Arthur sat on a rusted, salt-corroded bench at the bus stop outside the school. His midnight-blue suit, once a symbol of his sudden ascent, was now a charred wreck, smelling of ozone and the metallic tang of his own blood.
Sarah stood beside him, her shadow long and sharp against the pavement. She looked at her empty hands, then at the street where the armored SUV had literally dissolved into pixels only moments ago.
"The car vanished while I was reaching for the door, Arthur," she said, her voice tight with a mix of awe and fury. "The bank account is an empty void. Every cent you gave me is gone. My father's debt is back. Technically, my contract is void. A professional walks away when the payroll hits zero."
Arthur didn't look up. He was staring at a crumpled, oil-stained ten-dollar bill he had pulled from the depths of his pocket. It was physical "trash"—a low-vibration object the System hadn't bothered to liquidate because it didn't exist in the digital cloud.
"Then why are you still standing there, Sarah?"
She didn't answer immediately. She watched the faint, rhythmic pulse of violet light in his pupils—a light that hadn't faded even as his wealth did. "Because I saw you catch an explosion with your bare hands. Money can buy a lot of things, but it can't buy that. I want to see what a man who can hack reality does with ten dollars."
Arthur stood up, his movements fluid despite the bruising on his ribs. "What I do is buy the world. Starting with this."
[The Market Intuition: Max Level]
They didn't go to a high-rise office. They went to 'The Glitch,' a basement cyber-cafe in the slums, filled with the hum of overclocked servers and the smell of cheap energy drinks. Arthur took a seat at a terminal in the back, his fingers hovering over a greasy keyboard.
[MARKET INTUITION (MAX) – TRIGGERED]
The screen didn't just show numbers to Arthur. It showed the Flow.
In his vision, the stock tickers began to glow. He saw the "veins" of the global economy. He could see the collective fear of investors in London, the greed of a hedge fund in New York, and the exact millisecond a server in Tokyo would lag. To a normal trader, this was chaos. To Arthur, it was a symphony he had already memorized.
"Watch," Arthur whispered.
He fed the serial number of the ten-dollar bill into a fringe, high-leverage "shadow" exchange—the kind used by money launderers and desperate gamblers in 2015.
• 14:02 PM: He buys a 'Put' option on a failing biotech firm. He is betting his only $10.
• 14:05 PM: The stock plateaus. Sarah leans in, her breath hitching. "You're going to lose the last ten bucks, Boss."
• 14:06 PM: A freak news report about a failed clinical trial breaks—news Arthur remembered from his first life. The stock plunges. Balance: $480.
• 14:10 PM: He doesn't breathe. He moves the $480 into a 100x leveraged "Long" on a dead shipping coin.
• 14:25 PM: A major tech CEO tweets a joke about that specific coin. It rockets 4,000%.
Sarah's eyes went wide as the numbers on the screen began to spin like a slot machine. Balance: $19,200.
"You're not even looking at the charts," she whispered, her voice trembling. "You're clicking before the data even loads."
"I'm not following the market, Sarah," Arthur said, his fingers a blur of motion. "I'm the one the market is trying to catch."
[The Counter-Attack]
By 16:00 PM, the screen displayed a figure that defied logic: $912,000.00.
Suddenly, the monitor began to flicker a violent purple. The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.
[WARNING: SYSTEM INTERVENTION DETECTED]
[ADMIN FEE APPLIED: 95% TAX ON 'ANOMALOUS GAINS']
The numbers began to drain. The Man in White was reaching through the network, trying to suffocate Arthur's recovery. The $912,000 started dropping: $800k... $600k... $400k...
Arthur's lips curled into a predatory smile. "You think I'm using the same door as last time?"
"Arthur, it's disappearing!" Sarah yelled.
"Let it," Arthur said.
He closed the browser and opened a primitive command prompt. He used his new skill, Timeline Echo, to see five seconds into the future. He saw exactly where the System's "Detection Algorithm" would scan next.
In that one-second blind spot, Arthur didn't send the money to a bank. He shattered the $900,000 into a million tiny fragments and hid them inside the "Pending Transaction" logs of ten thousand different pizza delivery apps.
The System's violet light flashed angrily across the screen, searching for a "pile" of money to delete. But there was no pile. The money was a mist, scattered across the city's digital infrastructure.
[FINAL RECOVERY: $890,000.00 – SECURED IN GHOST PROTOCOL]
[The New Objective]
Arthur stood up, his ruined coat billowing behind him. He looked like a king who had just reclaimed his throne from the mud.
"We aren't going back to the penthouse," he said.
"Where then?" Sarah asked, clutching her phone, which was now buzzing with notifications of 'Credits Received' from a thousand ghost accounts.
"To the Old Docks. The Silvano Cartel warehouse."
"Boss, you have nearly a million dollars again. We could leave the country. Why go back to a den of killers?"
Arthur walked toward the exit, the violet glow in his eyes reflecting in the glass door. "Because the Man in White thinks money is my power. He's wrong. It's just my fuel. The Silvanos are holding something that doesn't belong to them—the first Core Fragment of the System. I'm going to take it, and then I'm going to use it to rewrite his 'Admin' privileges."
His phone buzzed. A message from Elena:
"You're the first person to ever outrun the System Tax. I'm impressed, Ghost. But the Silvanos aren't just mobsters anymore. They've been 'Upgraded'. Meet me at the South Gate. Don't be late."
Arthur stepped out into the rain. He had started the day with ten dollars. He was ending it with a war.