My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible Chapter 722 Taking Off The Veil

Immediately after the announcement dropped, everyone saw that a new section had been added to Lucidnet.

When they clicked on it, they found that just as Nova Technologies had promised, Lucidnet Finance showed everything. The homepage displayed the world's financial assets as a whole, with their value sitting at $283.05T and the ticker in the red, a downward trend of 15 percent that represented a total loss of roughly $49.95T.

This was after the absurd notional value—fake money—of $600T had been removed.

Nearly everyone did not understand what the figure meant, but those in the financial sector understood it very well. They all could not help taking a deep breath of cold air.

Looking at the world market in red, the whole world immediately clicked on it and it expanded into three domains: Financial Markets, Global Sectors, and Continental Regions.

Each domain carried its own ticker, and all of them were in the red. Financial Markets was down 17 percent on average, Global Sectors was down 12 percent, and Continental Regions the same.

Though none of the domains showed an amount in front of them, each represented the entire world market viewed through a different lens.

Curious to see everything underneath each domain, some users clicked on the one they wanted to examine.

But nearly everyone clicked on Continental Regions, which expanded to show two major categories beneath it: Continental Regions and Regional Grouping. Each of those also carried its own ticker, likewise in the red.

Everyone immediately clicked on Continental Regions, and it expanded to display seven minor categories: North America; Europe; Asia; Middle East/MENA; South America; Africa; Oceania.

This was where everyone knew things were becoming more interesting, because each category now showed a figure in front of it. Every minor category's ticker was also in the red. People began clicking on their own home continents.

What they saw after selecting their respective continents were the names of the countries within them. For those in North America, the view was even more interesting.

The majority of the world's attention was fixed on the USA, so users scrolled down, found its ticker, and clicked on it.

***

UNITED STATES ▼ 14.8%

Reported total financial position: $181.6T

Actual total financial position: $154.7T

Concealed / overstated: −$26.9T

TRUE FISCAL POSITION ▼ 68.6%

Reported national debt: $40.05T

Actual consolidated obligation: $127.65T

Undisclosed liability: +$87.6T

Headline federal debt: $40.05T, as publicly stated. Of this, debt held by the public is approximately $32.27T and intragovernmental debt approximately $7.78T.

Unfunded Social Security and Medicare obligation, 75-year present value: +$78.3T, not included in the headline figure.

Federal employee and veteran benefits payable: +$4.8T.

Consolidated territorial debt, Puerto Rico and others: +$0.9T.

Contingent guarantees and off-balance-sheet commitments: +$3.6T.

The reported figure represents 31 percent of the actual obligation. The remaining 69 percent does not appear in any official headline disclosure. Debt-to-GDP on the reported figure stands at approximately 124 percent.

FINANCIAL MARKETS ▼ 17.2%

Reported market value: $126.7T

Actual market value: $104.9T

Overstatement: −$21.8T

Public equity across NYSE, NASDAQ and OTCQX is down 8.4 percent, on a reported capitalization of approximately $63.0T; real value largely intact.

US fixed income across Treasuries, corporate and municipal debt is down 6.1 percent, on approximately $58.2T.

The US Treasury market is down 2.1 percent; as the world's safety asset, its markdown is minimal.

Private equity, venture capital and hedge funds are down 27.9 percent, marks corrected to actual clearing value.

Commercial real estate is down 21.3 percent, carried far above real clearing price.

Crypto and digital assets are down 34.8 percent.

Shell-structured ownership registered through Delaware, Wyoming and Nevada has been resolved to actual beneficiaries. Previously undisclosed ownership of $8.7T is now attributed to identifiable holders. This is where a significant share of global concealed ownership resolves onto US soil.

SECTORS, REAL ECONOMY ▼ 9.1%

Reported productive value: $30.5T, GDP basis

Actual productive value: $27.7T

Overstatement: −$2.8T

Information technology is down 12.2 percent, valuation froth removed. Financials are down 18.7 percent, the paper layer corrects hardest. Real estate is down 20.1 percent. Health care is down 6.8 percent. Energy is down 4.2 percent. Manufacturing is down 3.1 percent, real output, minimal markdown. Consumer staples are down 1.9 percent, genuinely productive, barely moves. Agriculture is down 1.4 percent, real. Defense and military are down 2.8 percent.

The real economy is mostly real. The markdown here is the smallest of any US layer. The productive base is genuine. The fiction lives above it, in the financial and fiscal layers.

