TEARDOWN [Modern Crafting LitRPG] — Only I Can See the Numbers

The world didn't change. Cal Chen did. Twenty-two, a dropout, and forty-one thousand dollars in debt he didn'tborrow. He fixes cracked phones in the back of his uncle's shop on MainStreet, Flushing, and he is very good at exactly one thing: taking somethingapart until he understands why it worked. Then one Saturday night, a panel opens behind his eyes. Levels. Stats. Quests — hanging in the air over strangers who have no ideathey are asking anyone for help. The woman on the 7 train with a problem shehas never said out loud. The old man in 4B who has been waiting nine yearsfor something. Nobody else can see it. Not the associations on Main Street, who have sold the same protective charmfor sixty years and cannot tell you why it works. Not the old money downtown,who bind power into contracts and collateral. Not the federal office thatshows up three days late with a clipboard and a bad lie. They all HAVE power. Cal is the first one who can MEASURE it. And anything you can measure, you can take apart. Anything you can takeapart, you can build cheaper. He starts with a nail gun and a dead floor sweeper. He is going to end anentire economy. --- WHAT THIS IS • Modern-day New York. No isekai, no apocalypse, no chosen one.• Hard crafting progression. Every point of combat power is something he  built, bought, or trained for, and the story shows you the receipt.• The System grants measurement, not power. He starts at zero and stays  there until he makes something. He loses the fights he didn't prepare for.• TALLY, an inventory script he wrote himself, who develops opinions about  his life choices.• Wangcai, a floor sweeper that should have been thrown out three years ago.  It does not talk. It beeps.• A protagonist who does the math before he does the right thing, and keeps  a ledger of the people he said no to. WHAT THIS ISN'T: a harem, a power fantasy without a price tag, or a storywhere the numbers are decoration. Updates daily through Book One.