Two months . It took two fucking months to catalogue all of the first years. And that was while I mostly ignored the average students. If I placed equal focus on every student, I would have to spend almost the entire year on freshmen alone. Well, I guess that is the cost of doing things alone. But at last, the results were out.

Looking at the papers in front of me, decorated with thousands of segments each, all filled with different colors.

Simply writing down everything as pure text would be extremely wasteful, inaccurate and time consuming. Any natural language, i.e. a language that developed naturally through being used and modified by a group of people without any planning involved, is too wasteful and cannot store large amounts of information in little text, or using fancy words, it isn’t information dense. But in exchange, it flows smoother and usually sounds better.

So the only remaining option was to use an artificial language. Well not really a language, since I only need a very specific segment of it. It would be more fitting to call it encoding, because I only needed to create a more efficient way to write down data for this specific need.

The benefit of writing down everything on a physical object, was that at my current level, it behaved like an analog storage. It could store details with almost infinite complexity. For example, if I wanted to store a number, I could pick any, while storing digitally would only allow for discrete values.

A simpler explanation would be that you can paint a piece of paper any color, while you can only show certain colors on a computer monitor. The latter only has 2^24 different colors, while the former has unimaginably more. But that also raises the question about the accuracy and the range of the sensing instrument, aka how many colors are human eyes actually capable of seeing and what is the minimal difference between values that can be noticed. And then there is also the inherent digital nature of the universe, but that is a topic for another time.

So using both digital and analog elements, I created the following system.

Every student would be given a segment of a paper. On it was written everything I found out about the person in question. A combination of colors, symbols, sizes and lengths held the results of the assessments I made. All located at a specific place. It would look like some abstract art to the untrained observer, but to me, who had the knowledge how to read it, was a vault of information.

While I could decrease the size of it all even further, I would only increase the risk of the info getting destroyed. And it was not like paper was hard to get. Making a simple analogy; if I painted a giant letter on a piece of paper, it would still be at least somewhat recognisable, even if water spilled on it. But that wouldn’t be the same if I had a sheet filled with tiny letters. So I had to find a compromise. To ensure the safety of it even further, I added a few redundant elements and backups. The most talented of students even got a copy of their information scratched into a metal tablet, which was far less prone to issues.

So with all the data reasonably secured and all of the technical information out of the way, it is time to start the analysis.

***

The results showed that out of the 1488 students tested, only 44 had any special reaction to the tests I performed. So 1 in 33 students performed well on at least one test. After every test, an appropriate number would be written down. The overall score would be based on the weighted average of all tests. Simply put, the tests didn’t have equal importance, since some of them had overlap, and students with qualities inside of that overlap would score higher on average, lowering the accuracy of the results.

Now to the actual results.

Out of the 44 students that showed good results, 39 were in the first group. That was 88%. So I could get almost 90% of talents by just focusing on the immediately outstanding. Scouting the others would be far less resource efficient. It took nearly 10 times the effort for a 10th of the results. So for the same amount of effort as it took to find a single outstanding individual in other groups, I could find 100 in the first on average.

Going back to the 44 students, only 3 had any real potential. The others were only slightly above the norm. Doing some simple math, the barrier for a noticeable talent was 1 in 500, or T500 for short or τ2.7 [Author note: -greek letter tau- is followed by the logarithm base 10 of the rarity. I am using it so instead of writing T1000000 I can just use τ6. Natural log base 10 of X, or just ‘log x’ just means: 10^y = x, where Y is the result and in the previous case, 10^2.7 is about equal to 500. End of author note].

I was still annoyed, that the only way to measure talent was through the use of rarity. But for now, there was no objective method to write it down. But being unreliable was still better than nothing.

Making even further observations about the 44 students, I found a few things.

Firstly, my suspicions were confirmed, as none of them could be mistaken for average. So all 44, without exception, stood out from the norm in some way. They either had a really magnetic personality, exceptional fitness, incredible sensory abilities or just a supernatural vibe.

Another thing was that students with similar talent liked to stay together. This was extremely useful. Simply finding a single person with high talent could allow me to find a whole group.

The previous observation was the result of a simple ‘fact’. Talented individuals instinctively ignored others that were ‘below’ them. And the less talented person usually wouldn’t make contact. But that was purely instinctual. Circumstances could still overcome that without any significant inconvenience.

There is always a question to ask, “Why are things like that?”. The simplest solution could be that it was a result of evolution. Talents are rare and those that have to protect weaker ones don’t get to progress as fast. Well that is just a guess that doesn’t take the nature of nen into account but yeah. Regardless of the answer, the phenomenon was useful to me.

All the speculations could wait. There is only a finite amount of time a person can think in a day. So giving my brain a rest, I moved onto other things.

***

Writing books was an entertaining hobby of mine. It wasn’t the typical transmigrator practice of copying all of the popular books from the previous world. After all, there was only so much I could remember about a book I read decades ago, even with a lot of time to think and recall the events. So that was not an option. Yet. The thing I did instead wasn’t really that different, but the results should vastly improve. Writing the books with my almost non-existent skills would only shame the original works, so instead, I only wrote the outlines and planned to give them to some professionals to fill in the blanks. But this needed a considerable investment and most importantly, good authors willing to do the work. Just hiring the existing authors wouldn’t be as good, since they would want to take a significant share of the book’s profits, which just wasn’t viable. If I only gave them a flat rate, regardless of the book’s impact, they would simply not put as much effort in. It is basic human nature. Afterall, most wouldn’t waste so much time for no additional rewards.

So instead, I must hire writers of my own, give them the outline, a basic salary plus some shares of the book’s profits. It was the best course of action to earn a considerable sum in a short time, without revealing too much knowledge to the public.

Yet this still doesn’t help with the immediate problem. I need the starting capital. And the sooner the better.

But I had a solution. Just write the most cliche, low effort books en masse. The common tropes and cliches of my world could be revolutionary in this one. Just taking the anime, Dragon Ball for example, which almost singlehandedly defined the shonen genre. Before it came out, tropes like transformations, final forms, enemies becoming friends and so much more simply didn’t exist. They were novel ideas that only became cliche because of their popularity and subsequent overuse. Without it, anime like One piece and Naruto wouldn’t exist, or at least would be the same. Needless to say, a single work had monumental influence.

But books weren’t the only thing that could be recreated. There were board games, toys, comics and so on. Even art could be stolen. Simply creating popular artworks or posters could earn popularity and popularity often brings money.

It wasn’t as if I wanted to create a business empire for the sake of it. It was only a means to an end. And everyone imagined running a successful company at some point, me being no exception. It could bring unimaginable benefits, countless helpers and a pool of talent so big I could drown in it.

With enough hold over the population, through jobs, housing, money and even relationships, I could take all the power away from the countries and become the absolute ruler. This has a name, “Economic imperialism”, aka a social structure, where an entity with incredible economic means gains incredible influence. And it is not a new idea. It is as old as capitalism itself and the first signs appeared in the early 21st century with Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and so many more.

With time, they gained so much power that if they denied their services to a country, the country would fall into a terrifying economic collapse, from which there was no recovery.

But it all depends on how you use that power. If you wanted, you could shape a better world with it. And I plan to do exactly that.