Chapter 466: The Rich and Oblivious

In the seven days since the challenge, Emily Hartwell’s phone had become a living, vibrating nightmare.

It didn’t politely pause between notifications the way a sane device might after, say, the fiftieth consecutive seven-figure offer from a multinational corporation desperate to plaster Phei Ryujin Tiamat’s face across every billboard from Paradise to the Pacific.

No.

Emily’s phone had decided rest was for peasants.

It buzzed with the manic, relentless energy of a gadget that had accepted its new life purpose: to serve as the central nervous system for every brand, sports franchise, energy-drink conglomerate,

luxury-watch

maker, sneaker label, gaming peripheral company, and marketing executive on the planet who wanted a piece of the seventeen-year-old who’d publicly humiliated five Legacy heirs on national television and looked like a literal god while doing it.

And on those rare, sacred moments when the screen finally went dark for longer than thirty seconds, Emily would stare at the silence the way a combat veteran stares at a ceasefire:

with deep, bone-weary suspicion.

With the

exhausted

certainty that peace was temporary and betrayal was inevitable.

Then she’d shift the burden to the reason for all of it.

Phei.

The offers arrived like floodwater through a cracked dam.

Sports

brands begging to make him the face of their next campaign.

Athletic-wear

companies literally bidding against each other to see who could get his body on a billboard first.

Energy drinks

promising him private jet to pick him up if he’d agree to just hold the can at the right angle.

Shoe lines.

Watch brands that had never sponsored anyone under thirty but were suddenly willing to rewrite their entire marketing philosophy for a kid who’d dunked on Legacy royalty and made it look effortless.

Professional basketball teams—actual NBB franchises—had sent formal inquiries about his future availability, his training regimen, his interest in going pro.

Media

companies wanted exclusives.

A gaming peripheral brand had thrown six figures at him just to hold their controller in a single photograph.

Phei had learned something in the past week that no system notification or supernatural power had ever taught him:

getting obscenely rich was stupidly,

almost

insultingly easy

when you were

popular

enough.

Emily had told him—

voice flat with the particular exhaustion of someone who’d stared at too many commas in bank-account figures

—that the

cheapest

offer currently sitting in her inbox was

five hundred thousand dollars

.

For one day of work.

Stand here.

Wear this.

Smile.

Half a million.

He still couldn’t believe it.

Weeks ago

—weeks—he’d been waiting on Melissa to get back to him about a part-time job she’d said she’ll get him.

A part-time job.

As in, minimum wage, maybe tips, probably wearing a nametag.

Now he was turning down half a million dollars on Melissa’s advice.

"Don’t take the first wave,"

she’d told him that first night the offers started flooding in, calm as still water.

"The companies that reach out earliest are always the most desperate. They want you cheap before your value settles. Let them bid against each other. Let the real players come to the table."

So he’d waited. Turned down half a million here.

Three hundred thousand there.

Said no to numbers that would have made old-Phei weep with disbelief.

Meanwhile,

he was still using Melissa’s card for immediate expenses. Dates. Food.

The everyday machinery of a life that cost more to maintain in Paradise than most people earned in a decade.

Even the money he’d bet on himself during the challenge—

the wager that had paid out beautifully—

had come from that card. And he hadn’t even touched the returns yet.

Then there was the

PheiCrush

Simps money.

The fan club—

if you could call a small army of wealthy, obsessive, terrifyingly organised young women a "fan club

"—had

monetised

the challenge with the ruthless efficiency of people who’d grown up watching their parents run empires with the help of the academy.

Ticket sales

from the live event.

Live-stream

payments from the tens of thousands who’d watched remotely.

Live-stream

gifts—the digital donations viewers threw at the screen during peak moments, and peak moments during Phei’s challenge had been approximately every ten seconds.

And the

betting profits.

The Simps had organised the betting pools themselves with Yuki, taken a house cut, and managed the entire operation with the casual competence of people born into generational wealth.

Phei still couldn’t wrap his head around it.

He’d read once—

back in the cracked-phone-under-the-blanket days

—that a single boxing match between two men who hated each other had generated six hundred million dollars.

Two fighters.

One ring.

A stadium that held maybe fifteen thousand people.

