Evan didn't want to wake up. The city forced him to.
Morning in Edgewater was an assault. The thin windowpane rattled in its frame, vibrating with the noise from the alley below. A delivery drone malfunctioned against the brickwork while Mrs. Gable's terrier yapped a jagged, staccato rhythm into the humid air.
Evan groaned. He let his arm hang limp over the edge of the mattress. His fingers grazed the dusty floorboards until they found the cold aluminum of his phone. There was no room for a nightstand in the shoebox apartment; anything he needed stayed on the floor. He didn't remember that the phone slipped from his hand last night.
He dragged the device up and squinted against the glare.
7:00 A.M.
Too early.
His limbs were heavy, weighed down by a deep, leaden exhaustion. He let the phone drop onto the mattress. He just needed five minutes. Five more minutes to reset.
He closed his eyes, ready to sink back into the grey.
But the grey didn't come.
Flash.
A fist made of white smoke slamming past his face.
Flash.
The sensation of his own hands gripping the smoke creature's skull, the impossible strength surging through his tendons as he crushed it into the rippling floor.
Then, he was reminded of the two entities standing in the void. Order, shining with blinding, rigid light, bowing to him. Chaos, carved from entropy, cutting through reality with claws of shadow.
Evan sat up.
The cheap springs screamed. His heart didn't ramp up; it slammed directly into high gear, thumping against his ribs like a trapped bird.
"The Emperor System," he whispered.
The memories weren't hazy like a dream. They were high-definition. He could still feel the biting cold of the void on his skin. He could still hear the terrifying screech of Order fading away.
He stared at his hands.
They looked normal, same as before. No glowing aura. No marks. Just the same callouses from carrying crates and the ink stain on his thumb.
I need to verify, his mind snapped.
He snatched the phone up again. His grip was tight enough to crack the casing.
He ignored the new icon—the black and gold crown that hadn't been there yesterday. He knew that must be the icon for the Emperor System.
He opened the banking app. Novan Trust.If the System was real, the money had to be in the ledger even now. It must not disappear.
He pressed his thumb against the screen. The phone vibrated.
The blue logo pulsed. The loading circle spun for three seconds.
Evan stopped breathing. The noises of the alley—the drone, the dog, the shouting—faded into a dull buzz. All that existed was the pixelated wheel.
Don't be three hundred forty-six dollars and thirty cents, he pleaded silently. Please.
The screen refreshed.
[ Account Balance: $1,000,000,000.00 ]
Evan froze.
The number still there.
He stared at it for a full minute, waiting for it to glitch.
Waiting for a "System Error" message.
Waiting for the bank to call him and scream about fraud.
Nothing. Just the battery icon dropping to 58%.
"Okay," Evan breathed out. "It looks real. But looking isn't enough."
He checked the transaction log again.
[ Source: Heaven Corporation - Dividend Payout ]
Evan leaned back against the peeling wall, his mind racing.
Heaven Corporation.
The Emperor System had used the world's largest superpower to fund him. That implied a connection. A lineage. Perhaps the First Emperor was the founder, and the corporation was simply paying its due to the heir.
Maybe they have been waiting for me, Evan thought. But then, the counter-argument spiked. Or maybe the current Board of Directors likes their power exactly where it is, and I am a threat.
He looked at the phone. It was a GPS beacon.
I already logged in twice unsecured. Those were mistakes. I can't afford to repeat that, he thought.
The money was already in his account. That meant Heaven Corp already knew who he was. They had the name "Evan Kyros."
Standard banking transfers revealed the account holder, but they didn't necessarily reveal real-time location unless he started spending actively.
"They have my name," Evan whispered, his eyes narrowing. "And they might have the coordinates of this place."
If he started buying things using his phone's standard 5G connection, he would be painting a target on this apartment building, or even directly on his back.
"I need a mask," he murmured. "I can't hide the name, but I can hide the body. I need to route my traffic through a node they can't trace back every time I use the money."
He paused for a moment. He had another pressing matter at hand. "And I need to move my family from here. Quickly."
But before he proceeded with moving, he needed to settle the masking first.
He looked at his phone. It was trash. A five-year-old model with a cracked screen. It choked on basic video streaming; it certainly couldn't handle the heavy encryption protocols needed to mask a billion-dollar trail.
Hardware bottleneck.
He couldn't wait three days for a new laptop to be delivered. He needed power now.
He exited the banking app and opened a browser. He navigated to ARL Nexus—the country's premier cloud computing provider.
He skipped the consumer page. He went straight to Enterprise Solutions.
He needed a machine that could act as a fortress. A proxy that would stand between his cheap phone and the watchful eye of the bank.
He scrolled past the "Pro" tiers.
He tapped on Tier 4: The Titan Node.
The specs flashed across the cracked screen of his phone, mocking the device's own inadequacy. It boasted a 128-Core Quantum-Bridge processor backed by two petabytes of RAM—enough raw power to run a small city's infrastructure without blinking. But Evan didn't care about the speed; he cared about the shield.
The description promised Military-Grade Isolation and a Zero-Log Protocol. It was a black box. A digital void where data went to hide.
