The day after the grand ceremony, Alex reported for duty as usual. His supervisor, Fitz, was in a particularly foul mood, which Alex was beginning to learn was his default state.
Fitz pointed a greasy thumb towards a work order on his desk.
"Big job today, Vance," he grumbled, not looking up from a manual for a floor buffer that was at least twenty years old.
"The eggheads in Research and Development cleared out their junk pile. They call it the 'Disposal Area for Volatile and Unstable Artifact Prototypes.
I call it a graveyard for bad ideas. Your job is to haul it all to the deep incinerator."
Alex's eyes lit up, a reaction he quickly hid. A graveyard for bad ideas sounded like the most exciting place on the entire island. "Yes, sir. I mean, Fitz."
Fitz finally looked at him, his eyes narrowed. "Don't look so happy about it. It's dangerous work.
Last year, a kid poked a discarded shield emitter and it bounced him around the room like a pinball for an hour. Wear these." He tossed a pair of thick, rubbery gloves and oversized safety goggles onto the desk.
"And if something starts glowing, don't touch it. Just run. I'm too old to fill out an incident report for a vaporized janitor."
With his instructions and his new, slightly ridiculous safety gear, Alex navigated the service tunnels to the disposal area.
It was located in a sub-basement, a place so far removed from the shiny academy above that it felt like a different world. The air here was cool and smelled of ozone, burnt sugar, and the metallic tang of failure.
The room was huge, a concrete cavern filled with bins, crates, and piles of discarded technology. It was, indeed, a graveyard.
Alex saw a chrome toaster that was smoking slightly, probably a failed attempt at a heat ray. There was a pair of boots that seemed to be stuck to the ceiling.
In one corner sat a pile of what looked like metal frisbees, each one bent and warped. Alex pushed his clattering metal disposal bin into the room, a wide, genuine grin spreading across his face.
This wasn't a graveyard. This was a treasure chest.
He spent the next hour happily sorting through the junk. To everyone else, this was useless, dangerous trash.
To Alex, it was a collection of fascinating puzzles. He didn't even need to use his [Debugger] ability to see the obvious flaws.
A shield that was designed to protect you, but its power source was located on the outside. A communication device with no microphone.
A kinetic blaster with the safety switch installed backward. It was a museum of terrible engineering, and it was hilarious.
He was just about to wheel his first full bin to the incinerator when something caught his eye.
It was nothing special, just a small, black data cube, about the size of his fist, lying in a bin of sparking wires and cracked data chips.
It looked like all the other junk, destined to be melted down into slag. But it was flickering. It was a weak, erratic pulse of light, almost like a dying heartbeat.
A normal person would assume its battery was failing. Alex saw a signal.
He glanced around. The vast room was empty, the only sound the hum and pop of dying electronics.
He pushed his bin into a corner, hidden behind a mountain of discarded robot parts, and crouched down.
"Okay, let's see what we've got here," he whispered to himself.
He focused his mind, and the world of concrete and metal dissolved into a sea of code. The piles of junk became shimmering, messy stacks of data.
Most of it was corrupted and broken, full of digital holes and error messages. It was the digital equivalent of spoiled food. Then, he focused on the little black cube.
His breath caught in his throat.
The cube was a disaster. Its outer layers of code were a chaotic mess of bright red data, flashing with error warnings and system conflicts.
It looked like a digital car crash. It was easy to see why the R&D department had thrown it away. It was unstable, broken, and completely useless by any normal standard.
But Alex looked deeper, past the screaming red errors, to the very heart of the cube.
At its core, nestled inside all that chaos, was a tiny, perfect sphere of pure, white code. It was clean, elegant, and pulsed with a quiet, immense potential.
It was the cube's true nature, buried under layers of corruption. He focused on the core, and its hidden name appeared in his vision, written in glowing green letters: [Corrupted Logic Core].
The name itself was a clue. It wasn't a failed logic core; it was corrupted. The difference was huge.
Failed meant it was a dead end. Corrupted meant it was broken, but it could, theoretically, be fixed. It could be debugged.
But that wasn't even the most amazing part. As he watched, a faint structure began to form from the core, visible only to him. It was an "evolution path."
It looked like a tree growing in fast-forward, a tree made of pure light and information. The trunk was the [Corrupted Logic Core], and from it, dozens of branches sprouted, showing every possible future for the artifact.
Most of the branches were small and withered. One path led to it becoming a slightly faster pocket calculator.
Another branch showed it could be repaired into a simple data storage device, the kind you could buy for a few credits.
Many branches simply ended in a puff of smoke, a "FATAL ERROR" message hanging in the air. These were all the dead ends the R&D team had seen.
But then Alex saw it.
One branch, so thin it was almost invisible, hidden behind all the others. It didn't look like much at first, but unlike the others, it was glowing with a steady, powerful light.
It was the path that no one else could see. Alex traced it with his mind, his heart starting to beat faster.
The first node on the branch was labeled [Stable Logic Processor]. That was already a huge leap, turning a broken core into a functioning one.
The branch continued upward. The next node glowed even brighter: [Adaptive AI Matrix]. It could become a true, thinking artificial intelligence.
Higher still, the light becoming almost blinding: [Localized Reality Simulator]. An ability to create small, contained pockets of reality? The very idea was staggering.
Alex followed the single, brilliant branch all the way to its very top. There, at the peak of the evolution tree, was the final node.
It shone with the light of a supernova, a name that seemed to vibrate with impossible power. A name that shouldn't exist for a simple piece of discarded junk. An SSS-Rank outcome.
[World-Engine].
Alex knelt there, crouched behind a pile of trash, completely stunned. World-Engine. He didn't know exactly what that meant, but it sounded like the kind of power that could rewrite the rules of reality itself.
And he had just found it in a garbage can. The irony was so thick he could almost taste it. The greatest scientists in the world had looked at this cube and seen a failure.
They had thrown away a seed that could grow into something god-like because they couldn't see past the weeds.
His plan to live a quiet, powerless life suddenly felt very silly. Power wasn't something you had to chase. Sometimes, it was something you stumbled upon in a dumpster.
This wasn't about fame or being a hero. This was about potential. This was about taking a broken, discarded thing and building it into a masterpiece. That was a kind of power he could get behind.
He snapped out of his trance. He had to have it.
He looked around again. Still empty. He reached into the bin, his thick rubber glove closing around the small, black cube. It was cold to the touch.
He quickly pulled it out and, with a motion that looked completely casual to any outside observer, slipped it into the pocket of his gray uniform. It settled in next to a half-eaten protein bar and a stray bolt he'd found earlier.
He stood up, grabbed the handles of his disposal bin, and started pushing it towards the incinerator, whistling a cheerful, off-key tune.
To anyone watching, he was just a low-rank janitor doing his job, hauling away another load of worthless trash.
They had no idea that he was walking away with a treasure more valuable than the entire academy, a secret that pulsed with quiet, unimaginable promise in his pocket.
The quiet life was still the goal, but now, he had a new project. A pet project. And it was going to be fun.