"I give up. I concede. I’m 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.
’Who said anything about living in it?’
"No. I’m not going to live in it," he said calmly. "I’m giving it away."
Leo blinked. Then blinked again.
"You’re, you’re 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.
’An entire building. As a gift.’
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 didn’t quite cover it anymore.
Tycoon described soone who could buy a building. It didn’t describe soone 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 soone else as a gift?
Only a certain class of person was even worthy of being called Stan Harrison’s peer. And it wasn’t a class anyone in this room was familiar with. Stacked next to Stan Harrison, Leo wasn’t 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, I’ve finalized the calculations. The total cos to one hundred and thirty million dollars."
The number landed in the showroom like a small, polite bomb.
Leo’s heart actually skipped a beat. ’One hundred and thirty million.’
His own family, the Smith family, supposedly one of the more comfortable second-generation houses in the region, didn’t have liquid assets at that level. Not even close. The total figure on the manager’s tablet wasn’t 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 ’put it on my tab’. He slid the bank card across the counter without so much as glancing at it.
This didn’t feel like a hundred-and-thirty-million-dollar transaction. It felt like a coffee order.
’Is this what real boldness actually looks like?’
Leo’s 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 didn’t blink. He didn’t ask to verify anything. He didn’t even watch the card swipe through.
A super tycoon. An absolute super tycoon. Among every second-generation rich kid Leo had ever t, ever heard whispered about, ever read about in the gossip columns of Inksea, not one of them belonged in the sa 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 mont later, Stan’s phone chid.
[US Construction Bank. Outgoing: $130,000,000.00]
[Consumption rebate triggered. Target: Sophie Youngs (5×). Incoming: $650,000,000.00]
....
A/N:
Confused about how the rebate becos 5x? Please check the Author’s Note / Creator’s Thoughts section. I’ve clarified it there.
Sorry for the interruption and thank you for your understanding.
....
anwhile Stan kept his expression perfectly still as the second notification scrolled past, but inside, sothing quiet and gleeful did a small backflip.
’Six hundred and fifty million dollars.’
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 sothing printed for a movie prop.
"Mr. Harrison," the manager said, slipping into the warm, careful tone of soone who had just handled the largest single sale of her career, "the title deeds for an entire building take a little ti to process, roughly twenty-four hours. I’ll personally contact you the mont the paperwork is ready for collection."
"That’s fine," Stan said with a small nod.
’Perfect.’
The double rebate had finally landed, the proper, full-fat, five-tis multiplier from a high-favorability target. He had been chasing this exact mont 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 ti 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.
’Elon Musk? Who the f*ck is that?’ The thought drifted across his mind with quiet amusent.
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 anymore?"
Leo opened his mouth and discovered, in real ti, that no words ca 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 custors had stopped pretending they weren’t watching.
The crown jewel of his evening, the two-million-dollar villa he’d 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 sa easy tone, leaning slightly closer so only Leo could hear, "how did you ever look at and decide that was the man you wanted to flex on? Who gave you the courage? Your therapist?"
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