My Karmic Debt System
Marcus West was about to swallow a handful of pills when someone started pounding on his door.
Three years ago, he had everything. A restaurant he built from nothing. A wife who believed in him. A future. Now he's got $186,000 in medical debt, a dead wife, and a condemned hotel room in the Tenderloin.
Then Jerome shows up bleeding, holding a USB drive and gasping: "They did it to you too. Here's proof."
Turns out Marcus's life didn't fall apart by accident. His restaurant was sabotaged. His wife was a federal agent murdered for protecting him. His father was killed for knowing too much. The same people destroyed all of them.
Now Marcus has something they didn't expect: the Karmic Debt System. A power that turns suffering into currency. Every nightmare, every loss, every moment of pain—it all has value now. And Marcus has been suffering for a very long time.
They took everything from him.
He is about to take it back and with interest.
Can Marcus tear down the empire that destroyed everything he loved before the debt consumes him? Or will his quest for vengeance cost him what little humanity he has left?
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Chapter: Chapter 17: The First PropertyThe first of my father's documented properties was a three-story Victorian in the Haight-Ashbury, painted in faded blues and yellows that probably looked charming in the 1970s. Now it just looked tired.I surveilled the building from a coffee shop across the street, my Enhanced Multitasking ability running on all cylinders. One track watched the house. Another researched the owner. A third analyzed the building's structure from public records. A fourth monitored the movements of a gray sedan parked down the block—Volkov's people, rotating shifts every four hours.They had cameras too. Security feeds from adjacent buildings, angled to cover the Victorian's entrances. Patient. Professional. They'd been watching this place for years, waiting for an opportunity.The owner was an elderly Chinese-American woman named Margaret Chen. Seventy-eight years old, widowed, lived alone. She'd owned the property since 1987 and had refused every buyout offer for decades. Property tax records showed sh
Last Updated: 2026-01-13
Chapter: Chapter 16: Splitting FocusI came back from Ocean Beach to find the safe house in chaos.Jerome was seizing on the couch, his body rigid, foam at the corners of his mouth. Yuki's medic was holding him down while shouting instructions to Yuki, who was on the phone with someone speaking rapid Cantonese."What happened?" I pushed into the room."Internal bleeding worsened," the medic said without looking up. "He's going into shock. We're out of time."The seizure stopped as suddenly as it started. Jerome went limp, his breathing shallow and ragged. The medic checked his pulse, his pupils, cursed under his breath."He needs a real hospital. Real doctors. Real equipment." He looked at me. "Now. Not forty-eight hours from now. Right fucking now, or he dies tonight."Yuki hung up the phone. "I can get him to SF General anonymously. Drop him at the ER, disappear. They'll treat him as a John Doe.""And then what? He wakes up surrounded by cops asking questions?""He wakes up alive." Her voice was sharp. "That's more tha
Last Updated: 2026-01-11
Chapter: Chapter 15: Elena's WarningI called Elena the next morning using the number from her business card.She answered on the first ring, like she'd been waiting. "I wondered when you'd reach out.""I need to talk. In person.""Ocean Beach. Dawn tomorrow. Walk along the shore—it's deserted that early except for surfers and insomniacs." A pause. "And Marcus? Don't use any powers between now and then. You can't afford it."She hung up before I could respond.I spent the rest of that day and night helping Yuki coordinate Jerome's medical situation, but my mind kept drifting to the inherited debts tab, to the numbers that represented sins I hadn't committed but was apparently paying for anyway.Dawn came gray and cold, fog rolling off the Pacific like the ocean was trying to swallow the city. I parked near the ruins of the old Sutro Baths and walked down to the beach, sand crunching under my boots, the sound of waves drowning out everything else.Elena was already there, a dark figure against the lighter gray of the sky.
Last Updated: 2026-01-10
Chapter: Chapter 14: DebriefI woke up in a room I didn't recognize, pain screaming through my shoulder like someone had shoved a hot poker into the wound and left it there.Different safe house. Studio apartment, small and sparse. Daly City based on the view through the grimy window—south of San Francisco proper, far enough from Hunters Point that we'd hopefully lost anyone trying to follow.I tried to sit up and immediately regretted it. My shoulder was wrapped in professional-looking bandages, the kind with actual medical tape instead of the duct tape and bar towels I'd been using on Jerome. Someone knew what they were doing."Don't move." Yuki's voice came from across the room. She was at a small table, laptop open, papers spread around her. "You'll tear the stitches.""Jerome?"She nodded toward the couch. Jerome was lying there, connected to an IV bag that looked like it came from a veterinary supply store. His face was still a mess of bruises and swelling, but he was breathing steadily. Alive.A man I didn
Last Updated: 2026-01-09
Chapter: Chapter 13: Midnight in Hunters PointThe shipping container yard looked exactly like the kind of place where bodies get found months later. If they're found at all.I parked the borrowed car two blocks away and walked the rest of the distance, fog rolling in from the bay and turning the industrial wasteland into something out of a nightmare. Rusted containers stacked three high, abandoned cranes silhouetted against the orange glow of the city, and silence so thick I could hear my own heartbeat.The USB drive in my pocket was a fake—Yuki had created it that afternoon, identical to the original but filled with encrypted garbage that would take hours to verify. The real drive was in a safe deposit box under a false name, insurance in case everything went to shit.Which it probably would.I was armed with a knife from the warehouse and desperation. The Combat Precognition offer still pulsed at the edge of my vision, tempting me with three seconds of foresight that could save my life. But $10,000 in debt felt like selling too
Last Updated: 2026-01-07
Chapter: Chapter 12: The Third PlayerElena couldn't meet until later that night. Something about preparing resources, calling in favors. She told me to sit tight and not do anything stupid.So naturally, I went to do something stupid with Yuki instead.We met at one of her safe houses in the Outer Sunset—a cramped apartment above a laundromat that smelled like detergent and old cigarettes. She'd been making calls since we left the warehouse, pulling on every thread in her network."Aegis Solutions," she said, spreading printed documents across the kitchen table. "They operate from an unmarked building in SoMa. Fourth floor of a converted warehouse. Former special forces operators, most of them ex-military with combat experience in places the government doesn't officially acknowledge.""How many?""At least twelve on rotation. Maybe more." She tapped a grainy photograph of the building's exterior. "Strict operational security. Rotating shifts, counter-surveillance protocols, hardened entry points. Breaking Jerome out isn'
Last Updated: 2026-01-06
