Leo woke up the next morning with a dull headache and a bank notification that made the headache irrelevant.
$1.56 million.
Sitting right there on the screen of his banking app, deposited overnight from PlayForge’s automated revenue disbursement system.
He stared at the screen longer than he probably should have.
Just a week ago, the man whose life he’d inherited was drowning in debt, buried under a failed startup with zero prospects.
Now, seven figures sat in the account, with three games quietly churning out passive income while he slept.
The number felt abstract, like play money on a leaderboard.
He had a feeling it wouldn’t register as real until he actually started moving it around.
So he did.
One by one, he started working through the mental ledger left behind by the original Leo Sinclair.
Every personal loan.
Every borrowed favor.
Every dollar that parents, friends, and old college buddies had poured into a studio that went nowhere.
He knocked them out methodically, watching each green confirmation checkmark land with a quiet, satisfying snap.
When the last transaction cleared, the balance settled at $1.21 million.
Then reality hit.
The initial glow faded as Leo stared at the total.
This was gross revenue, entirely untaxed.
As an independent developer, nobody was withholding taxes at the source for him.
The IRS expected its quarterly cut, and the mid-April deadline was exactly one week away.
He pulled up the IRS portal on his phone and immediately routed thirty percent into a dedicated tax account.
Just like that, the number plummeted to a little over $800,000.
It hurt to watch that much cash vanish with a single thumb tap, but getting audited in his first month of existence in this body would be a special kind of stupid.
Eight hundred grand.
Still plenty to work with.
For the first time since waking up in this body, the crushing weight behind his ribs finally let go.
Leo Sinclair was officially starting on a clean financial slate.
Now he could actually move forward.
The suburban apartment had to go.
The place was an absolute dump: no subway access, spotty delivery coverage, aging pipes that groaned every time he turned on a faucet, and a persistent mold smell that no amount of scrubbing could kill.
He had tolerated it because the original Leo was broke.
The new Leo was not.
He booked a commercial property agent online, shoved what little he owned into two duffel bags and a backpack, and walked out.
The stench of damp drywall followed him all the way to the curb.
He didn’t look back once.
The agent’s name was Ethan Park.
Gold-rimmed glasses, hair slicked back with surgical precision, and the kind of relentless enthusiasm that probably won him Employee of the Month every quarter.
He met Leo at the agency office with a firm, practiced handshake and tapped his clipboard.
“Got three office spaces and seven apartments queued up for today,” Ethan said, giving him a quick, professional smile.
“How do you want to handle the order?” Leo paused for a second, glancing out toward the street before looking back.
“Let’s start with the offices.” The first stop was on the seventeenth floor of a high-rise tower in Seattle’s financial district.
Floor-to-ceiling glass, panoramic skyline views, pristine marble accents.
The asking price?
$450,000 a year.
Leo lasted about ninety seconds inside.
The layout was built for a fifty-person firm burning venture capital money, not a solo dev operating a secret System out of his own head.
He could practically hear his remaining $800,000 screaming in agony.
“Next.” The second option was a standalone building tucked into an older industrial pocket.
Six thousand square feet, private entrance, street parking.
The blueprint had potential, but the reality was depressing.
Peeling paint, visible water damage, and wiring that looked older than the dial-up era.
Worse, the plumbing was ancient, featuring a single, cramped unisex bathroom in the basement that smelled faintly of rusty copper and damp concrete.
Leo pictured himself trekking down two flights of creaky stairs at 2 AM in the middle of a crunch session just to use a flickering, dungeon-like bathroom and immediately shut it down.
“Next.” Ethan, to his credit, didn’t flinch.
He just pushed his glasses up his nose and drove them to the third location.
This one was different.
It sat at the edge of a quiet neighborhood built around a failed pedestrian shopping district.
The city had tried turning the area into a bustling commercial strip a few years back, but the slightly out-of-the-way location made retail shops bail early.
What remained was a clean, sturdy block of modern mixed-use buildings surrounded by a residential pocket that had quietly settled in around it.
