Rise of the Darkness Tycoon

Chapter 19- Cracks on the Surface

Calvin silently pondered his plan of action all the way home, only snapping out of his train of thought when Ashley’s car stopped at his neighbourhood.

“Right, here,” he said, dipping his hands into his jacket pockets and bringing out the earth elemental cores he had taken from the earth lions in the trailer.

“These are for you. They’re mostly E-ranks, so they should still give you a substantial amount of energy.”

Seeing the elemental cores Calvin offered her, Ashley blinked in faint surprise and said, “Oh, I completely forgot about that.”

“I’m not surprised. You probably have higher-rank elemental cores waiting for you at home.”

Ashley smiled wryly, making no effort to deny his words.

“If you don’t want them, I can sell them,” Calvin then said.

For a moment, Ashley stared at the cores in silence, then shook her head.

“Nah, don’t worry about it. I’ll take them.”

After collecting the cores, she pulled out her phone. “Give me your account details. Let me send you your money.”

Calvin nodded once and opened his phone, showing her the number.

As Ashley navigated her bank app to transfer the funds, he casually glanced over and noticed the figure she was typing.

Right before she tapped send, Calvin’s hand shot out, and he grabbed her thumb, frowning as he spoke.

“Don’t even try that bullshit.”

His voice was cold, and Ashley instinctively flinched as she looked up. When she saw the look in his eyes, she immediately understood.

‘Ah, he’s angry.’

She was certain Calvin was annoyed, and she knew exactly why.

“I told you to send me my share of the money,” Calvin said, his tone still cold. “Not all of it.”

Ashley stayed silent, and Calvin moved her finger off the screen, took her phone, deleted the figure she had typed, and entered a much smaller amount before handing it back for her to input her PIN.

The young woman looked at the phone in silence with her brown eyes before she finally spoke.

“You know I don’t need this amount of money, right?”

“You don’t need to remind me you’re the daughter of a multimillionaire, Ashley Simon. But that has nothing to do with this,” Calvin replied.

“I very much believe that one should earn what they work for.”

Pointing at the figure on the screen, he continued, “That is my share of that money. Everything else belongs to you.

I won’t be silly and claim I don’t need the money, but I’m not going to take charity.”

At that last word, Ashley’s eyes narrowed faintly, and she muttered, “Charity, huh?”

With that, she took her phone back from Calvin, deleted the figure he entered, and retyped the full amount from the elemental beast sale as she said, “Then call it a loan.”

Before Calvin could reach for her phone again, she pressed her finger on the screen, authorised the transfer with her fingerprint, and sent the money to his account.

“You now owe me 4.5 million,” she said with a light smile.

She reached out and grabbed Calvin’s phone, tapping it against her own, and when the contact-sharing feature activated, she saved his number and added, “I’ll make sure to call you to remind you to pay back.”

For a moment, both of them stared at each other in tense silence, not a single word exchanged.

Finally, Calvin, breaking eye contact, took his phone back with a sigh. “Fine.”

With that, he turned and stepped out of the car, saying nothing else.

As soon as he closed the door, the driver glanced at Ashley through the interior rearview mirror and said, “Young mistress, your face…”

At his words, Ashley blinked and reached up, rubbing her face as she felt ridges running across her skin. She raised her phone and used the camera like a mirror, seeing small cracks spreading across the side of her face.

“I guess I used a lot of elemental energy today,” she said calmly, even as the cracks continued spreading.

Looking at one of the elemental cores Calvin had given her, she picked it up and did something any normal person would have called insane.

She tossed the elemental beast core into her mouth, biting down on it and chewing it as though it were a piece of candy.

Elemental Beast Cores were NOT meant to be consumed by humans.

Many had tried in the past, and their transformation into mindless monsters corrupted by elemental energy was more than enough proof that such things were never meant to be ingested.

But Ashley simply chewed it like candy, completely unbothered. The elemental energy within the core flowed through her body, invigorating her, and the cracks across her skin slowly began to close.

Within a minute, her face had returned to normal. She brushed away the dust from the areas where the cracks had appeared before speaking.

“It’s okay now. Let’s go back home.”

The driver nodded silently, started the car, and headed back toward the Simon residence.

◇　◇　◇

When Calvin got back, Martha had not yet returned from work. This was completely normal, since she often worked shifts up to 11 pm, even past the restaurant’s closing time, as they usually prepared ingredients for the next day and cleaned up before shutting everything down.

He was completely exhausted from the day’s events and really wanted to sleep, but he decided to deal with the elemental cores he had obtained first.

Starting with the F-rank elemental cores, Calvin spent the next few hours absorbing their energy.

The Elemental King’s Core within his chest greedily devoured each F-rank core within minutes, and he soon moved on to the E-rank cores, absorbing their darkness elemental energy and using it to raise the total amount of elemental energy within him until he finally broke through the bottleneck of F-rank and stepped into E-rank.

After breaking past that bottleneck, he stopped absorbing elemental energy and put away the remaining cores before lying down on his bed, thinking back on everything that had happened throughout the day.

‘I really just wanted to go out and see if I could make some money off elemental stone gambling, but somehow I ended up involved with a rather chaotic character, witnessed what was most likely the clash between rival factions tied to an illegal elemental beast fighting ring, ran into a few annoyances after that, and even got a bit of a makeover.’

Shrugging slightly, he concluded, ‘Well, I suppose I made a net profit today, so I don’t really mind.’

He exhaled softly, staring at the slowly turning fan until exhaustion finally took over and he drifted off to sleep.