My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible Chapter 727 Turning Trash To Gold

Before the submissions started flooding in, governments around the world first went to Nova Technologies' website to read the criteria in full.

What they saw made them pause, because Nova was asking for something even sharper than they had braced for, and the very first line told them so.

The minimum land requirement: 120 square kilometers. A single parcel, and a massive one — bigger than the city of Paris, twice the size of Manhattan, almost exactly the footprint of San Francisco. Nova was not asking for a site. It was asking for a small city's worth of ground.

And the strange thing, the thing that made the number land even harder once it settled, was that by Nova's own measure this was small. The space station was 55 kilometers by 27.5 — 1,512.5 square kilometers, larger than Hong Kong, twice the size of Singapore, near enough the whole of London. Against that, a Medical Center was a fraction, a rounding error, a single borough beside a floating nation.

But that was exactly what unsettled them. Because "small," measured by Nova, still meant a parcel that dwarfed the capital cities they governed from. If this was the modest end of what Nova built — a facility it considered minor, one of seven, a thing it could close and walk away from on a whim — then the governments were being made to understand, in the very first line of the requirements, the scale of the entity they were now dealing with. And they had not even reached the conditions yet.

The rest of the land criteria made the size a little easier to take in, because it became clear Nova was not asking for ground near a city at all. The company would build on anything — mountain, desert, tundra, wetland, it did not care, and said as much, promising to terraform whatever it was given. But the land had to be empty. Uninhabited. No settlement, no structures, and no one displaced to provide it. Read together, the meaning was plain: Nova wanted a parcel in the middle of nowhere.

Which raised an obvious problem. Patients would arrive by air, into the major international airports every country kept near its cities — and the nearest of those could be hundreds of kilometers from a facility buried in empty wilderness. Several governments raised their brows at that, because it opened a question the criteria had not yet answered. How would anyone actually reach the place? Unless Nova intended to move the patients itself, from the airport to the center.

Reading ahead, they became fairly sure that was exactly the plan, because the isolation and buffer criteria said the same thing the land rules had said, in a harder voice. No less than 100 kilometers from the nearest major population center.

A perpetual buffer around the parcel, enforced by the host's own law, forever, into which no settlement or road or development could ever creep — and encroachment counted as a breach. If that was not a demand for total isolation, they did not know what would be.

And a facility sealed inside 100 kilometers of empty, unbuildable ground could not be reached by any ordinary means. Someone would have to carry the patients across it. There was only one someone who could.

And it was there, at the buffer clause, that a great many governments quietly took themselves out of the competition before they had even begun.

The heavily urban nations, the small dense countries, looked at the map of their own territory and found nothing that could satisfy it — no empty 120 square kilometers, no room for a 100-kilometer ring of enforced emptiness around it, nowhere on their soil that had not already been built upon or lived in.

They could only measure the size of their countries against what Nova required, and blame themselves, bitterly and with no small irony, for having developed so thoroughly and so well. The very success that made them modern was the thing that shut the door. Nova wanted emptiness, and they had spent a century making sure they had none.

For the nations that remained, the map worked the other way. The large and the empty, the countries with vast interiors no one had ever filled — the deserts, the outbacks, the tundra, the high steppe and the deep wilderness that had always been counted a kind of poverty — suddenly held the one thing on Earth that Nova wanted; Land, and the emptiness around it.

What had been dead weight on a balance sheet for centuries, ground too remote or too harsh to be worth anything, was now the price of admission to the future. The countries that had the most nothing were, for once, the ones holding the most.

They read the remaining conditions with a particular care of someone had realized they were genuinely in the running, and the conditions did not get gentler.

Full immunity. No jurisdiction inside the perimeter. No taxation. No law of theirs applying on their own soil. An airspace corridor surrendered, their own air authority suspended over their own territory wherever Nova's vessels flew. The right, reserved to Nova alone, to close the whole thing and leave whenever it wished, owing nothing and explaining nothing. Every line was a piece of sovereignty handed across, and there were a great many lines.

