Milan was a city that knew how to look expensive even when it was freezing you to death.
Elias van Kempen, fifty years old and suffocating under the weight of a life misspent, sat in the corner of a drafty, rented apartment. The radiator had given up three days ago, leaving the air inside feeling like the inside of a meat locker. But the cold seeping into his bones wasn’t what made his hands tremble. It was the paper.
In his hands rested a stack of final notices, legal demands, and royalty statements. He stared at the bottom line of the most recent envelope from his former label. The number was printed in a neat, clinical font.
$0.00.
Thirty-four years. He had given thirty-four years to the machine. He had climbed from the gritty, unglamorous bottom of catalog modeling to the absolute pinnacle of global iconography. He had possessed a face that sold millions of dollars in cologne, a voice that conquered the Billboard charts, and an aura that made the world’s most elite women—actresses, pop divas, supermodels—look twice. He had been on the cover of magazines in eleven different countries.
Yet, here he was. Rent was three months past due. His bank accounts had been frozen by a syndicated web of lawyers representing a studio he had helped build.
From the thin plaster wall of the adjacent apartment, a muffled sound bled into the room. It was a radio, tuned to a nostalgic pop station. The opening chords of a song began to play. It was a massive, generation-defining hit from 1998.
Elias closed his eyes. The voice singing through the static of the neighbor’s radio was his own.
He listened to the familiar baritone, the carefully produced hook that had once dominated the summer airwaves across the globe. That single track had sold over two million physical copies. It had been licensed for movies, commercials, and television shows. It had bought yachts for record executives and funded the summer homes of A&R managers.
And Elias didn’t own a single second of it.
Buyout. The word echoed in his mind like a death sentence. When he was twenty-three, desperate for relevance and starving for the spotlight, he had signed a contract that gave away his master recordings and his publishing rights for a one-time advance of seventy-five thousand dollars. He hadn’t just sold a song; he had sold the financial anchor of his future. The American terrestrial radio stations played that song millions of times over the next two decades, generating untold wealth for the publisher. Under US copyright law, terrestrial radio paid the writers and publishers, not the performers.
Fame was a lie. Fame was a landlord that evicted you the moment your face started to wrinkle. Ownership was the only truth. Being paid and owning something were two entirely different universes, and he had learned the distinction far too late.
A violent, rattling cough seized his chest. Elias dropped the papers, clutching his throat as a sharp pain pierced his lungs. His vision blurred at the edges, the cold room spinning into a muted gray. He wasn’t dying of any grand, romantic disease. He was simply dying of exhaustion. He had run the rat race at maximum speed for three decades, only to realize the track belonged to someone else.
If I could just do it again, he thought, his breathing growing shallow, his pulse fading into a distant drum. I wouldn’t just read the script. I would read the damn contract.
The radio next door hit the chorus of his stolen song.
Then, there was only darkness.
He woke up with a violent gasp, his chest heaving as if he had just broken the surface of a frozen lake.
Elias shot up, his hands instinctively gripping the sheets. But the sheets weren’t the cheap, scratchy polyester of his Milan apartment. They were thin, worn cotton, smelling faintly of cheap detergent and mildew.
He blinked, his eyes adjusting to the dim, gray light filtering through a narrow window. This wasn’t Italy. The ceiling was too low, slanted sharply under the roof tiles. There was a water stain in the corner shaped vaguely like the map of Europe.
He looked down at his hands. The liver spots were gone. The fine tremors of a fifty-year-old man worn down by stress and whiskey were completely absent. His skin was smooth, tight, and uncalloused. He threw off the blanket and stared at his legs. They were absurdly long, hanging off the edge of a mattress that was entirely too short for his 189-centimeter frame.
He wasn’t fifty. He was a teenager.
"Elias!"
A voice drifted up from the floorboards below. It was a woman’s voice, sharp, practical, and laced with the undeniable warmth of a mother who had too many bills and too little time.
"Elias, cepat turun! Kopi sudah dingin, rotinya nanti makin keras!"
Elias froze. His breath caught in his throat. That was Indonesian. Mixed with a heavy Dutch accent. It was a voice he hadn’t heard in eleven years, not since her funeral in 2014.
Rina Suryadi. His mother.
He slowly swung his long legs over the side of the bed, his bare feet touching the cold wooden floorboards. He was in Den Haag. The Hague. The "Widow of the Indies." The city where thousands of the Dutch-Indonesian diaspora had been deposited decades ago, expected to build lives out of thin air and gratitude.
It was the spring of 1991. He was sixteen years old.
Elias didn’t scream. He didn’t drop to his knees and thank God or the cosmos for a second chance. The mind inside this gangly, starving sixteen-year-old body was still the mind of a fifty-year-old man who had navigated the most treacherous shark tanks in Hollywood and Wall Street. He processed the impossible reality with clinical precision.
He stood up, his stomach immediately letting out a hollow growl. The grinding, mathematical poverty of his youth hit him like a physical blow. This wasn’t the romanticized poverty of movies; this was the kind of poverty where you knew exactly how many slices of bread were left in the plastic bag downstairs, and you knew exactly how many days it had to last.
As he walked toward the door, his eyes swept over a small, battered wooden desk in the corner. Resting against the wall was a stack of old vinyl records his mother had bought from a flea market. The one facing front caught his eye, and the irony of it hit him so hard he actually let out a dry, cynical laugh.
The record was by a band called Shocking Blue. The lead singer’s name was printed on the sleeve: Mariska Veres.
