Chapter 2
The morning sun crept through the grime-streaked window of Remy's apartment, casting long shadows across the peeling wallpaper and water-stained ceiling.
But for the first time in years, he didn't pull the covers over his head to hide from the day.
Instead, he sat upright at his small, cluttered desk, a rickety piece of furniture he'd salvaged from a sidewalk three years ago, his eyes still stinging slightly from the golden surge of the previous night.
Silas, his great-great-granduncle, remained a shimmering, translucent presence near the corner of the room, standing beside the ancient radiator that had never worked.
The ghost watched him with an inscrutable gaze, his 19th-century attire seeming even more out of place in the harsh morning light.
"Did you sleep at all?" Silas asked, his form flickering slightly as a truck rumbled past on the street below.
"Couldn't," Remy admitted, rubbing his eyes. They still held a faint golden glow that he could see reflected in his laptop screen.
"Every time I closed my eyes, I saw... everything. A thousand possible tomorrows, all playing out at once. How do you turn it off?"
"You don't," Silas said, moving closer. His footsteps made no sound on the creaking floorboards. "You learn to control it, to focus it like a lens.
The gift of Foresight is not a toy, Remy. It is a tool, a sacred instrument granted by powers beyond mortal comprehension.
If you use it only for greed without purpose, the soul withers like a flower denied water.
I've seen it happen to others in the spirit realm, those who were given second chances and squandered them on base desires."
Remy nodded slowly, his fingers hovering over his laptop keyboard. The device was five years old, held together with duct tape, but it was still connected to the internet.
"I understand, Grandpops. But I need a foundation first. I can't change my life if I'm starving and ducking the landlord every time I hear footsteps in the hallway.
I can't become... whoever I'm supposed to become... if I'm living like this." He gestured around the squalid apartment.
"I need resources. Not luxury—just enough to build something real."
Silas studied him for a long moment, his ghostly eyes seeming to peer into Remy's very soul.
"Your intentions are pure, for now. Very well. But remember, money is a tool, not a destination. What you build with it will define whether you honour this gift or disgrace it."
Remy took a deep breath and closed his eyes, focusing as he had the night before.
The golden light flared behind his eyelids, spreading warmth through his skull.
Suddenly, the chaotic noise of the world fell away, the rumble of traffic, the argument from the apartment next door, the drip of the leaky faucet in the bathroom, all of it dissolved into silence.
In its place came a crystalline stream of data, pure and precise. Numbers flowed through his consciousness like a river of light.
He saw financial markets shifting and churning, saw patterns that no algorithm could predict, and saw the invisible threads connecting events across the globe.
And then, with perfect clarity, he saw it: AetherCoin, a mid-tier cryptocurrency that had been hovering around $0.43 for weeks.
He watched as a false rumour, something about the development team abandoning the project, would hit Twitter at 9:47 AM. He saw the panic selling, watched the value plummet over the next six hours, bottoming out at $0.09 at exactly 3:23 PM.
But that wasn't the end. At 6:15 PM, a major tech company would announce a partnership with AetherCoin, debunking the rumour spectacularly.
By midnight, the value would skyrocket to $0.36, then continue climbing to $0.45 by 2:00 AM—a 400% increase from the bottom.
"I see it," Remy whispered, his heart racing as he opened his eyes. His hands moved across the keyboard with newfound confidence.
"It's so clear. Like watching a recording of something that's already happened."
"In a sense, it has," Silas observed. "Time is not the straight line mortals perceive it to be.
You're glimpsing a thread that has already been woven, at least for the next twenty-four hours."
Remy pulled up his banking app. His savings account showed a pitiful $847.32, money he had been hoarding for next semester's tuition and the overdue rent that his landlord, Mr. Kowalski had been breathing down his neck about.
This was everything he had left in the world.
His finger hovered over the transfer button.
"Doubt is the enemy of action," Silas said softly. "But recklessness is the enemy of wisdom. Are you certain?"
"I'm certain," Remy said, and he realized he truly was. The vision wasn't fuzzy or uncertain. It was absolute.
He transferred the entire amount to his trading account, his heart pounding as he watched the number update. Then, setting multiple alarms on his phone, he waited.
The hours crawled by. At 9:47 AM, exactly as predicted, the rumour hit social media. Remy watched the price begin to fall, watched the panic spread through trading forums and chat groups. People were dumping their holdings, calling it a scam, predicting it would go to zero.
At 3:22 PM, with the price at $0.091, Remy's hands moved. He executed the buy order at 3:23 PM. precisely, acquiring 9,308 AetherCoins at $0.09 each.
Then came the longest wait of his life.
"Now," Silas said, appearing beside him at the desk, "while the gold works for your pocket, you must work for your body.
You can not be an alpha male with a heart that fails after a flight of stairs. You can not command respect when you are winded from walking to class."
At 6:15 PM, the announcement came. Remy watched his account balance transform before his eyes as AetherCoin surged. By midnight, his $847.32 had become $3,390. By 2:00 AM, it was $4,654.
He had just quintupled his money in less than twenty-four hours.
Remy stared at the screen, his hands shaking. "This is real. This is actually real."
"And this is only the beginning," Silas said. "But money alone will not give you what you truly seek. Do you want respect?
Do you want to look those cruel children in the eye and see fear instead of contempt? Then, you must forge yourself into something they can not dismiss."