Derek stared at his wallet balance on his cracked phone screen:
$203.17.
He exhaled slowly, letting the number sink into him like cold water.
That wasn't just "broke."
That was one-bad-decision-away-from-homeless broke.
People joked about college poverty—instant noodles, part-time jobs, caffeine for dinner—but Derek's situation wasn't a joke. He had no parental fallback, no emergency fund, no safety net. If he slipped, he would fall straight to the bottom.
But even that wasn't the worst part.
He had goals—ambitions that required seed money—and right now, he couldn't even afford a gym membership, never mind an investment pool.
Tutoring? He considered it.
Writing papers or doing assignments for rich kids? Also possible.
But the thought of dealing with entitled brats who would ghost him, underpay him, or complain that "his writing was too smart" made his stomach twist. He had too little time and way too much dignity left to sell his energy for pennies.
What he needed wasn't a job.
He needed a system.
Something scalable, efficient, and immune to human stupidity.
And then it hit him.
He had built something once. Something that changed everything in his first life.
A predictive algorithm—designed to forecast crime, political unrest, terror attacks, and natural disasters. He had combined intelligence doctrines with machine learning to create a probability engine that governments salivated over… right before they stole it.
That same framework, tweaked and simplified, could become something else entirely.
A trading algorithm.
Automated.
Precise.
Faster than any human.
And powered by a lifetime of experience that no one in this world had.
Derek's pulse accelerated.
His fingers twitched.
He could build it again.
But then reality smacked him in the face.
He… didn't have a laptop.
He froze.
Stared around the messy dorm room.
Looked at the empty desk where a computer should've been.
Right.
He was a broke scholarship kid.
He couldn't even afford some damn ramen packets, much less a MacBook.
No laptop.
No workstation.
No tools.
And yet the idea burned too bright to ignore.
"Fine," he muttered. "Then I'll improvise."
He dressed quickly, splashed cold water on his face, grabbed his student ID, and bolted out of the dorm.
He didn't walk.
He ran.
Down the stairs, out the door, across the courtyard—past confused students who stepped aside for the scrawny green-eyed man sprinting like he'd just discovered fire.
His first stop: a small electronics shop just outside campus.
He slammed inside, breathless, eyes scanning shelves.
There.
A one-terabyte flash drive.
$49.99 plus tax.
Almost a quarter of his remaining money gone in a heartbeat.
He slapped two twenties and a ten onto the counter, grabbed the bag, and ran out with such urgency that he nearly collided with someone at the doorway.
"Derek—?"
He didn't even hear the voice.
He shot past the blonde girl in a blur, leaving Veronica Sanders standing frozen in confusion.
Her brows knitted.
She had half-expected Derek to crumble after she dumped him. To beg. To chase. To embarrass himself.
Instead he had moved like she was invisible.
That… stung her ego.
But Derek didn't look back. He was already sprinting across campus, lungs burning, hair whipping in the wind. The library doors came into view like gates to a cathedral of possibility.
He yanked them open and slipped inside.
The world went quiet.
Rows of students tapped on keyboards, whispered in study groups, or slept with their heads on textbooks. Derek scanned the floor until he found what he needed:
A computer station tucked away in a secluded corner.
No cameras.
No foot traffic.
Minimal visibility.
Perfect.
He sat, plugged in the flash drive, and breathed out slowly.
The second his fingers touched the keyboard, everything else vanished.
He started with security.
→ Proxy chains.
→ Routing through multiple VPN nodes.
→ Sys-level obfuscation.
→ Cleansing logs.
→ Shadow partitions.
He wasn't just hiding his footprint—he was erasing the concept of footprints entirely. CIA training, Mossad doctrine, and SVR cyber-warfare protocols danced at his fingertips. If anyone tried to trace him, they would get lost in loops of dead data and digital ghosts.
Only when the digital perimeter was airtight did he begin.
Line after line of code poured from memory.
This wasn't new.
This wasn't trial and error.
He had built this before—perfected it in another life. He rewrote the core predictive frameworks, adjusted parameters from sociopolitical triggers to financial indicators, swapped priority algorithms, enhanced machine-learning loops.
Hours blurred.
When he finally paused, the system clock read:
2:04 PM.
Five hours.
Nonstop.
He flexed his aching fingers.
But he was nowhere near done.
He opened a new window and began feeding the algorithm every resource it needed to learn:
• Decades of financial textbooks
• Every market analysis PDF he could find
• Stock exchange records
• Government fiscal reports
• Talk shows, debates, academic journals
• Interviews with economists
• Press conferences
• Hedge fund letters
• Bank of England, Federal Reserve, ECB announcements
• Commodity charts
• Derivative strategies
• Behavioral economics studies
• Crisis retrospectives
• Inflation cycles
• Black swan analysis
• AI prediction models
• Currency wars documentation
If the internet had ever discussed money, he uploaded it.
The room's air-conditioning hummed softly as gigabytes poured into the flash drive—sometimes at 30 MB/s, sometimes at 50 MB/s, sometimes painfully slower. Derek didn't waste the downtime.
He opened a new tab.
Shell companies.
He built them one by one, with the same cold efficiency his parents once drilled into him.
Singapore.
Switzerland.
Cayman Islands.
Hong Kong.
South Africa.
Luxembourg.
Belize.
Dubai.
Malta.
And more.
He created accounts—thirty, then thirty-five, then forty. Each with a unique structure, routing, and financial identity. He webbed them together like a spider with the precision of a surgeon.
By the time he leaned back, the clock read:
8:32 PM.
The upload was complete.
The shell companies were ready.
The architecture was built.
Now came the hardest part:
Would the algorithm work again in this new world?
Would this Earth's financial system behave the same?
Did the butterfly effect exist across universes?
He didn't know.
But tomorrow…
Tomorrow, he would find out.
Exhaustion hit him all at once—back aching, eyes burning, stomach growling. He saved his files, wiped the logs, unplugged the drive, and slipped out of the library like a ghost.
The sky outside was dark.
The streetlights buzzed overhead.
Campus was quieter now.
Derek walked back to his dorm slowly—no longer running, no longer frantic. Each step felt heavier, but each breath felt clearer.
If this worked…
If the algorithm behaved…
Then poverty would become a memory.
Weakness would become optional.
And Derek Morgan would no longer be the scrawny scholarship kid people forgot.
He would become a shadow in the market.
A phantom.
A force.
Tomorrow would decide everything.