Chapter 41: Money can be made.

Karl, while seated on the bed, proceeds to check out the rewards, which were the money spins he was doing.

The events of the past few days had been a relentless avalanche of violence and victory.

Paying off a crime boss, winning a regional tournament, dodging physical threats, and somehow accumulating a small group of people who looked to him for direction had left a lingering soreness deep in his muscles.

He let out a long, slow breath and focused his mind, staring at the empty space in front of his knees.

’System. Open the interface.’

The pale blue screen unfolded in the center of his vision, bathing the dim bedroom in a soft, ethereal light. He bypassed the tabs for his newly established hamlet and the syndicate management, navigating straight to the reward he had left waiting in escrow.

For the quests he had been doing, he could spin three times; every single slot on the wheel had a question mark.

The blue text dissolved, reassembling itself into a massive, ornate golden wheel that hovered silently in the air right in front of him.

Karl studied the wheel carefully. It was divided into several equal sections, but instead of displaying prize amounts, items, or skill upgrades, there were no guarantees visible.

There was absolutely no way to calculate the odds or predict the outcome. It was a pure, blind gamble provided by an entity that had completely hijacked his reality.

’Three pulls,’ Karl thought, his heart performing a sudden, erratic flutter against his ribs. ’Let us see exactly what kind of windfalls we are talking about.’

He reached his hand forward. The golden light washed over his skin, casting long, shifting shadows against the white walls of his quiet room.

He tapped the glowing center of the wheel with his mind.

The massive construct groaned, emitting a deep, resonant sound that seemed to vibrate directly within his skull, and then it began to spin. The glowing symbols blurred into a continuous ring of golden light.

Karl watched it, his breathing shallow, waiting for the momentum to die down.

The wheel slowed, clicking rhythmically as it ticked past the unseen slots.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

It ground to a halt. A bright flash illuminated the room, and a notification box materialized over the wheel.

Reward acquired: 4,000 dollars.

Taking a deep breath, he did the first spin and got 4000 dollars.

Karl stared at the number, waiting for the familiar rush of adrenaline that usually accompanied a financial win. It never came. A few months ago, that amount of money would have changed his entire life.

It would have meant his mother could take an entire month off from the grueling shifts at the depot. But now, after holding tens of thousands of dollars in a canvas bag and walking away from a crime boss, it which didnt really excite him all that much.

It was a good safety net, certainly, but it was not the massive windfall he needed to fund a syndicate or cement his position in the city.

’I have two more tries,’ Karl reminded himself, rolling his shoulders to release the tension building in his neck. ’I just need one solid hit.’

He focused his intent and activated the wheel for a second time.

The golden structure spun again, much faster this time, the heavy clicking sound merging into a high-pitched, metallic hum.

Karl leaned forward, his hands resting flat on the mattress, his dark eyes tracking the blur of light.

He did not know what he was hoping for, maybe a hundred thousand, maybe enough to buy this extravagant penthouse outright so he would never have to worry about the rent again.

The wheel began to slow. The hum dropped back into individual, agonizing clicks. It ticked past one slot, hesitated directly on the dividing line, and finally settled firmly on the next.

The light that erupted from the interface was blinding.

Karl actually had to lift a hand to shield his eyes for a fraction of a second. When the glare faded, the numbers hovering in the air refused to make sense to his human brain.

Reward acquired: 500,000,000 dollars.

He had waited, completely numb, until he did the second, and found a total of, 500,000,000 being rewarded to him.

Karl completely stopped breathing. The air in his lungs turned into solid lead. He stared at the nine digits, his brain flatly refusing to process the information.

Five hundred million. Half a billion dollars. It was a number that belonged to corporate titans and heads of state, not a twenty-one-year-old college student sitting on a hotel-quality mattress in a quiet room.

His hands began to shake violently. A cold sweat broke out across the back of his neck. He reached into his pocket with trembling fingers and pulled out his cracked phone, desperate to anchor himself to physical reality.

He opened his banking application, the screen taking an agonizing two seconds to load over the wireless network.

The numbers appeared, overlapping the jagged crack in the glass. He checked his phone and the money was truly in his bank account.

The balance stretched across the screen, a sprawling line of digits that made his chest physically ache with the sheer pressure of it.

Charlotte’s voice flared in the quiet space of his mind, carrying a sharp edge of genuine concern.

