Ethan discovered that inventing the future was easy.
Paperwork was not.
He sat in a small office in Queens, holding a clipboard and staring at a form that had far too many boxes and far too much legal language.
"…Why does starting a company feel like trying to solo a Dark Souls boss with a stapler?"
The woman behind the counter smiled in the way only someone who had processed thousands of identical forms could. "Sir, you forgot to sign on page three. And initial on page seven."
He looked.
"…I did sign page three."
"Yes, but not in the lower right corner."
"…Of course not."
He fixed it.
Thus, after three hours, two trips to a copy shop, and one existential crisis, Mercer Technologies LLC officially existed.
He walked out of the building holding a manila folder like it contained the meaning of life.
"…Okay," he muttered. "I have a company."
He paused.
"…I have a company."
Then he grinned like an idiot.
"Mercer Technologies," he said aloud, testing it. "That sounds… respectable. Boring. Trustworthy."
Perfect.
The first rule of not getting disappeared in the MCU was simple:
Never look special.
The second rule was:
Never look rich before you look successful.
So he didn't build a miracle.
He built something… reasonable.
He sat in his storage-unit workshop, staring at his notebook.
Product 1: Consumer laptop motherboard
Goal:
20–30% better power efficiency
Slightly better thermals
Slightly better reliability
Nothing that breaks expectations
"…You hurt me to make," he told the page. "You know that, right?"
He took his ridiculously overpowered prototype and intentionally made it worse.
He removed optimizations.
Added conservative margins.
Chose older, safer component layouts.
"…This is like putting a Ferrari engine in a sedan and then limiting it so it behaves like a nice Toyota."
But that was the point.
He didn't want headlines.
He wanted contracts.
He used the Sharingan anyway.
Not to design something revolutionary.
But to design something perfectly optimized for mass production.
He watched supply chain inefficiencies.
Manufacturing tolerances.
Failure points.
"…Okay," he muttered. "If this goes wrong, it will go wrong here and here."
He redesigned those parts.
Not better.
Just… smarter.
The next problem was money.
He didn't have venture capital.
He didn't want it.
He started small.
He took consulting gigs under the Mercer Technologies name.
"System optimization"
"Hardware diagnostics"
"Thermal efficiency analysis"
Which, translated from marketing-speak, meant:
"I fix your tech better than anyone else, and you don't ask how."
The Sharingan made it trivial.
He could walk into a small business, look at their server rack, and say:
"Your third power supply is failing in two weeks."
They would laugh.
Then it would fail.
They would stop laughing.
Three months later, Mercer Technologies had:
A tiny office (which was really just two rooms)
A small but steady income
And exactly zero attention
Perfect.
Then came the real step.
Manufacturing.
He didn't build a factory.
That was insane.
He partnered with a small, struggling electronics manufacturer in New Jersey.
He showed them his design.
They looked skeptical.
He showed them the numbers.
They stopped being skeptical.
"…You're telling me this board is cheaper to make and fails less often?" the manager asked.
"Yes," Ethan said. "And runs cooler."
"And you're not cutting corners?"
"I am cutting the correct corners."
They stared at him.
"…We'll do a pilot run."
He left the meeting and immediately went to get coffee because his hands were shaking.
"…Okay," he muttered. "This is happening. This is actually happening."
The first batch was 500 units.
He didn't sell them under his own brand.
Not yet.
He sold them as OEM components to a mid-sized laptop assembler.
Quiet.
Anonymous.
Safe.
Two months later, the reports came back.
Failure rate: less than half their usual.
Thermal complaints: almost zero.
Power efficiency: better than expected.
The assembler wanted more.
Ethan stared at the email.
"…Don't smile. Don't smile. Don't—"
He smiled.
He celebrated by buying a real chair for his office.
And a second monitor.
"Careful," he told himself. "Don't get reckless."
He kept using the Sharingan, but carefully.
Never in public.
Never in meetings.
Never on anything that could be traced.
Only in his workshop.
Only in his head.
He was building a reputation for Mercer Technologies as:
Reliable
Conservative
Boring
Which was exactly what he wanted.
One night, he sat alone in the office, lights off, city glowing through the window.
He looked at the company paperwork.
At the invoices.
At the growing balance in the bank account.
"…I am officially a tech CEO," he said.
He paused.
"…This is the weirdest power fantasy I've ever had."
He opened his notebook and wrote a new page:
Phase 2:
Expand into consumer networking hardware
Then low-profile laptops
Then phones
Never leapfrog the market
Always look like you're following trends
He underlined the last line.
Twice.
But something bothered him.
He turned on the Sharingan and looked at his office.
At the walls.
At the cables.
At the air.
"…I'm being paranoid," he told himself.
But he still felt it.
The sense of pressure.
Of a world that noticed anomalies.
Two days later, a man in a very nice suit walked into his office.
"Ethan Mercer?" he asked.
"Yes?"
"I represent a private investment group. We've been watching your company's growth."
Ethan smiled politely.
Inside, every alarm bell he had screamed.
"…I'm not interested in selling," he said.
The man smiled back.
"Oh, we're not here to buy. We're just… curious."
They shook hands.
The man's grip was firm.
Trained.
That night, Ethan stood on the roof of his building.
White hair moving in the wind.
"…Rule one," he reminded himself. "Never be the best."
He looked out at the city.
"…I think I just broke rule zero."
Somewhere, someone had added Mercer Technologies to a list.
Not a big list.
Not yet.
But in this world—
That was how it always started.