Richest Man: It All Started With My Rebate System-Chapter 54: Wonderful Progress

Steven walked Lena to her car.

When they reached it, she paused and turned to face him. The parking area was quiet, but filled with only the ambient sound of the city and the distant hum of traffic from the street beyond. The overhead lights cast a warm, steady glow across the space.

Lena looked at Steven with a bright smile and said, "Thank you for tonight. I really enjoyed it."

"I enjoyed it too," Steven said, giving a nod.

"I’m sorry about Drew," she said. "That wasn’t how I expected the evening to end."

"Don’t apologise for him," Steven said. "That’s not yours to carry."

She looked at him for a moment, with her smile becoming warmer.

"We should do this again. Soon," she said.

"It might not be too far away," Steven said.

Lena nodded once, inwardly satisfied with his response. Then she said goodnight, turned, and got into the Mercedes.

Steven stood and watched as she started the engine. Through the window, she raised a hand in a small wave before pulling out of the space. He raised his in return.

He stood there for a moment after the tail lights disappeared around the corner, then walked to the Aston Martin, got in, and started the engine.

***

The drive home was quiet.

Steven moved through the late-night streets without rushing, the city reduced at this hour to empty intersections and amber streetlights and the occasional set of headlights moving in the opposite direction. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

His mind drifted back through the evening without being directed.

It went to the dinner, the conversation that had moved without anyone steering it, Lena’s directness, the way she said exactly what she meant without making a show of it and listened to what he said without waiting for her turn to speak, or interrupting him. He also thought about rooftop atmosphere, the Old Fashioned and the city spread out beneath them.

He had not had a conversation like that in a very long time. He hadn’t realised how long until he was sitting in the middle of one and noticing what it felt like.

The truth was that for most of his adult life, conversation had been functional. Instructions at work, brief exchanges with neighbours, the surface-level back and forth of people who occupied the same space without really connecting. He had grown so accustomed to that level of communication that he had stopped noticing the absence of anything deeper.

Tonight had reminded him that the absence had been there and he hoped they would meet again soon and he believed they would.

His thoughts shifted without warning to the moment Drew had thrown the punch.

He sat with the thought for a moment, thinking about his reaction. The speed at which he had reacted and his decisiveness. He hadn’t thought about it, hadn’t weighed the options or considered the consequences. Drew’s arm had moved and Steven’s body had simply responded, catching the wrist, pulling the head down, driving it into the table.

He understood the Physique upgrades had contributed to the speed at which he had reacted and so did his Intelligence upgrade. But he also understood that there was another reason for why he had reacted as fast.

If there was one thing he had no patience for, it was the particular type of person Drew represented. The kind who used proximity to power as a substitute for actual character. Who treated people as variables in their own comfort rather than as human beings with their own weight and worth.

He had worked under a version of that for two years. He had watched it operate on the people around him, wearing them down quietly while it smiled and called itself management.

Hearing what Drew had done to Lena, and then watching him stand there with that particular smile, had compressed something in Steven that had been building for longer than one evening.

He didn’t regret it. Not exactly. But he was aware that it had been less calculated than most of what he did. But the honest truth was that he couldn’t care less.

Yes, there would be consequences. He had no illusions about that. Drew was the kind of person who measured everything in terms of debt and settlement, and what had happened on that rooftop terrace was not something he would simply absorb and move past. He would reach for whatever leverage he had and use it.

The question was what that leverage actually amounted to.

Steven thought about it. Drew’s position came from his father but his father’s influence had limits, particularly when the person on the receiving end of it had the backing of JP Morgan Private Bank, a Halcyon-managed trust, and four million dollars in a Chase account. The landscape was different from the one Drew had been calculating in.

He almost smiled at that.

He wasn’t going to wait for Drew to make his move with anxiety or dread. He was going to continue living his life exactly as he had been, and if trouble arrived, he would handle it directly and without apology, giving the person a taste of their own medicine.

He pulled into the underground garage, parked the Aston Martin, and killed the engine.

The garage was quiet. The Superleggera sat in its bay beside the car, white and still under the fluorescent lights. He glanced at it as he passed.

Five more days until the MSF course.

He took the elevator up and stepped into the apartment.

He dropped his jacket across the sofa without ceremony and walked to the bedroom. He showered, dried off, dressed for the night, and collapsed onto the bed.

He lay still for a moment, looking at the ceiling in the dark, as the city pressed its ambient light through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

His mind settled and he thought about Lena briefly and then let the thought go. There was nothing to press on there. The evening had been what it had been, and what it had been was good. That was enough for now.

His mind moved to the Reserve Card.

He had spent the drive from the gear store working through the logic, and the conclusion he had reached was the right one. But lying here now, with the day’s noise stripped away and the thinking cleaner, he found himself refining it further.

The current approach — settling the balance immediately after each transaction — was workable but inefficient. It produced the same result as a direct debit payment, one transaction, one rebate trigger, one return. Which was fine. But it wasn’t making full use of what the Reserve Card actually offered.

The card had no ceiling and that was its core feature. Any transaction of any size can be done with it without friction, flagging by the system or verification delay.

Where his debit card would slow down on a large spend — daily limits, fraud protocols, bank-side checks triggered by unusual activity — the Reserve Card simply processed and moved on.

Which meant the right way to use it was not as a direct substitute for his debit card, or relegate it to background usage but as an accumulation instrument.

The idea was clean in its logic. He would use the Reserve Card for all spending across a given period, let the balance accumulate, then settle the full outstanding amount in a single transfer from his account.

One outflow with one rebate trigger, means one return on the full accumulated total rather than on each individual transaction.

A week’s worth of spending settled in one hit would give the system a larger base to work with. Even a low multiplier on a large base returned more than a high multiplier on a small one.

A 1.5x on fifty thousand returned seventy-five thousand. The same 1.5x distributed across fifty individual transactions of a thousand each returned the same mathematical total in theory, but introduced more variance, more friction, and more individual triggers each with their own random multiplier draw.

The randomness of the multiplier would still apply but working against a bigger number meant even the floor was acceptable.

He ran the idea through once more to make sure the logic made sense, and it did.

He also thought of the best interval settlement period to use and he settled on weekly settlement.

Monthly would be too slow, with too much capital sitting in a deferred state for too long. But weekly gave him enough accumulation to make the base meaningful while keeping the cycle short enough to maintain velocity.

He decided that he would call Hargreaves in the morning and have the settlement interval fixed to weekly.

With that decision made, Steven smiled in satisfaction, before his thoughts drifted one more time to the evening as a whole and he smiled at the ceiling without meaning to.

He had been living this new life for less than two weeks and it had already accumulated more good evenings than the twenty years before it combined.

But he had no idea of exactly what the next Chapter of it looked like.

His smiled widened, as he closed his eyes and sleep came quickly.