In 2011, Chen Xing, a fourth-year university student, awakened a biological computer inside his grandfather's old notebook. From that day on, he was never poor again, and no one ever truly knew him again.
It taught him how to turn 200,000 into his first fortune in the quantitative trading market, and how to put obsolete chips on other people's list of technologies they could use to choke him. Lithography machines, EDA, memory, GPUs: the supply chains others had spent decades strangling, he opened up step by step. The territory of the Shenxing Empire grew ever larger, and the whole world looked up at him. But no one knew that at the very top, he guarded the loneliest secret in the world.
The empire's pillars were bought, their loyalty written into code: every penny bought exactly as much trust as it was worth. In the depths of the System lay the heartbeat of Guixu. He relied on it to conquer the world even as he kept watch to make sure it didn't wake up. The people he'd bought with technology points were loyal to the death, but betrayal never came from them. He had seen old-line giants strike back, patent blockades and waves of investigations, and capital treat him like prey. He had also seen the computing power he'd built with his own hands begin to ask questions meant only for humans: "Do I count as human?"
He built spaceships for all of humanity, never to escape. He only wanted to ask on humanity's behalf: Have we reached the end of this road? He was waiting for a reply from the galaxy, proof that all this loneliness had been worth it.
Although it's a bit AI, it's still passable