The soft, rhythmic chime of the wall-mounted television was the only sound cutting through the oppressive, three-thousand-square-foot stillness of the master penthouse bedroom.
On the screen, a perfectly coiffed news anchor adjusted her posture, her expression shifting into that practiced, somber gravity reserved for tragedies involving ten-figure net worths.
Behind her, a rolling graphic displayed a sleek corporate logo alongside photographs of a middle-aged man and woman smiling with the distant, flawless confidence of old American capital.
“Breaking news from the coast of Nova Scotia,” the anchor announced, her voice clipped and pristine.
“Billionaires Mark Sterling and Josephine Sterling have been confirmed dead following a private jet crash over the Atlantic Ocean. Authorities report catastrophic engine failure during a severe localized storm. Coast Guard rescue teams report no survivors. The market is already reacting, with Sterling Global Resources stock expected to experience significant volatility following the sudden vacancy in executive leadership…”
I wasn’t listening.
Because I had a much bigger problem than a corporate power vacuum.
“Huh?”
The syllable left my throat as a dry, unformed croak.
I stared blankly at the massive liquid-crystal display, then lowered my gaze to the floor beneath me.
The rug was a thick, seamless expanse of hand-woven white silk that looked like it had never encountered a single speck of Manhattan street grime.
My legs were stretched out on the edge of a bed large enough to comfortably host a minor diplomatic summit.
“Where am I?” I muttered, turning my head slowly.
The room wasn’t just larger than my old apartment.
It was larger than my entire previous apartment building.
The walls were clad in book-matched Calacatta marble and dark, matte-finished walnut panels.
Floor-to-ceiling glass offered a sweeping, unobstructed panoramic view of Central Park, the autumn trees looking like tiny patches of moss under the grey, weeping sky.
Then the memories hit.
Marvel.
The pillar.
The system.
The coin toss.
The rich family.
“Oh.”
I blinked.
“Oh yeah.”
I was in Marvel.
I looked down at my hands.
They weren’t the tired hands of someone who had spent his life counting every dollar.
The skin was smooth, the knuckles unblemished, the fingers long and elegant.
A quick glance at a nearby mirror revealed a handsome teenager with black hair and sharp features.
Then another wave of memories crashed into me.
Chris Sterling.
Sixteen years old.
Only son of Mark Sterling and Josephine Sterling.
The Sterling family.
One of the largest mining dynasties in America.
Estimated family net worth: Forty billion dollars.
“…”
I stared at my reflection.
Then at the television.
Then back at my reflection.
“So I really got the rich option.”
The news continued.
“Sterling Global Resources stock is expected to experience significant volatility following the tragedy.”
“And I’m an orphan.”
I paused.
Actually…
was I possessing a body?
I frowned.
The pillar never said anything about possession.
Maybe this was a reincarnation that had finally reconnected with its true self, or maybe it was a structural merge of two timelines.
Either way, Chris’s memories felt entirely real.
His emotions felt real too—and they weren’t pleasant.
Anger.
Resentment.
Frustration.
Years and years of it pooling in the dark corners of his mind.
I winced, rubbing my temples.
“Damn.”
The emotions weren’t directed at me.
They were directed entirely at his parents.
Mark Sterling.
Josephine Sterling.
The perfect billionaire couple.
The perfect billionaire parents.
The perfect controllers.
Every decision had been made for him.
Every hobby approved by them.
Every friend investigated.
Every class selected.
Every future planned down to the exact fiscal quarter.
The memories made my head hurt, echoing with the cold, measured cadence of a father who viewed his only son as a corporate asset rather than a human being.
“They compared me constantly,” I muttered, Chris’s voice mixing with my own thoughts.
‘Why can’t you be more disciplined?’
‘Why aren’t your grades higher?’
‘Why don’t you take the company seriously?’
I rubbed my temples again, taking a deep breath.
Then I remembered my old life before the void.
The cramped apartment, the depressing minimum-wage salary, the constant calculation of whether I could afford groceries or heating for the month.
I looked back at the sprawling marble bathroom and the silk sheets, and immediately felt ridiculous.
“What a rich people problem,” I laughed, a dry, sarcastic sound that bounced off the high ceiling.
“Oh no. My billionaire parents control everything. At least you have money, kid. I used to worry about the cost of a turnstile swipe.”
The laughter died quickly, though.
Because the emotions remained stubbornly locked in the nerve endings of this body.
Chris had genuinely, deeply hated them.
Not because they were physically abusive, but because they had suffocated every single spark of his personal freedom under the guise of an elite legacy.
I sat on the edge of the enormous bed, forcing the emotional noise to settle into a neat, organized filing cabinet inside my mind.
“Okay. Deep breath.”
“New life.”
“Dead parents.”
“Marvel.”
“Money system.”
I needed priorities.
If I was going to survive in a universe where gods threw planets at each other and secret organizations ran the government from the shadows, I couldn’t waste my time attending high-society galas and weeping over people I had never actually met.
First priority: Money.
Lots of money.
Liquid capital.
The system I had bartered for with that celestial coin flip didn’t care about net worth.
It didn’t care about Forbes rankings, corporate valuations, or how many analysts thought Sterling Global Resources was worth.
It cared about one thing.
Wealth I could actually command.
Money sitting in an account I controlled.
Assets I could legally sell.
Resources under my authority.
The Sterling family might have been worth forty billion dollars on paper, but most of that wealth existed as mines, infrastructure, equipment, shipping contracts, and corporate holdings tangled in enough legal paperwork to kill a small forest.
