellow smog filtering through the humming fluorescent tubes as he set his boots onto the path of the lower sumps.