Seven stories tall.
Ground floor retail, six floors of office space at roughly 2,600 square feet each.
All six office floors were sitting vacant.
Leo walked through slowly, testing the drywall, checking the outlets, and running the bathroom faucets on the second floor.
Everything was in great shape.
The building was newer than the second option by a decade, and someone had actually maintained the HVAC.
“Subway’s about a five-minute walk,” Ethan said, keeping pace.
“And three of the apartments on your list are in the residential complex literally right next door.” Office and living space within two minutes of each other.
Zero commute.
Zero wasted hours.
For a guy building a studio from scratch while secretly managing a sentient game development System, that level of proximity was worth ten times more than a fancy downtown view.
“What’s the rent for the office space?” Ethan glanced at his notes.
“$96,000 a year for one floor, roughly $8,000 a month.
Or around $490,000 if you want to lock down all six floors.” Leo ran the numbers in his head.
Eight thousand a month for a 2,600-square-foot space in Seattle was an incredible price for this quality.
He could lock down one floor now, then absorb the upper levels as the company grew.
“One floor is plenty to get us started,” Leo said, taking one last look across the open space.
“Alright, let’s go check out the apartments.” The apartment tours blurred together after the third unit.
Similar open layouts, neutral finishes, polished concrete.
Leo ended up picking an 860-square-foot two-bedroom with massive windows that caught the morning light.
Modern, spotless, and fully furnished, it was priced at $3,500 a month.
It felt like a completely different dimension from the suburban mold trap he’d fled that morning.
He signed both leases before the afternoon was out.
Between the $96,000 annual office rent and $42,000 for the apartment, the total came out to just under $140,000 for the year.
Given what he’d braced himself to spend in Seattle, the price felt almost generous.
By early evening, the moving crew had hauled over his few remaining possessions.
It wasn’t much to look at: some salvaged hardware from the failed original startup, his primary computer rig, and a few stray boxes of personal clutter.
He had everything unpacked and set up in under three hours.
Leo stood near the windows of the vast, quiet office floor, hands resting in his pockets as he looked down at the street below.
One massive room of polished concrete.
One desk.
One chair.
One laptop.
It was the bare skeleton of an empire, if you looked close enough.
Next on the list was hiring actual human beings.
He needed a tight, reliable core team to start: a talented UI designer, maybe a solid junior dev, and someone who could run QA without needing constant hand-holding.
The System could handle the brutal computational heavy lifting, but Leo couldn’t keep running as a mysterious one-man black box forever.
Eventually, the ambitious projects he wanted to ship would need visible human hands in the pipeline, or the industry would start asking questions he couldn’t deflect.
But that was a headache for next week.
Tonight, he simply wanted to sit in a room that didn’t smell like damp drywall and marvel at how far a few days of absurd luck and a rogue AI engine could push a man’s life.
His phone vibrated in his palm.
A breaking alert popped across the screen: TRENDING: The Nameless Rogue drops surprise title.
Plants vs.
Zombies shatters PlayForge’s all-time day-one download record.
Leo tapped the notification.
James hadn’t wasted a single minute.
Plants vs.
Zombies was already front and center, pinned to the top of PlayForge’s storefront beneath a massive promotional banner: A brand-new title from The Nameless Rogue.
The game that changes everything.
The active download counter was spinning so fast the numbers were a complete blur, and half the top channels on PulseStream were already broadcasting live playthroughs.
Leo looked at the live metrics on his phone, then looked back out across the empty, echoing office floor.
“Yeah,” he muttered to himself with a faint smile.
“I’m definitely gonna need a bigger desk.”
P.S.
Tax logic gap?
Solved.
Author’s brilliance?
Unmatched.
Jokes aside, keep pointing out those logic gaps when you spot them, it helps me out way more than you think!
Just try not to lean too far into the trash-talk, y’know.
Thanks for sticking around and keep the feedback and support coming.
Speaking of support…
hit that Power Stone button!
Plz.
I thrive on them.