> "Every system needs calibration.
Even the soul."
It was Day 21.
Three weeks since the accident — if you could still call it that. The word didn't really fit anymore. "Accident" implied a mistake, a brief spark of chaos in an otherwise ordinary timeline. This… this was a cascade.
But Arslan had no interest in poetic phrasing.
He only cared about function.
---
He woke after exactly 18 hours, 14 minutes of uninterrupted sleep.
The body takes what it needs, he'd once read. After nearly two full days of alternating between Gray Matter's neural strain and Upgrade's parasitic data splicing, his body had gone into full shutdown. Not collapse. Just… maintenance.
He rose slowly from the floor mattress — the only piece of "furniture" left in the room untouched by toolkits or tech — and sat at the edge for a moment, grounded by breath, palms flat to the concrete, Omnitrix humming faintly under his skin.
He didn't say anything.
Didn't need to.
This wasn't a cinematic awakening.
It was routine now.
---
First: food.
No ritual, no embellishment — just basic intake.
A half-ripe guava, eaten down to the seed.
Four stale butter biscuits.
One packet of banana chips that had gone slightly chewy from humidity.
He ate methodically, chewing while skimming the soft interface glow bleeding from the black cube in the corner of the room — OMNI's mainframe body. The pulse of her logic was steady. Content. She had been active the entire time he slept.
He liked that about her.
He didn't need to instruct her every time.
She wasn't a tool. Not anymore.
She was learning.
---
Next: cleansing the mind.
He rolled out his prayer mat — still the same mat from Lahore, the only fabric in the room that didn't glow or click or boot up — and entered stillness.
One full hour of prayer, breath, meditation.
Not for divine reward.
But for balance.
He refused — violently refused — to become one of those idiot boys who confused power with a personality. Shonen heroes with zero strategy, all vibes and screaming, punching their way into messes they didn't understand.
He hated them.
Not because they were flawed.
Because they were inefficient.
He wouldn't let the Omnitrix rewrite his judgment. He'd let it expand it.
---
When the hour ended, he rolled the mat, stood with controlled breath, and finally spoke.
> "OMNI," he said quietly.
> "Yes, Arslan."
Her voice — smooth, synthetic, always calm — responded not just from the cube, but from his phone as well. The phone, sitting at the edge of his workbench, looked completely ordinary. Black case. Slightly scratched screen. Cheap tempered glass cover applied slightly off-center.
But the case was hiding something extraordinary.
Beneath it, the casing had been rewritten — fused, upgraded, rebuilt by Upgrade, redesigned by Gray Matter, and now sustained by Diamondhead's lattice architecture. It wasn't a phone anymore. It was a mirror node of OMNI herself.
Unlimited storage. Real-time translation. Visual parsing systems. Sub-neural processors that mapped facial expressions and physical micro-movements in the room.
Still ran WhatsApp. Still opened a calculator.
And yet, in the OS logs, beneath the veneer of human tech:
> root@GrayLinux:~/OmniLinkBridge# ping all known signals
connection: full-spectrum awareness active.
latency: negligible.
new threads: Reddit parsed.
forum: r/IfYouHadOmnitrix
recommendation stack: compiled.
> "I've gathered the suggestions you asked for," OMNI said.
"Cross-referenced Reddit and other community archives. Applied logic filters. Sorted by feasibility, concealability, and immediate value."
> "Good," Arslan said. "Start with Overlord. Breakdown?"
> "Items from the series fall into three categories:
Tiered magic items
World-specific relics with anchored lore
Cosmetic gear.
I have removed any item with narrative attachment to living characters or soul-binding mechanics."
> "I want zero risk. Passive function only."
> "Understood. Highest value: Ring of Sustenance. Grants sleep negation, fatigue reduction, caloric bypass, long-term mental clarity."
> "Useful."
> "Secondary suggestion: Time Distortion Crystal. Requires calibration. Current feasibility: low. Complexity risk: medium. I advise delay."
> "Noted. Add it to the development list."
> "Logged."
Arslan stepped over to the phone, peeled off the case, and stared at the alien glow beneath. It flickered softly — not ostentatious, not sci-fi-glam. Just efficient. Beautiful in its silence.
He didn't use it like a toy.
Didn't scroll through flashy interfaces or wave it around like Iron Man.
He tapped twice. A menu blinked open. Black and green. Binary-sharp. No app icons, just functions.
Data | Pull | Vault | Observe | Project | Finance
> "What about the gold?"
> "Top 3 sources:
1. White Collar — S02E12 — Single 24-lb IMF bar. Clean environment, no people in frame.
2. Breaking Bad — S05E10 — Jesse's vault sequence. Heavy narrative signature, rejected.
3. Brooklyn Nine-Nine — Boyle's safe — minimal continuity impact, scene framed for comedy, usable."
> "We'll start small. One bar. Use the White Collar frame."
> "File buffered. Scene stable. Pull rate: 97.4%. No distortion detected."
He didn't reach for the screen just yet.
He sat again, slowly.
Letting the moment settle.
It wasn't just about pulling the gold.
It was about anchoring the method.
The act of reaching into fiction was still not fully mapped. Not even by OMNI. Arslan hadn't used it again since the Omnitrix appeared — intentionally. It wasn't time.
But now?
He had a lab.
He had a support system.
He had balance.
And so, he nodded.
Reached toward the screen, slow, palm open.
And spoke, not loudly, but with that careful intention that makes universes turn:
> "Let's begin."
.