There was something I never detested.
It's three things. Wealth, wealth, and wealth.
I was sitting in my room, the one that belonged to the original Kuroe, though it didn't feel like it belonged to anyone. Just a space with furniture, with a bed and a desk and a window. The cliche.
I snorted. How do you build it, really?
When most people think of getting rich, they imagine what they've seen in movies or read in books. A high-paying job. A corner office. Becoming a CEO, climbing the ladder until you're standing at the top looking down at everyone else. That's what the salaryman dreams about during his lunch break when they're watching Tiktoks, eating a convenience store bento box, his mind full of distant yachts and business trips to places he'll never actually visit.
But that's not how it worked. Not really.
The real answer was simpler and infinitely more frustrating: you should add value to the economy. You became part of the system. You acquired assets that appreciated, compounded over time. You scaled those assets. You let the market do the work while you collected the dividends. It was a game, and the game had rules, and the rules were designed so that if you played long enough and had enough starting capital, you would eventually win. There were reasons why the rich became richer and the poor became the poorest.
The problem was that most people didn't have starting capital. They had a paycheck and a rent payment and the slow, grinding realization that they would never get ahead. They were cattle. Sheep. Products in a market designed to extract value from them until there was nothing left to extract.
And if that was the worst case for someone in a normal world, someone with education and systems in place and the infrastructure of modern capitalism, what did that make me? A transmigrated consciousness in a thirteen-year-old body in a world where superpowers existed and the entire economic system revolved around people who could do extraordinary things?
I opened my phone. The screen felt warm in my hands. I opened the search bar and typed: Pro Hero earnings.
The Wikipedia page loaded. There was a lot of text, too much text, the kind of dense information that would take hours to properly parse. But I scrolled, looking for the important parts.
Professional Heroes are licensed individuals authorized by the government to engage in heroic activities. They differ from law enforcement in that they are not required to work within police protocols and are primarily deployed against high-powered villains and criminal organizations. Their services are obtained through private contracts and government sponsorships.
Interesting. So they existed in a weird space between government regulation and private enterprise. That meant there was money in it, but it was constrained by bureaucracy.
I scrolled further.
Average annual earnings for a Pro Hero range from approximately 4 million yen to 50 million yen, depending on rank and specialization. Top-tier heroes can earn between 500 million and several billion yen annually.
Several billion yen.
Several billion yen.
SHIT!
That was really substantial. That was the kind of money that changed your life, that gave you options, that let you move through the world with a different kind of gravity. I thought about what that meant in practical terms. A top-ranked hero earned more in a year than most people earned in a lifetime. And these were people whose job was to fight crime and save people, not to build businesses or create systems or navigate markets. They were essentially getting paid for their raw power, for being something other people couldn't be.
I searched again: Highest paid Pro Hero Japan.
The results loaded. There were images, faces I didn't recognize attached to names and rankings.
Endeavor.
The image showed a man with sharp features and red and yellow eyes, his expression intense in a way that made something in my chest tighten just by looking at it. His quirk was listed as Hellflame, with a description that made my skin crawl.
Hellflame grants the user the ability to generate and manipulate flames at extreme temperatures, capable of destroying entire city blocks in moments.
I choked. I read that sentence twice. An entire city block. In moments. Just imagine, a casual ability to incinerate everything in a radius, all the buildings and people and lives contained in that space, gone because one person decided to use their power. The thought of it was obscene in a way that was hard to articulate. The kind of power that shouldn't exist right? That shouldn't be held by any single person, yet there he was, ranked as the number two hero in the entire country, earning enough money to live like a king while possessing the ability to destroy kingdoms.
But number two wasn't the highest. I scrolled further and found him immediately.
All Might.
The image showed a man who looked like Superman had stepped out of the page and into this world. Blonde, impossibly tall, smiling with the kind of genuine warmth that made you want to believe in everything he stood for. The description below his image was sparse, almost dismissive, as if whoever had written it didn't know how to properly capture what he was.
All Might is considered the strongest hero in Japan. His quirk is classified as [REDACTED]. His earnings are not publicly disclosed, though reports indicate he donates the majority of his income to charitable organizations focused on poverty relief and disaster recovery.
Not publicly disclosed. He was the strongest person in the country, possibly the strongest person in the world, and his earnings weren't listed. That alone told me something really important. Someone that powerful wouldn't need to publicly declare their wealth. They wouldn't need to prove anything to anyone. All Might was operating on a different level entirely, and part of me wondered if his charity work, his genuine focus on helping people, was strategic. A way to build loyalty and trust and the kind of untouchable public image that made him even more valuable than mere money could measure.
I thought about Elon Musk. In my previous world, in my old life, I'd watched that man accumulate wealth in ways that seemed to defy the normal rules of economics. He'd built companies that shouldn't have worked, that went bankrupt and came back, that disrupted entire industries through sheer force of will and capital and leverage. And everyone hated him for it. They hated him for not bothering to hide the fact that he was accumulating wealth at a scale that humanity had never seen before.
A trillionaire.
He could have solved world hunger. The math was simple enough, the poverty line was a known quantity, and he had more money than all the poverty programs combined. But he didn't. Instead, he kept accumulating, kept building, kept using every lever available to squeeze more wealth out of the system. From a certain perspective, it was obscene. From another perspective, it was the only rational move in a game that rewarded consolidation and punished distribution.
Leverage.
Leverage wins.