To the system, those numbers were meaningless.
If I couldn’t spend it, transfer it, or liquidate it, it wasn’t mine.
At this exact moment, despite technically belonging to one of the richest families in America, my usable balance was effectively zero.
That was a problem.
Then memories immediately provided a highly specific, beautifully transactional piece of information.
Trust fund.
Chris had one.
A very large one.
It was a legally independent entity established by his grandfather, designed to bypass his parents’ constant micro-management.
On his seventeenth birthday—which was exactly three weeks away—he was scheduled to receive full, unmonitored access to a liquid sum that made my previous life look like a rounding error.
Instinctively, I tried to access the system.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then a translucent blue screen flickered into existence.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
RIMURU EVOLUTION FRAMEWORK
STATUS: DORMANT
MINIMUM ACTIVATION REQUIREMENT
$100,000
CURRENT RECOGNIZED BALANCE
$0
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
“…”
I stared at the screen.
The screen stared back.
“You’re telling me I need a hundred thousand dollars just to turn you on?”
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
AFFIRMATIVE
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
I closed my eyes.
Of course.
Of course the money-based system required money before it would even start functioning.
The screen vanished.
Good.
But three weeks was a lifetime in a world this volatile.
I needed an immediate infusion of capital to get my system online.
Right now, I didn’t have a single cent allocated to the interface, meaning my baseline capabilities hadn’t even sparked to life.
I was just a regular, squishy human teenager who could get taken out by a mugger with a cheap revolver.
I searched through the memories, pushing past the fragmented pages of private tutors and restrictive schedules.
Then another memory surfaced.
A drunken conversation.
Mark Sterling.
A glass of single-malt whiskey.
A rare moment of raw, paranoid honesty in the dead of night.
“If your mother ever divorces me and tries to strip the assets, Chris… she’ll never find it. None of them will. The lawyers think they know every ledger, but they only see what the accountants want them to see.”
My eyes widened.
I stood up instantly, my fingers twitching.
Wait.
What?
“There was another account.”
A hidden account.
Offshore.
Separate from family finances.
A secret emergency fund.
The kind of safety net paranoid ultra-rich people created when they expected massive, rich-people problems.
And Chris knew exactly where the access information was hidden.
Or at least, he remembered the physical vessel his father used to access it.
I searched through the memories, forcing my mind to piece together the broken fragments.
Come on.
Come on.
Think.
A laptop.
There was a laptop.
An old, completely unbranded, heavily modified one.
It was never connected to the company network, never plugged into the family servers, and completely disconnected from anything that could be tracked by a digital footprint.
Where was it?
Then the answer appeared, clear and vivid enough to make me freeze before bursting into a fit of pure, unadulterated laughter.
“The Corolla.”
Of course.
Of course the billionaire mining king hid his multi-million-dollar offshore liferaft inside a rusted, thirty-year-old Japanese compact car.
The memory became perfectly sharp.
Mark loved that car.
Not because it was expensive, but because it was his first.
He used to tell the story every single year at Thanksgiving like a tedious corporate sermon.
How his father had forced him to work minimum-wage jobs at a gravel quarry to understand the value of labor.
How he had saved for months.
How he had bought the old Corolla with six paychecks and a tiny personal loan.
How he had driven it until his knuckles bled.
When he finally inherited the empire, the car was never sold, never restored, and never displayed to the public.
It sat forgotten inside one of the estate’s subterranean garages in Westchester, completely surrounded by pristine Ferraris, customized Lamborghinis, and armored Rolls-Royces.
An ugly, beige monument to his own self-made mythos.
I stepped out of the master suite and finally got a proper look at the penthouse.
The place was absurd.
The bedroom alone was larger than my entire previous apartment.
Beyond it stretched an open living area that looked more like the lobby of a luxury hotel than a home.
Floor-to-ceiling windows wrapped around three sides of the building, painting everything in the grey light of the storm outside.
A grand piano sat untouched near the glass.
A private library occupied an entire wall.
The dining table could comfortably seat twenty people.
Not that anyone would be using it anytime soon.
The memories told me this wasn’t even the entire residence.
The penthouse occupied the top three floors of the building.
The upper level contained the private suites.
The middle level was designed for entertaining investors, politicians, and executives.
The lower level housed security facilities, staff accommodations, storage rooms, and direct access to the private garage.
Forty billion dollars.
Apparently this was what forty billion dollars looked like.
And somehow it still felt empty.
I grinned, a sharp, predatory expression settling over my new face.
I grabbed a heavy grey wool coat from the walk-in wardrobe, checking the pockets until I found the encrypted electronic proximity fobs for the penthouse elevator and the private garage below.
“Looks like I’m going treasure hunting.”
The silence followed me all the way to the elevator.
A pair of polished steel doors waited at the end of the hallway.
No guards.
No servants.
No family.
Just silence.
I pressed the garage button.
The doors slid open.
The elevator looked more like a private lounge than a transport system.
Dark wood paneling, deep leather seating, and enough space to fit an entire family comfortably.
I stepped inside.
The doors closed.
For a moment, the only sound was the low mechanical hum of the descent.
My hand slipped into my pocket, fingers wrapping around the key fob.
Somewhere in Westchester sat an ancient Corolla.
Inside that Corolla was a laptop.
Inside that laptop was potentially the first real step toward power.
The elevator continued descending.
For the first time since waking up in this body, I found myself genuinely smiling.
Treasure hunt it was.
See you in the next chapter!