Then his eyes dropped to the price tag.
$5,000 / Month.
That was seven months of rent. Yesterday, looking at this page would have been a joke. But now?
"If they are my allies, this is just a business expense," Evan muttered. "If they are my enemies, this $5,000 just bought my life."
His thumb hovered over the 'Subscribe' button.
Five thousand dollars.
Evan hesitated. This was the dangerous part.
To buy the node, he had to make one transaction without protection. He had to ping the tower one last time from Edgewater to set up the shield.
It's a calculated risk, he reasoned. One single ping. By the time they triangulate it, I'll be behind the Titan encryption. Then, I'll be away from here.
Even with the billion-dollar balance staring back at him, his stomach still did a slow, sick somersault. Old habits didn't die just because a database updated. The fear of the 'Insufficient Funds' notification was burned into his nervous system.
No need to worry, he told himself, though his pulse was hammering in his throat. Either it works, or I'm exactly where I was yesterday.
He didn't close his eyes. He wasn't going to hide from the result. If this was a lie, he wanted to see it break.
He pressed down.
[ Processing Payment. ]
The circle spun.
It lagged for a fraction of a second—a tiny stutter that made his breath hitch.
Come on.
DING.
The sound coming from the phone was bright, cheerful, and completely indifferent to the fact that it had just changed his life.
Evan let out a breath that sounded suspiciously like a laugh.
[ Payment Successful. ]
[ Titan Node: Active. ]
[ Access Key: Sent to Secure Inbox. ]
Evan stared at the green checkmark.
His inbox lit up with the credentials. IP addresses. Admin keys. Root access.
"The money… it is real," he whispered. His voice trembled.
No error. No fraud alert. Just clean, flawless approval.
He didn't celebrate. He moved immediately.
He switched apps to his terminal emulator. He punched in the new IP address and the root key.
[ Connecting to Remote Host. ]
[ Connection Established. ]
The command line blinked green. No lag. No stutter.
He typed a quick command to route his connection through the Titan Node, creating an encrypted tunnel that bounced his signal through three different continents before hitting the banking servers.
[ Tunnel Active. Origin Obscured. ]
Evan exhaled. Now, if he sent money to his parents, the bank wouldn't see a transfer coming from "Evan Kyros's Phone in New Orelis." They would see a transfer authorized by a secure data center in the capital, three hundred miles north.
It wasn't perfect invisibility, but it was enough to buy him time.
"Shield is up," Evan said, a cold smile touching his lips.
He swiped back to his banking app. He needed to verify the cost. He needed to see the dent the shield had made in his fortune.
He refreshed the page.
[ Account Balance: $1,000,000,000.00 ]
Evan blinked.
The number hadn't moved.
His smile vanished, replaced by a frown of confusion.
"Did it fail?" he muttered.
He checked the Titan Node notification again. [ Payment Successful. ]
He checked the banking app. [ Balance: $1B. ]
It didn't make sense. Five thousand dollars should have disappeared.
That was when Evan realized a notification from the black-and-gold icon—The Emperor System—was blinking. Another thing that he hadn't noticed was that there was a chime that hadn't come from the phone speaker—it had resonated directly inside his auditory cortex.
[ System Alert: Balance Variance Detected. ]
[ Auto-Restore: Complete. ]
"Auto-Restore?"
Evan tapped the transaction log. He didn't just stare; he analyzed the data stream.
[ 07:15:02 AM - Debit: ARL Nexus (-$5,000.00) ]
[ 07:15:02 AM - Credit: Heaven Corp Claim (+$5,000.00) ]
Evan stared at the timestamps.
They were identical.
The System hadn't waited for him to notice the drop. It had detected the outflow and neutralized it in the same second the transaction hit the server. It was faster than the bank's refresh rate.
"Zero latency," Evan whispered.
A new variable clicked into place.
He looked at the number. The perfect, unmoving billion.
That was the visible liquidity.
If he bought a coffee, it refilled.
If he bought a supercomputer, it refilled.
It was an enforced state of equilibrium. But what about the ceiling?
If I try to authorize a transaction for $1.1 billion, would it bounce?
Standard banking protocols query the current balance before approval. Unless the System could inject the funds pre-transaction—anticipating the debit before it hit the server—he was technically capped.
Is it infinite volume? he wondered. Or just infinite regeneration?
He tapped the screen. It was a critical distinction. One meant he was rich. The other meant he was a god.
He couldn't test it. Not yet. Attempting a multi-billion dollar transaction on a mobile app would trigger every fraud algorithm in the hemisphere, Titan Node or not.
He let the phone drop onto the mattress. A laugh escaped him. It was sharp and dry.
"Emperor System," he muttered to the peeling ceiling. "You gave me a bottomless cup. Now I have to figure out how big the mouth is."
He lay there for three seconds. That was all the time he allowed for the shock.
He sat up. The upper limits were theoretical. The lower limits were his reality.
Friday.
The eviction notice. The debt.
He cracked his neck, the sound loud in the quiet room. He picked up the phone again. The signal was routed. The tunnel was secure.
"Test complete," he said, his voice steady. "Time to help Mom and Dad."