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Ever since Henry got the green light to modify the kitchen, he'd quietly taken that as blanket permission to upgrade everything else in the house too.
Structural stuff? Untouched. But anything he could tweak, replace, or improve he did it himself. No contractors, no permits. Just tools, materials, and a Kryptonian brain backed by steel-forged hands.
Gary, the landlord, didn't seem to care. He often dropped off food in Tupperware, and as long as the house didn't blow up and Henry promised to return it to "rentable condition" later, he kept his mouth shut.
So when Henry picked up a few acoustics books at the library, it didn't take long for him to fall headlong into the glorious rabbit hole of high-end audio engineering.
Because speakers? Speakers had no era. No expiration date. They weren't beholden to tech trends or operating systems. They were all about physics and materials and intelligence.
Sound was math. Sound was geometry. Want optimal audio? Then minimize interference, bounce waves the right way, and build your space so that the sweet spot the acoustic focal point was where you'd actually be sitting.
Those principles hadn't changed in a hundred years. And they wouldn't change in the next hundred either. The science of concert halls, recording studios, and listening rooms had always been the same it was just the materials that evolved.
And frankly? Even modern alloys hadn't completely outclassed the classics. Copper was good. Silver was better. Most people didn't use it because it was expensive and a nightmare to process.
But Henry wasn't most people.
With heat vision, microscopic precision, and zero need to worry about patents, labor costs, or "intellectual property," he bypassed every overpriced middleman in the supply chain.
He bought raw materials. He hand-crafted the rest.
Take wiring, for example. Instead of settling for high-end copper, he went with silver higher conductivity, cleaner signal, less resistance. Sure, silver was notoriously tough to work with, but not when you had Kryptonian fingers.
He refined it to lab-grade standards, ensuring ultra-purity and tuning the crystal lattice density not the physics textbook kind of density, but the microscopic uniformity in the wiring, eliminating gaps and inconsistencies down to the nanometer.
It was the same reason ancient blacksmiths hammered molten metal for hours: reduce bubbles, increase structural integrity.
Then came the braided shielding layer, to insulate the signal from outside interference. And finally, the rubber casing not so much for sound quality, but for protection. That part required chemistry.
In fact, processing the materials gave off fumes and chemical waste. So, naturally, Henry upgraded his kitchen exhaust system into something most labs would envy. A high-grade multi-stage ion filtration unit. Static filtering was child's play he went full mad scientist.
An obsessive passion project that blended electronics, materials science, chemistry, and a little bit of overkill.
But this wasn't some indulgent flex of his Kryptonian brainpower.
Because no matter how many books he read or papers he memorized, raw knowledge was still just disconnected data. Just like a martial artist learning a hundred styles but never sparring.
Real mastery came from synthesis. From doing.
To build this sound system, he had to consider the room's layout, acoustic geometry, available materials, and his own practical limitations. And in solving one problem after another, those books stopped being books. Those papers stopped being theory.
They became intuition.
He'd find himself asking: Can this be improved? Is there a better way? What if I try this? Each tweak pushed him past what the textbook offered. He wasn't just recalling knowledge. He was testing it. Expanding it. Innovating.
No wonder people said desire drives science forward. If you're not trying to solve something, you're not going to discover anything new.
Unlike Superman, Henry didn't have a Fortress of Solitude packed with Kryptonian science and miracle tech. He didn't have an alien AI whispering universal truths into his ear.
If he didn't read, think, or explore, his "super brain" would just sit there. Useless. Nothing more than a glorified calculator.
And it was during this project this audio temple he was building for his ears alone that Henry realized something he'd never felt before:
Before this new life, he'd just been an end user. A cog in the system. His job was to plug values into templates, slap duct tape on problems, and get sign-off before deadlines. If something went wrong, he could always just submit a different version and pretend it was progress.
Real innovation? Real elegance?
Those were luxuries for people smarter, richer, or luckier than him.
But now now he had the tools. The mental horsepower. The freedom. When he hit a problem, he didn't just solve it. He started seeing alternate paths new ideas that felt... right.
Not guesses. Not pipe dreams. These were viable. Operational. Solutions that could work, because the logic behind them was sound.
That was what inspiration felt like.
Not some magical bolt from the heavens. Just the natural byproduct of a solid foundation, clear logic, and the confidence to stretch just a little further.
It was this feeling this newness that made Henry stop and wonder:
> Was this what real scientists felt like?
Was this what Tony Stark lived with every day?
Was this... something I've always had?
Because when he looked back on his "past life," it suddenly felt... fuzzy.
He remembered things. Sort of.
But now, with this engine running in his skull his Kryptonian mind firing on all cylinders he had to ask himself:
> Were those memories real?
Or were they just constructs? An elaborate fiction generated by an alien brain trying to fill in the blanks?
And if they were fake...
Who the hell had he really been?
For once, Henry didn't have an answer.
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