Elias walked over and picked up the dusty vinyl, his thumb tracing the name. Mariska Veres. In his previous life, in the year 1998, he had taken a song she had written back in 1974. A song she had sold the publishing rights to for a miserable four hundred pounds because she didn’t know any better. He had sung that song, turned it into a global sensation, and the exact same industry had robbed him of the master rights just as cleanly as they had robbed her of the publishing.
Two generations of fools, holding the same piece of paper, both dying with nothing while the executives in Madison Avenue and Los Angeles bought their third vacation homes.
"Not this time, Mariska," Elias whispered, setting the record down. "This time, we collect the rent."
He stepped into the tiny attached bathroom and pulled the pull-string for the light. The bulb flickered to life, illuminating a cracked, water-spotted mirror.
Elias stared at his reflection. It was the face that would eventually be his greatest weapon and his greatest curse. His mixed heritage—the sharp, aristocratic Dutch bone structure inherited from a father who had abandoned them, combined with the exotic, deeply striking warmth of his Indonesian mother—created an ambiguity that the camera loved. It was a face that casting directors couldn’t place. It could be sold as Southern Italian, Spanish, Latin American, or Middle Eastern. In his past life, he had let them sell it for cheap. He had let them put him in bottom-tier catalogs.
As he stared at his reflection, a strange sensation washed over his brain. It wasn’t a headache, but a sudden, terrifying clarity. He closed his eyes.
The 1994 Calvin Klein contract. He could see it. He could see page fourteen, paragraph three, subsection B. The exclusivity clause that had trapped him. The 2008 Lehman Brothers collapse. He remembered the exact date the subprime mortgage bubble burst, the exact derivative markets that bled out. The Apple stock price in 1997. Five cents.
His memory wasn’t just intact. It was a flawless, high-resolution archive of thirty-four years of global financial, cultural, and corporate history. A photographic ledger of every trap, every booming trend, every box-office hit, and every piece of distressed asset that would turn into gold.
Suddenly, a sound erupted directly inside his cerebral cortex. It was obnoxiously loud, entirely devoid of any angelic or magical grace. It sounded exactly like the violent slam of an old, heavy-duty mechanical cash register.
[CHA-CHING!]
Elias staggered back, gripping the edges of the sink.
Before his eyes, the physical world seemed to dim, replaced by a semi-transparent screen projecting straight into his retinas. It wasn’t a mystical fantasy interface. It looked like an old, CRT stock trading terminal from Wall Street, glowing with harsh green and red phosphorescent text. Numbers scrolled rapidly in the background, like a ticker tape of global misery.
A block of text solidified in the center of his vision.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION COMPLETE.][WELCOME TO THE SHAMELESS CAPITALIST SYSTEM.]
Elias narrowed his eyes. He didn’t panic. He analyzed the data scrolling in front of him.
[USER STATUS ALIGNMENT: ELIAS SURYADI VAN KEMPEN][CURRENT LIQUID CASH: €0.00][SOCIAL CLASS: ABSOLUTE POVERTY / BOTTOM TIER][ASSETS OWNED: NONE]
[WARNING: THE SYSTEM DOES NOT PROVIDE CHARITY. ALL MIRACLES MUST BE PURCHASED. MONTHLY MAINTENANCE FEES WILL COMMENCE SHORTLY. FAILURE TO MAINTAIN ADEQUATE LIQUIDITY WILL RESULT IN PENALTIES AND SOCIAL DEATH.]
Elias let out a low whistle. A system. Not a benevolent god giving him superpowers, but a digital loan shark attaching itself to his consciousness. It didn’t offer magic; it demanded capital.
He focused his mind, mentally navigating the archaic green interface. A secondary menu dropped down, revealing a [SHOP]. He scanned the items.
[Facial Symmetry Golden Ratio 99.9% - Subscription Required] [Alpha Playboy Aura - 5,000 Shameless Points (CP)] [Corporate X-Ray Scan - 10 CP per use] [Oscar-Level Micro-Expressions - 50,000 CP]
The prices were extortionate. It was a predatory pricing model designed to bleed him dry. The system was telling him that he could have the world—he could have the perfect pitch, the perfect face, the ultimate intimidating aura to crush any executive in a boardroom—but he had to pay for every single millimeter of it. He would have to hustle. He would have to abandon every ounce of his pride, scrape together cash, and generate ’Shameless Points’ by doing exactly what the name implied: being absolutely, unapologetically shameless in the pursuit of wealth.
Most people would be terrified by this parasitic HUD. They would cry at the unfairness of being reborn into extreme poverty only to be saddled with a cosmic debt collector.
Elias van Kempen threw his head back and laughed.
It was a cold, elegant, sociopathic laugh. The laugh of a man who had finally found the right battlefield.
He loved it. He absolutely adored it. For thirty-four years, he had tried to play by the rules of art, passion, and loyalty, and the institutions had chewed him up and spit him out. Now, he was bound to a system that operated on the only language the world actually respected: leverage, extortion, and cold, hard cash.
"Elias!" Rina’s voice snapped from the bottom of the stairs, sounding more irritated now. "If you don’t come down right now, your brother is eating your share of the bread!"
Elias looked at his reflection one last time. The green light of the system reflected in his dark, predatory eyes. He didn’t have a single cent to his name. He didn’t even have the train fare to get to Amsterdam. But he had a brain full of tomorrow’s gold, and a loan shark in his head driving him forward.
In my last life, I just read their contracts, Elias thought, adjusting the collar of his worn-out pajamas as if it were a bespoke Tom Ford suit. This time, I’m the one who writes the clauses. And I am going to bleed them dry.
He turned off the bathroom light and walked out to conquer the world.