Forced to Log In from the Start, I Blew Up the Entire Street

Her equipment was broken, her electricity bill overdue, and she was so broke she couldn’t even afford instant noodles.

With a junk docking pod she’d picked up for 300 yuan, Yan Ling forcibly logged into The Starry Era. The official system ruled that she was “not qualified,” but she logged in anyway.

Her right hand punched through the screen and grabbed a pulsing metal core. She bonded with the “Technology Analysis System.” First mission: use a micro nuclear fusion battery to light the bulb in her rental room. Reward: computing power +10, instant noodle budget +0.

Couldn’t afford copper-based superconductors? She went all in with aluminum wire from a scrapyard that cost three yuan per half-kilo. It exploded, but the blast uncovered a “reverse improvement” branch that wasn’t in the System database. In her hands, a broken blueprint with a 37% compatibility rate became black technology powerful enough to burn through an entire street.

The energy fluctuations attracted a drone engineer. She didn’t ask for fifty thousand yuan, only for a channel where she could trade data over the long term. The shrewdness she’d developed from being broke allowed her to weave an intelligence network before the capitalists could close in.

The young heir of Dawnlight Technology set his sights on her. Patent theft, smear campaigns, “accidents” in the lab: she anticipated his every move. Using a flawed blueprint she’d deliberately left behind, she made her opponent’s “independent research” fall apart in public.

When the National Science and Technology Bureau came calling, she laid down three conditions: the technology would belong to the country and her team; she would reject all capital; and the game’s dungeons had to serve as sandbox test grounds for real-world engineering.

From a laborer too poor to pay her electricity bill to a firewall protecting the civilization’s technological autonomy, her golden finger had never been the System. It was the cunning poverty had taught her, and a backbone she refused to surrender.

When the Zerg fleet approached the Solar System, she rejected the System’s proposal to “become the sole interface” and chose instead to distribute access to players around the world.