The glow of Ivan's laptop screen was the only light in his dorm room. It was 2:47 AM, and while the rest of the campus slept or partied, Ivan sat hunched forward, eyes scanning lines of data, news reports, and press releases. His hands moved with precision — open tab, scroll, cross-check, close tab, repeat.
He had searching all night.
Key terms like "mineral merger 2029," "crypto-metal fusion," "rare earth blockchain," filled his browsing history. All the information was vague. Companies came and went, startups collapsed, billion-dollar projects disappeared like smoke in the wind.
Then he came across a article with the same names as he vagely remembered from his past life — TitaniumCore-X and MolTech Industries. Two metal giants that, for a brief moment in time, had stirred the financial world with rumors of a new metal alloy.
But the merger never truly happened; it was a deliberate stunt to manipulate investors and pump crypto coins connected to the fake tech.