And yet none of the qualifying governments closed the page. They read to the end, and then most of them read it again, not looking for a reason to refuse but for the cleanest way to accept — because behind every clause sat the same fact that had hung over every dealing with Nova since the beginning, and it had never been heavier than it was here.

The thing inside the facility was the cure. Whatever the terms cost in pride, in principle, in the slow quiet erosion of what it meant to be sovereign on your own ground, the alternative was to explain to your people why the neighbor got it and you did not.

Also, it wasn't just the cure. The price of hosting a center was huge but the benefits it would bring, were just as enormous. Because a Nova Medical Center was not only a place the cure lived. It was a permanent river of the world's sick, and the world's money, flowing through whichever country was chosen to hold the door.

The governments that thought past the terms to the consequences saw it quickly, and what they saw changed the arithmetic entirely.

Every patient on the continent would come to them. Not once or seasonally, but continuously, forever, because sickness never stopped and the cure existed nowhere else.

Each of those patients would arrive through the host's airports, and with each of them would come family, companions, the ones who could not be housed inside the center and would need somewhere to stay for the months a treatment ran.

This meant a steady, unending population of the world's most motivated visitors, would be landing in the host country and spending there, year after year, in numbers that did not fall when markets fell or when the season turned, because a person seeking a cure did not wait for a better time to come.

The host would become the gateway of an entire region. Every neighbor, however large, however proud, would have to route its own dying through the host's territory to reach the one place that could save them.

A small nation that won a center would find itself suddenly indispensable to countries that had spent a century looking straight past it, as they for the first time, holds something the giants needed and could not get anywhere else.

That was not the kind of standing money usually bought. It was the kind that reshaped a country's place in the world and kept it reshaped for as long as the center stood.

And the infrastructure. To carry that flow, a host would build — airports widened and modernized, roads laid, transport raised to a standard the country might never have reached on its own.

Nova would pay for none of it and the host would keep all of it, a modern spine built for the center's sake that would serve the whole nation long after, permanent improvement bought on the back of Nova's presence. The company asked for a patch of empty ground and left, without meaning to, a transformed country around it.

The officials who did the real math understood then what the announcement had so flatly undersold. Nova had promised nothing but proximity. Nova had said, in that cold and unbothered voice, that if proximity for your citizens was not sufficient motivation, you should not submit.

And it had meant it, as Nova genuinely offered nothing else, made no guarantee of development, no promise of jobs, no commitment of any kind. But the officials could see what Nova either did not care to mention or did not care about at all: that the proximity came wrapped in a windfall, that hosting the door to the cure meant hosting the beating economic heart of a region, and that Nova would take not a single cent of it.

The whole enormous benefit — the gateway status, the endless flow of visitors, the foreign money, the infrastructure, the standing — flowed past Nova entirely and pooled in the host's own lap. Nova wanted the ground. The country got the future that grew around it.

That was the thing that turned deliberation into a scramble. Because now the qualifying nations were not weighing a hard bargain against a moral cost.

They were looking at the single largest prize any of them would ever be offered — the cure for their people, and a permanent transformation of their economy and their place in the world — sitting behind terms that were only outrageous until you measured them against what they bought. Sovereignty over a patch of empty desert, against becoming the region's gateway to the end of death. Written that way, the choice stopped being difficult. It became a race.

The nations the modern age had passed over, the ones that had watched the urban and the developed pull ahead of them for a century, held the one asset that century had taught everyone to dismiss. Empty land. And Nova, of all the powers that had ever come asking for something, wanted exactly that, and would pay for it with the future itself.

So the pens came out, in capitals across the empty half of the world. Somewhere in each qualifying nation, an official was already unrolling a map of the country's most forgotten ground, measuring out a parcel of desert or tundra or high steppe that not one living soul had ever wanted, drawing a hundred-kilometer ring of guaranteed emptiness around it, and beginning, at last, to write the confirmation Nova required — every condition accepted, without modification, in full. Because Nova had made saying yes the most profitable thing a poor and empty country could ever do, and then had stepped back, and said nothing, and let them race each other to the door.