[Master. Your heart rate has elevated to dangerous levels. Are you under attack? Please give me the word, and I will manifest immediately.]

’I am fine, Charlotte,’ Karl replied silently, forcing himself to swallow the dry lump in his throat. ’I am just in shock. The system just gave me something impossible.’

Raziel chimed in a second later, his deep voice carrying a cynical weight.

[I find the mortal obsession with arbitrary numbers entirely amusing, Administrator. Though I will admit, even I can sense the substantial shift in your resources. You have conquered a new type of territory today.]

Karl looked back up at the golden wheel, which was now pulsing with a soft, inviting warmth. He could not believe his eyes but he truly wanted to try again.

He needed to know if the interface would correct the massive error or if the reality bending around him would snap back into its previous shape.

He had one final spin remaining, and his curiosity was completely overpowering his fear.

He did not hesitate. He fired the wheel for the third and final time.

The spin felt entirely different. It was smoother, lacking the heavy, grinding noise of the previous attempts.

Karl watched it with completely numb detachment, his mind still heavily tethered to the half billion dollars resting quietly in his pocket. The wheel slowed, ticked to a perfect stop, and flashed one last time.

[Reward acquired: 70,000,000 dollars.]

He watched the screen update, and this time, he got 70,000,000 dollars from it.

Karl slowly lowered his cracked phone. He placed it carefully on the pristine white sheets of his bed, treating the cheap plastic device as if it were a live explosive. He had just pulled five hundred and seventy million dollars out of thin air in less than three minutes.

A sudden, highly practical thought pierced through the overwhelming fog of his newfound wealth. He picked his phone back up, pulling up a search browser with clumsy fingers. He looked up the federal tax regulations for sudden lottery winnings and massive cash deposits in his specific region. The percentages displayed on the government website were brutal, high enough to make any normal person weep in frustration.

But as Karl ran the math in his head, calculating the deductions against the massive whole, he let out a short, completely humorless laugh. There was so much money sitting in his accounts that so much the taxes he was supposed to pay looked like mere shit to him. Even after the government took its massive, unfair cut, he would still possess more wealth than he could reasonably spend in three lifetimes.

The funds had him surprised, as there were so many things he could do with such money. He could completely buy out Yajn and the entire Black Snakes organization, turning their hideouts into parking lots.

He could purchase Miss Vera’s ex-boyfriend’s software company and dismantle it piece by piece just for the sport of watching the arrogant man cry again.

He could set his mother up in a private fortress where no one would ever be able to reach her, and he could hand Elsa the professional esports roster she had always dreamed of commanding.

As he sat there, letting the absolute magnitude of the situation wash over him, a familiar chime echoed in the quiet space of his mind.

The golden wheel dissolved, fading away into nothingness, and the interface snapped back to its standard, pale blue layout. Then the system hit him with a quest, telling him to invest 74% of the money.

[Quest Alert: The Architect of Wealth.

Objective: Liquidate your assets and put your capital to work. Invest the required percentage of your total current funds into real-world business ventures, properties, or infrastructure.

Reward: Pending processing.]

Karl read the floating text carefully, noting the exact stipulations, and the reward was a 100% rebate on the amount he spent.

He sat perfectly still on the edge of the mattress. The gears in his mind, usually focused on reading enemy movements and calculating weapon cooldown timers, shifted entirely to dissecting the system’s underlying logic.

If he invested the required percentage, the system would simply hand the money right back to him. There was zero financial risk involved.

It was a closed, infinite loop of wealth generation. He would gain the assets, the power, and the influence of the massive investments, and lose absolutely none of his initial capital in the process.

Karl realized the system was doing all this just for the sole purpose of making him a better person.

It was orchestrating his rise to power, step by careful step, as it was way too convenient for the quests he keeps receiving.

From giving him the physical strength to fight off thugs in a cafeteria, to providing the exact funds he needed to protect his family from extortion, and now handing him an economic empire on a silver platter.

The entity in his head was actively grooming him, pushing him to conquer the physical world just as he conquered the digital one.

Good, he wasn’t going to complain since he knew the system could improve him as a person.

He reached for his phone again, gripping it with a newfound, unshakable steadiness. The frantic panic from a few minutes ago was entirely gone, replaced by the cold, absolute focus of a top-tier player looking at a fresh, vulnerable map waiting to be claimed.

So if he was supposed to invest the money, he had a few ideas.