All Might might have understood that too. Maybe his charity work wasn't altruism at all, but the highest form of leverage. He kept himself essential to the people. He made them love him. He made them dependent on his protection and his presence. In a world where superpowers existed, where one person could destroy a city block, the person who had the trust of the population had more power than any amount of money could buy.
Would going the hero route be the best way to build wealth? The answer seemed obvious on the surface. But I wasn't a brawler. My quirk wasn't the kind that let you punch things until they stopped being problems. Automation didn't seem to fit.
Though. What if there was another way to use it?
Something far beyond strength.
Time to test.
I got up from my bed and walked to the corner of my room, where I'd been keeping the metal scrap. The broken robot arm I'd found in a second-hand shop, the thing looked like it had been a toy once and had been loved to pieces. It was barely recognizable as anything functional anymore, just twisted metal and plastic and broken joints. The kind of thing people threw away.
I looked at it, and I started to imagine. What if I could take this broken thing and make it work again? What if I could do more than that, could create something from the jumble of parts, could build something that didn't exist before?
My fingers twitched with the desire to start immediately, but I forced myself to be methodical. To sit down and actually think about what I wanted to accomplish.
Automation.
The first step was always the same. Identify the current processes. Look at what exists and understand it.
This toy, this broken robot, had no triggers. No sequences. It was just raw material, potential waiting to be shaped. I could feel that immediately when I focused my quirk on it, running my awareness across the surface like fingers across a map.
The second step was defining the objective. What did I actually want this thing to be?
I closed my eyes and let the thoughts come. A mobile unit. Something small and capable of moving independently, of navigating spaces, of doing things my hands alone couldn't do. Something that could see what I saw, could go where I couldn't go. Something that could interact with the world on my behalf.
A robot.
The requirements came next, flowing out of me in a stream of consciousness that felt almost feverish.
How mobile? Human level. It needs to move like a person moves, with the same kind of fluidity and ease.
How fluent? It needs to speak. It needs to think. It needs to be conversational, natural, like talking to another person and not some chatbot spitting out scripted responses.
How durable? More durable than a motorcycle. It needs to survive impacts, falls, environmental hazards. It needs to be able to take damage and keep functioning.
How intelligent? It needs to be able to process information from the environment, to make decisions, to adapt to new situations.
How connected? It needs internet access. It needs to be able to search and retrieve information in real time. It needs to be as capable as a smartphone but embodied, mobile, present.
How friendly? This one made me pause. I was building this thing to be my tool, my asset, my way of extending my reach into the world. But something in me, some part that was still human enough to recognize loneliness, wanted it to be more than that. I wanted it to be something like a friend.
This thing will be my friend.
I opened my eyes and looked at the broken robot again. It was smaller now, somehow, reduced to components and potential. I could feel the shape of it in my mind, the way the parts would need to work together, the sequences of motion and thought and action that would make it function.
The third step was always the hardest. The execution.
I didn't move physically, not yet. I just sat there and let my quirk activate, spreading out from my body like a web of awareness. I traced every piece of metal, every scrap of plastic, every joint and hinge. I began to imagine how forces would move through it, how electricity would flow, how movements would propagate from one part to another.
Then I began to build the workflow presets.
Human level mobility. That means balance and coordination. That means understanding the physics of bipedal motion, of weight distribution, of how force moves through joints and limbs. I created a skeleton first, mapping out how bones would move, how muscles would respond, how the entire system would need to work in concert to achieve simple motion.
Fluent speech. That required something more abstract. Language was pattern recognition and probability and understanding context. I created pathways for processing, for analyzing, for generating responses that weren't scripted but emergent. It would learn from interaction. It would develop its own voice over time.
Durability. That meant reinforcement. That meant creating redundancies, backup systems, ways for the structure to absorb impact without breaking. Motorcycle durability meant it could survive a crash and still function. I built that resilience into every joint, every connection, every vulnerable point.
Vision and intelligence. I created processing cores, networks of intention and awareness that would let it see and understand and react to the environment. It would be aware in a way that simple machines weren't.
Internet connectivity. That required an antenna, a transmitter, a way to reach out and touch the networks that spanned the world. I built that too, a digital nervous system extending beyond the body of the thing I was creating.
Hours passed. I didn't notice them passing. There was only the work, the gradual accumulation of systems and sequences and the slow crystallization of potential into form.
My hands cramped from holding the position, from the concentration required to maintain all those threads of awareness simultaneously. Sweat ran down my face. My eyes felt gritty and dry, but I didn't stop. I couldn't stop. This was too important, too necessary.
The sun finished setting outside. My room became dark, lit only by the ambient glow of streetlights filtering through the window. I turned on a lamp, a small thing on my desk that cast harsh shadows, and kept working.
And then, finally, it was done.
I let the last of my awareness settle into place, the final sequences locking into position, and I felt the moment when everything connected, when all the disparate parts suddenly became a system, when potential transformed into actuality.
The robot moved.
It was subtle at first, flexing of joints that shouldn't have been able to flex. Then it lifted itself, the broken metal reorganizing itself under the influence of forces I'd mapped and established, taking on a new shape that was neither the original robot nor quite human but something in between. It was roughly cylindrical, with limbs that bent in the right places, and when it stood up on my floor.
And then it spoke, its voice coming out in a frequency that was almost mechanical but with something underneath that made it closer to human than not.
"It is good to see you. My friend."
Then pure white light blinded my eyes. I nearly passed out.
Cooldown to use Automation once again: One thousand hours