TERRITORIES, CONSOLIDATED UNDER UNITED STATES ▼ 12.3%

Puerto Rico, real fiscal position surfaced, carried debt consolidated to US total. US Virgin Islands. Guam. American Samoa. Northern Mariana Islands.

Under sovereign attribution, all territorial assets and liabilities are consolidated onto the United States. Puerto Rico's obligations, long treated separately in public discourse, appear here as part of the actual US total.

LucidNet Finance, United States. This profile reflects the actual financial position of the United States and all territories under its control, with the managed presentation removed. Reported figures are shown alongside actual figures wherever a gap exists. Daily report available. Tap any line to open the layer beneath it.

***

The United States was not the only country the world opened, and what it found there set the pattern for everything that followed.

Nation after nation was tapped open, and nation after nation told the same kind of story the US had—a reported figure sitting on top of a far worse actual one, a headline debt that turned out to be a fraction of the true obligation, hidden liabilities surfacing into daylight.

The specifics differed, but the shape did not. Every government on Earth had been managing its numbers, and LucidNet Finance had just unmanaged all of them at once.

For most of the world's people, the figures were still too large to feel. But they did not have to understand the numbers themselves, because the Lucid users understood them first. Their assistants turned the data into plain speech, and the Lucid users posted that speech to LucidNet, and from those eighty thousand people the understanding spread outward across the platform to the billions who needed it.

Within an hour, the translation was everywhere. It had been re-explained a thousand times over, until what had meant nothing at the top of the day meant something to nearly everyone. The debt was triple what they had been told. The pensions were short by tens of trillions. The hidden money had names now. The governments had published a third of the truth.

And once the world understood, the mood hardened into two things at once.

The first was rage, and it did not point where anyone in power might have hoped. It pointed at the institutions. Not at the size of the debt, which people had always known was large, but at the concealment of it—at the discovery that the real numbers had existed all along, knowable, and had been kept hidden on purpose.

Governments that had stood at podiums and called their economies sound were revealed to have been reading from a managed script, and the anger that followed was cold and total and aimed squarely at every official, every institution, every entity that had smoothed the truth flat. The betrayal was not that things were bad. It was that the truth had been available the whole time, and withheld.

The second was quieter, and it ran underneath the rage in a great many people: vindication. Everyone who had ever suspected the official numbers were massaged, who had felt the system was tilted without being able to prove it, now had the proof in their pocket.

LucidNet Finance told them the thing no institution ever had—that they had been right. And against all reason, a strange gratitude formed toward the one entity that had finally said it out loud. Nova had not seized anything or attacked anyone. It had turned on the lights and let people see who had been lying in the dark, and for that a large part of the world trusted it more, even as it detonated everything.

The financial world felt none of the comfort and all of the fear, and its fear was of what the seeing would do next. The numbers were not merely visible now; they were visible to everyone at the same time, and every inflated position that had floated on the fact that nobody could check it was now being checked by everybody.

The first to sell the overvalued asset would win, and everyone knew it, and everyone knew that everyone else knew it. The whole system leaned toward a repricing that transparency alone had made inevitable, and the people who understood markets grasped the cruelest part at once—Nova had not touched a single asset. It had only let them be seen, and the seeing was enough to move them.

Governments reacted the way they always did to Nova, which was to say they reached for tools that no longer worked. Some called the figures false, propaganda, an attack. But the denial died on contact with reality, because the numbers kept matching what actually happened as events unfolded, and a government cannot call the truth a lie for very long once its own citizens can check.

What they had truly lost was not an argument but an instrument, which was the ability to manage what their people believed about the money. That instrument had been part of statecraft since there had been states, and LucidNet Finance had removed it from every government on Earth in a single afternoon.

Governments around the world felt that Nova Technologies was out for them, because barely a day had passed since the abduction incident that forced all of them to act to appease the public. And now the rug had been pulled out from under them.

They had thought that Nova Technologies might have had a change of mind after it did not release the product as announced the previous month, but now they understood why. Nova Technologies had been playing a long game, and they all had played right into its trap.

And beneath all of it, in the minds of everyone with something to hide, sat the same cold thought the abduction video had planted. Nova had just shown the world the true books of every government and institution alive. It had seen the concealed debt, the massaged figures, the hidden names, all of it, in real time—and it had chosen to show everyone.

Today the truth had been on the world's side. But Nova could see everything; it had just proved that beyond any doubt. And every powerful person staring at that red screen was left holding the one question Nova never answered and never needed to. What else did it see. And what would happen on the day it decided to show something about them.