"I give up. I concede. Iâm not competing with this."
Then, unable to help it, he added with a hint of envy, "A whole building, though, can you actually even live in all of it?"
"Live in it?" Stan glanced at him with mild confusion.
âWho said anything about living in it?â
"No. Iâm not going to live in it," he said calmly. "Iâm giving it away."
Leo blinked. Then blinked again.
"Youâre, youâre gifting an entire building?"
Stan nodded once, already turning back to the manager to begin the paperwork.
Behind him, Leo stood rooted in place, the last coherent piece of his worldview quietly dissolving into the polished marble floor.
âAn entire building. As a gift.â
Four Seasons Garden. The most sought-after address in Inksea. A building Leo himself had just been told was off-limits to people like him.
Being given away.
Like a bouquet of flowers.
The word tycoon didnât quite cover it anymore.
Tycoon described someone who could buy a building. It didnât describe someone who could buy a building and give it away like a wedding favor.
Who in their right mind did that? Who had the kind of money, the kind of careless, ocean-deep money, to drop nine figures on a residential complex purely to hand it to someone else as a gift?
Only a certain class of person was even worthy of being called Stan Harrisonâs peer. And it wasnât a class anyone in this room was familiar with. Stacked next to Stan Harrison, Leo wasnât even an equal. He was a younger brother. A nephew, maybe. The kind of relative who got polite head-pats at family gatherings.
The manager returned to Stan a few minutes later, tablet in hand, expression carefully composed.
"Mr. Harrison, Iâve finalized the calculations. The total comes to one hundred and thirty million dollars."
The number landed in the showroom like a small, polite bomb.
Leoâs heart actually skipped a beat. âOne hundred and thirty million.â
His own family, the Smith family, supposedly one of the more comfortable second-generation houses in the region, didnât have liquid assets at that level. Not even close. The total figure on the managerâs tablet wasnât just larger than what Leo could spend. It was larger than what his entire family was worth.
"Run the card."
Stan said it the way another man might say âput it on my tabâ. He slid the bank card across the counter without so much as glancing at it.
This didnât feel like a hundred-and-thirty-million-dollar transaction. It felt like a coffee order.
âIs this what real boldness actually looks like?â
Leoâs mind was filling in answers as fast as it could process the question. The man clearly spent at this scale so often that nine figures barely registered as a number. He didnât blink. He didnât ask to verify anything. He didnât even watch the card swipe through.
A super tycoon. An absolute super tycoon. Among every second-generation rich kid Leo had ever met, ever heard whispered about, ever read about in the gossip columns of Inksea, not one of them belonged in the same conversation as Stan Harrison.
The manager picked up the card reader with both hands and processed the transaction in a single, smooth motion. The terminal beeped softly.
A moment later, Stanâs phone chimed.
[US Construction Bank. Outgoing: $130,000,000.00]
[Consumption rebate triggered. Target: Sophie Youngs (5Ă). Incoming: $650,000,000.00]
....
A/N:
Confused about how the rebate becomes 5x? Please check the Authorâs Note / Creatorâs Thoughts section. Iâve clarified it there.
Sorry for the interruption and thank you for your understanding.
....
Meanwhile Stan kept his expression perfectly still as the second notification scrolled past, but inside, something quiet and gleeful did a small backflip.
âSix hundred and fifty million dollars.â
In a single transaction.
Leo, standing close enough to catch a glimpse of the screen, saw only the outgoing figure, and even that was enough to set the back of his neck tingling.
He had never personally laid eyes on a number with that many zeros in his life. The string of digits looked almost cartoonish on the small screen, like something printed for a movie prop.
"Mr. Harrison," the manager said, slipping into the warm, careful tone of someone who had just handled the largest single sale of her career, "the title deeds for an entire building take a little time to process, roughly twenty-four hours. Iâll personally contact you the moment the paperwork is ready for collection."
"Thatâs fine," Stan said with a small nod.
âPerfect.â
The double rebate had finally landed, the proper, full-fat, five-times multiplier from a high-favorability target. He had been chasing this exact moment ever since the system first explained how the multiplier worked, and now it had arrived without a single complication. Six hundred and fifty million dollars dropped into his account in the time it took to swipe a card.
He almost wanted to laugh out loud. He had genuinely reached, in his own private way, the absolute peak of his life so far.
âElon Musk? Who the f*ck is that?â The thought drifted across his mind with quiet amusement.
At this rate, surpassing the top tycoons of the world was just a matter of how many bound targets he could keep happy and how many high-end consumption events he could justify per week. Months, maybe. A year on the outside.
He turned his head and looked at Leo with mild, deliberate interest.
"Not putting on a show in front of me anymore?"
Leo opened his mouth and discovered, in real time, that no words came out.
He wanted to crawl into the polished marble floor of the sales office and disappear. The manager was hovering nearby, clearly within earshot. Several other customers had stopped pretending they werenât watching.
The crown jewel of his evening, the two-million-dollar villa heâd bought specifically to humiliate Stan Harrison, had just been catastrophically eclipsed by a man casually dropping a hundred and thirty million on the building right next to it.
"How," Stan continued in the same easy tone, leaning slightly closer so only Leo could hear, "how did you ever look at me and decide that was the man you wanted to flex on? Who gave you the courage? Your therapist?"