Six hundred million.

That had been two men.

This had been him against five Legacy heirs in a stadium built for

two hundred thousand

.

Every single one of them rich enough to bet six figures on a Tuesday without their accountants blinking.

And almost all of them had bet

against

him.

That was the insane part.

The part that made the numbers spiral into territory his brain refused to process.

Then there was

Sierra, Maddie, even Delilah

—

at least that’s what Emily had told him

—had bet seven figures each.

Seven. On him. And he did not know the exact amount.

Then there were the hundreds of

PheiCrush

Simps—rich girls from Downtown Paradise and near-Legacy families who could throw six figures or more at a betting pool the way normal people threw coins into a fountain.

Let’s not even count the other

Princesses

who could bet as much as his three princesses, or even more.

How much had Elena bet?

And on the other side—the twenty thousand, thirty thousand, who knew how many other figures who’d bet against him. Rich Downtown Paradise people who could match those numbers easily.

Legacy families who’d wagered serious money on the certainty that five of their best would crush one nobody.

All of that money.

All of those bets.

Flowing into a pool that the Simps controlled.

And then he’d won.

And the pool had flipped.

Not mentioning the

two hundred thousand $500 tickets

.

Not mentioning the

live streams at $15

a head that millions of people globally had paid.

Not mentioning the

gifts.

The sponsorships the academy had got in nick of time.

The

VIP

seats which were $1000 that had been bought by

20,000

people.

The media rights.

The merchandise.

The hotels and restaurants and every business in Paradise that had been fully booked.

The truth was—Phei didn’t know how much all that was.

He’d tried to think about it.

Multiple times.

Tried to sit down and actually calculate it and every single time the numbers started making sense they’d spiral again and he’d lose the thread somewhere between "betting pool" and "house cut percentage" and end up staring at a wall with a headache.

He was good at maths. Always had been. Could calculate angles and trajectories and system stat distributions in his head without breaking a sweat.

But this? This wasn’t maths.

This was something else entirely.

Something that

operated

in a currency his brain hadn’t been built to process.

Because there was no way—no way—you could be sure of the numbers when the people involved were trust-fund babies with

billions

to spend and rich arseholes with millions specifically set aside for a few days of entertainment.

That was the scale.

That was Paradise

.

A place where a man could lose seven figures on a basketball bet and call it a Tuesday. Where a girl could throw six figures at a fan-club betting pool and never mention it to her parents because it wasn’t worth mentioning.

Where two hundred thousand people could fill a stadium at five hundred dollars a head and not a single one of them would consider that ticket price unusual.

He’d given up trying to calculate it.

The numbers were too big.

The variables were too rich.

And every time he thought he’d gotten close to a figure, he’d remember another revenue stream Emily had mentioned in passing—

merchandise, media rights, VIP packages, content licensing, sponsorship deals signed before the event even started

—and the number would jump again and he’d be right back where he started.

Nah.

He was rich.

Obscenely, stupidly, insultingly rich.

Let the Academy handle that. Let Emily handle that. Let the Simps and their terrifyingly efficient accounting division—because yes, they absolutely had an accounting division, probably staffed by girls who’d been doing their parents’ taxes since age

twelve—handle

that.

These rich girls didn’t just know how to spend their parents’ money. They knew how to make money—

vast, staggering, almost pornographic amounts of it

—the moment the right opportunity crossed their path.

Give them an opening and they’d turn it into an empire before breakfast.

All Phei knew was this:

there was a number somewhere with his name on it

.

A big number

. A number that was still growing because Emily’s phone wouldn’t stop buzzing, the Academy was still

processing

payouts, the Simps were

still counting

, and nobody had given him a final figure because there wasn’t a final figure yet.

Money he’d earned with his body, his talent—sitting in someone else’s vault.

Story of my life.

But that was a problem for another day.

Today the problem was the phone that wouldn’t stop buzzing.

Emily’s phone vibrated again.

She closed her eyes.

Exhaled

through her nose.

The sound of a woman who had been professionally competent for seven straight days and was now teetering on the razor edge of what competence could sustain without caffeine, sleep, or the sweet release of hurling the device into the Hell River.

The whole table looked at her.