"Major news! The price of the LCA conglomerate stocks is declining at an astounding rate! Masses are dumping the shares. Collapse imminent."
Daniel read the title of the newspaper in the comfort of his small office.
It was a weird feeling, to see the collapse of the unstoppable empire that he built over three separate lives of his.
A collapse that he himself caused.
'With this, I cut them off the majority of their funding,' Daniel thought as he took a deep breath and turned the page.
"Deescalation measures implemented at the east Asian front. The fighting is expected to conclude soon."
"To think that the economic news would be on the first page while the last twitches of the third world war would only make it to the second page…" Daniel muttered while shaking his head.
Humans never ceased to amaze him. And now that he fully knew how he wasn't the same kind of human as all those who were born before his original death, he found it all the easier to detach himself from the rest of the world's population.
"Sir Elyon," Daniel's new secretary entered his office with a tray in her hand.
She was a normal human. A mere mortal that would die within less than fifty years from now.
And yet…
With her two master's degrees and one doctor's degree, all in the STEM fields, she was only qualified to work as a secretary in Daniel's new company.
The middle-aged woman didn't seem to mind her role, though.
She put down the tray on the small stool beside Daniel's main table before moving the cup of hot coffee made out of freshly ground Sumatran beans and a plate of non-sugar, wheat cookies directly onto Daniel's desk.
A disaster in the eyes of the modern communists who called themselves the woke generation. The absolute degradation of such a successful career woman.
And nothing less but a dream job for the woman herself.
The pay that Daniel offered to his selected few employees was just that damn good.
"The war is finally coming to an end," Daniel muttered, giving his voice just enough attention to keep its new tone.
Whenever he would change his identity, he would pull at the stops. Not a single element of his original self or former sub-self would be left the same. And at least three hundred years would have to pass before Daniel would use the traits of his past incarnations.
This time, however, he was in the safe. The persona he was using appeared only a few times during the history of mankind… Yet not even a single proper recount of their looks, quirks, and talents would be saved for historians to discover later.
"Is Sir interested in the war news?" the secretary whose name Daniel didn't even remember asked. "I could bring a war-oriented paper if so Sir Elyon desires," she offered.
"Nah, I'm good," Daniel simply waved his hand away. "I just didn't expect the fighting to last that long, now that the outcome is clear to everyone."
The war officially didn't end. There were still seven different fronts where bloody fighting continued between sides who threw bodies at the enemy as if there was no tomorrow.
And three of such fronts all coincidentally happened to be all around the site Daniel's former allies nuked.
'They turned really desperate when I started messing their plans up,' Daniel thought, keeping his thoughts to himself this time.
He wasn't going to take the risk of randomly muttering some clues that could lead Patric or Alice toward his new identity.
'No. It's for the best for them to think I'm dead,' Daniel thought.
He could only vaguely recall what he felt when he was shot and later brought back from death by his teacher's spell.
The five years that passed ever since were too busy for Daniel to care about the past.
From setting up a small startup as someone without a valid identity, through fighting on the battlefield known as commerce all the way to the point where he had to checkmate the office of the new world order to give his company a free military pass, allowing him to stop his personnel from getting drafted...
While everyone was busying themselves with the biggest conflict in recorded history, Daniel toiled away in the shadows.
Bit by bit, he turned his small start-up into a respectable tech company. And exactly on the two years anniversary of his assumed death, Theo started the caricature of revenge.
First, he struck at the companies that unknowingly backed up Patric's war efforts.
Within a year, not a single one of them was left, all either forced into bankruptcy or absorbed into Daniel's own firm.
On the third anniversary of his death, Daniel finally reached his first goal of turning his small company into a tech giant that could rival the established household names.
From there on, he could pick the path of smooth sailing where just by throwing money around he could mess up every last plan that the traitors would cook up.
But Daniel picked the thorny path of not stopping the development.
The commercial war between his Sigma company and the giants like Guugle or Apply lasted for one and a half years. Mopping up the remains and setting everything back up once the unofficial truce was finally signed took another six months.
And just like that, Daniel arrived at the fifth anniversary of his death, right as all of his plans were finally about to bear fruit.
In the process of forging the truce with the other tech giants, Daniel simply gave up several fields of technology, even going as far as selling revolutionary schematics to his former enemies, just to keep them at bay.
A foolish move. The fact that not a single one of his investors spared from shouting in the emails Daniel kept on receiving even today.
But a decision necessary for Daniel to finally move to the second phase of his plans.
'My fresh consciousness should be reaching its maturity about now,' Daniel thought once his secretary left the room. 'So there is nothing left for me to wait for,' he decided before reaching out and pressing a button on his table.
"Hello, Peter?" Daniel called.
"Sir Elyon, what's up?" Peter, the head of the HR department of Daniel's Sigma company replied right away.
"Do you have the resume that I sent you?" Daniel asked in the Alexander the Gre… Elyon's voice.
"That's right, sir."
"How long it will take you to get it through all the systems?"
"About an hour, sir," Peter replied with confidence.
"Let's make it exactly an hour, okay?"
"Yes, sir!"
Daniel raised his finger from the intercom before moving his hand towards the small holophone his company conquered the market with.
It was a device devoid of any real insides, with its entire technology relying on a connection to the device that currently three great world powers were fighting for.
A device that Daniel locked for anyone else to use the second he connected it to his mind.
And with the use of this simplistic device, Daniel called out the one and only number that not a single soul in the company knew about.
"Bart here," the voice on the other side of the phone paid no attention to the formalities at all.
"You have exactly an hour," Daniel revealed.
"It will be done," Bart replied without any hesitation.
The hesitation came a bit later.
"But man… are you sure?" Bart asked in a voice unfit for a hardened mercenary who went through the two years of the early slaughter of the world war. "Isn't what you ordered… an overkill? For but a simple, meaningless boy?"
Daniel smiled.
'I'm sure I will hate myself for this once I regain all my memories,' he thought.
"Yes," Daniel then spoke in a calm tone.
A voice that someone would normally use to order groceries or a takeaway.
"I'm sure."
This 𝓬ontent is taken from f(r)eeweb(n)ovel.𝒄𝒐𝙢