Chapter 243: The Calm Before Coffee
Stan woke to morning light filtering through the curtains of his apartment and the soft, persistent hum of the city beyond his window.
He blinked up at the ceiling for a moment, allowing consciousness to assemble itself, then reached for the phone resting on his bedside table.
The screen lit up.
Two system notifications sat at the top of the alert queue, both arriving sometime during the night.
[Amelia Don: Favorability +110]
[Amelia Don: Favorability +115]
Stan stared at them for several seconds.
"So she’s finally awake, huh?"
The words drifted into the empty room.
The conclusion was obvious. Favorability did not increase while a person was unconscious. The system had demonstrated that rule often enough for him to regard it as settled fact. For Amelia’s affection to rise, she had to be thinking. And thinking required consciousness.
Which meant she had awakened from the coma.
She had learned what had happened to her, discovered who had saved her life, and somehow managed to become even more attached to him than she had been before losing consciousness.
It meant she had learned enough about her rescuer to fall harder than she had been falling before she went under.
’Five days. I low-key wish she spent longer, not because I hate her or anything.’
A sigh escaped him, carrying a very specific kind of regret.
By any reasonable standard, it was the wrong thing to be regretting. He should have been relieved. A woman whose life he had risked his own to save had survived and recovered. Any normal person would have considered that an unqualified victory.
Unfortunately, Stan had long since ceased being a normal person.
More importantly, he possessed a system with extremely expensive opinions about financial transactions.
He had paid for thirty days of elite medical treatment.
Five days had been used and twenty-five remained.
If Amelia recovered and decided, as the favorability counter strongly suggested she would, that she needed to repay every dollar he had spent on her care, the system penalty would activate.
The rule was simple and merciless.
If a bound target returned money he had spent on her, he would be penalized one hundred times the amount repaid.
Thirty million dollars returned meant a three-billion-dollar penalty.
Three billion dollars was no longer a figure he could comfortably absorb from his liquid cash reserves, even after the Sophie windfall. His balance was substantial, but it wasn’t that substantial. Covering the penalty would require liquidating part of his holdings in either Wanhai or Star Entertainment.
And selling shares now, while the broader corporate intrigue remained unresolved and his ownership position had only recently become public, was exactly the sort of move that attracted unwanted attention.
Of course, he could simply refuse her repayment.
He had every right to do so.
The problem was that Amelia Don, currently sitting at one hundred and fifteen favorability and climbing, was not the type of woman who accepted refusal gracefully.
She would pursue the matter with the focused, relentless determination of someone whose worldview had been quietly reorganized around the man who had saved her life.
A prolonged battle with a stubborn heiress over whether she was allowed to thank him financially was precisely the sort of headache Stan had no interest in acquiring.
Still, the situation remained manageable.
The penalty only triggered if the money actually reached one of his accounts.
If Amelia didn’t have his banking information, she couldn’t transfer anything.
The hospital, however, did. His account details were on file from the original payment.
Stan made a mental note to call Regina Caeli later that morning and issue very clear instructions: under no circumstances was any patient, family member, or third party to be given access to his banking information.
The hospital should comply. After all, he was their single largest private payer of the year. In one transaction, he had spent more than many of their major clients spent over months.
’I’ve identified an incoming problem and I’ve prepared the mitigation. For now, this should be sufficient.’
Sighing, Stan set the matter aside.
He swung his legs out of bed and moved through his morning routine with the unhurried, almost meditative focus he reserved for the small rituals of waking up.
Cold water on his face, the familiar rhythm of brushing his teeth, and a brief glance into the bathroom mirror, confirming that he had, in fact, slept surprisingly well.
Only then did he return to the bed, settle against the headboard, and properly open his phone.
The notifications were the usual disaster.
[FaceChat Messenger: 1,247 unread.]
[TikTuk DMs: 1,892 unread.]
[Snapchat: 103 unread.]
Stan stared at the numbers for a moment before slowly shaking his head.
’Two weeks. That was all it had been.’
He sighed.
Two weeks since the system had activated. Two weeks since he had been a broke, mildly bullied college student with an embarrassing reputation for simping after Lily Xavier and a bank balance that wouldn’t have covered next month’s rent.
Now he was a multi-billionaire once his shareholdings were properly accounted for.
He was the publicly known major shareholder of the world’s largest entertainment company.
He owned forty percent of Wanhai Group.
Under the alias ’Sir Streak’, he had become the largest whale in TikTuk Live history and one of the platform’s most closely watched figures.
And, by most metrics that mattered to people his age, he was involved, in one form or another, with a remarkable percentage of Peak University’s recognized campus beauties, along with several other women who had entered his orbit since.
The sheer absurdity of it occasionally caught him off guard.
His former self wouldn’t have believed any of it.
The Stan of two weeks ago would have considered a casual greeting from Sophie Youngs the highlight of his month.
Now Sophie Youngs left her apartment door unlocked for him at midnight and cooked amazing food with a heart filled with love while waiting for him to arrive.
The comparison was almost laughable.
A slow breath left him, carrying equal parts gratitude and disbelief.
The system hadn’t merely given him money, it had given him power, real power.
Quietly. Steadily. Incrementally enough that he hadn’t fully appreciated the scale of it until recently.
His lifting strength now exceeded twice that of the strongest verified humans on record.
His reflexes operated in a different category entirely, reducing trained fighters to something that felt almost sluggish by comparison.
The steel door at the abandoned warehouse. The men at Velvet Pulse. The effortless way six professional bodyguards at Neon Pulse had collapsed in front of him.
Every incident pointed toward the same conclusion. Whatever the system was doing to him, it wasn’t finished.
And things that came for free rarely stayed free. That thought lingered longer than he liked.
He still didn’t know what the system actually was. He still didn’t know why it had chosen him.
Most importantly, he still didn’t know what price it intended to collect.
With his current capabilities, dismissing the existence of others like him felt increasingly naïve.
If one person could receive impossible abilities, then statistically speaking, there was little reason to believe he was unique.
Are there other system holders, modified humans, or something stranger, he was yet to know. But the terminology hardly mattered, after all, the possibility itself was enough.
Stan exhaled slowly and forced the thought away before it could gain momentum.
’Not this morning. Not before coffee.’
Some existential crises could wait until after caffeine.
