Timothy closed his laptop and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. The numbers still danced there—$500,000,000 USD, glowing like they'd been seared into his brain. Twenty-eight billion pesos. It was absurd. Unreal. It felt less like money and more like something out of a dream, the kind that left you sweating and wondering if your mind had broken.
"Half a billion…" he muttered to himself. "Do you even realize how much that is, Guerrero?"
He looked at the cracked mirror and saw a twenty-year-old kid who had just been offered more money than presidents controlled.
And yet, it wasn't enough.
Not enough because the fact they had raised the offer fourfold meant this wasn't their ceiling. This was their opening hand in a high-stakes game. If they were ready to give him $500 million, then the chip—the prototype sitting under his bed in a black case—was worth tens of billions, maybe even hundreds, once commercialized.
