2025-10-31 20:51:12The laughter came first—loud, sharp, and mocking. As Anthony climbed the stage, the sea of students broke into exaggerated applause, their jeers echoing like cruel music across the grand hall.
“Go on, Anthony! Show us how it’s done!” one shouted.
“Don’t trip over the microphone!” another laughed.Anthony ignored them all. His steps were slow but certain as he approached Jackson, who stood smirking in the middle of the stage. Without hesitation, Anthony took the microphone from his hand.
“I accept your challenge,” he said simply.
A ripple of disbelief moved through the crowd. Jackson raised an eyebrow, amused by what he thought was foolish bravery. But before he could respond, another figure rose from the crowd—Darren.
The entire hall stirred as Darren walked toward the stage, his confidence radiating arrogance. “Anthony,” he said with a grin, “let’s make this more interesting.”
Anthony met his gaze, silent but steady.
“If you win,” Darren continued, holding up a shiny key, “this car is yours.” The students gasped as the spotlight captured the sleek keychain embossed with the logo of his luxury sports car. “But if you lose,” he added, leaning closer with a smirk, “you’ll clean this stage with your tongue.”
The hall exploded with laughter and applause. Darren dropped the key on the floor, letting it clink mockingly before strutting back to his seat. His friends exchanged uneasy looks—his involvement made the humiliation more personal.
Moments later, the waitress approached, balancing a tray of drinks and a small payment machine. “First round,” she said softly, placing two crystal glasses on the table—one before Jackson, one before Anthony. Each glass shimmered under the lights, the price tag clear on the screen beside them: $100,000 each.
Jackson grinned and handed over his platinum card. Within seconds, the machine beeped. “Successful,” the waitress confirmed.
The crowd cheered.
Now it was Anthony’s turn. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his sleek black card, and gave it to her without a word.
Fenrick and Liora exchanged anxious glances. Even Vionna, though she tried to stay calm, quietly closed her eyes. The room fell into a silence so heavy it felt sacred.
The machine processed… and processed…
Every second stretched endlessly.
Then the waitress looked up and announced, “Successful.”
The room erupted in gasps and disbelief.
“What?”
“No way!” “How?”Even Jackson’s confident smile faltered slightly. He sat up straighter, adjusting his tie as whispers surged through the crowd.
But the game wasn’t over.
The waitress returned with another pair of bottles, these ones glowing faintly under the neon lights. “Round two,” she said. The price tag read $500,000 each.
This time, there was no cheering. The tension was electric.
Jackson went first again. His payment went through easily, though the small flicker of uncertainty in his eyes didn’t go unnoticed.
Then Anthony handed over his card once more. The entire hall held its breath.
The waitress inserted the card, and after a few seconds, the machine beeped—“Declined.”
A burst of laughter filled the hall.
“I knew it!” “He’s finished!” “Maybe his ‘lottery’ ticket just expired!”But the waitress frowned. “Wait, let me try again. The machine might be faulty.” She switched to another terminal and inserted the card again.
Three seconds later, the screen blinked. “Successful.”
The laughter froze midair.
A ripple of uneasy murmurs moved through the students. Many began to exchange puzzled looks. Fenrick’s mouth hung open, while Vionna’s hand trembled slightly as she reached for her glass.
Anthony didn’t smile. He didn’t speak. He just stared forward as if nothing had happened.
The DJ, sensing the tension, quickly played a song to lighten the atmosphere. But even as music filled the air, the room felt different now. The laughter was quieter, the whispers heavier.
When the music stopped, the waitress appeared again—this time carrying a single bottle in a black velvet casing. The label shimmered gold under the lights. “Final round,” she said. “Price: $1,500,000.”
A hush fell over the hall.
Darren leaned forward, grinning. He had planned this himself, confident that no student could afford it. What he didn’t know was that Jackson’s card was already near its limit—with only $700,000 remaining.
Jackson tried to keep his composure. “You first,” he said smoothly.
Anthony nodded. He handed over his card, typed in his pin, and waited. The pause was brief.
“Successful.”
The word hit like thunder.
Screams erupted across the hall. Students jumped to their feet in disbelief. Some shouted, some laughed, some simply stood frozen. Even the staff at the bar turned to look.
Anthony stood still, calm amid the chaos, his face unreadable.
Now all eyes turned to Jackson. He hesitated before handing his card to the waitress. The air was thick with suspense.
She inserted it, and the hall went silent again.
Ten seconds passed.
Then twenty. Then a minute.Finally, the machine beeped—and the waitress looked up nervously. “Insufficient funds.”
The crowd exploded.
The students couldn’t believe it. Jackson’s face turned pale. His friends looked away, unable to meet his eyes. Darren stood abruptly, his expression dark with disbelief.
Anthony walked to the table, picked up the car key Darren had dropped, and began spinning it around his finger, the metal gleaming under the lights.
Darren stormed up to the stage, his anger barely contained. “Give that back!” he hissed.
But Anthony didn’t even look at him. He walked past him, descended the stage, and made his way through the stunned crowd. When he reached Vionna, he stopped, knelt before her, and gently placed the car key in her hand.
“Happy birthday,” he said quietly.
Then he stood, turned, and walked out of the hall.
The room erupted again—but this time not with laughter. The energy had changed. Whispers turned into questions, and questions into awe.
Outside, flashing lights greeted him. A few student reporters rushed forward, holding out microphones. “Anthony! Anthony! How did you get the money?”
He paused, his calmness unshaken. “I won a lottery,” he said simply, then walked past them into the night.
Back inside, Darren stood over the microphone on the stage, his pride crumbling. Jackson sat motionless, staring blankly at his untouched drink.
Desperate to salvage his friend’s image, Darren grabbed the mic. “Everyone relax,” he said with a forced laugh. “Jackson just ran out of funds because he spent too much on his girlfriend’s shopping this week. That’s all.”
No one responded. The crowd was already murmuring among themselves, some still replaying Anthony’s words, others too stunned to speak.
“But tell Anthony,” Darren continued, raising his voice, “if he thinks he’s so rich, he should prove it at the upcoming ASU King and Queen event!”
He dropped the mic with a clang and returned to his seat, but most of the students didn’t even notice. The night had already been claimed by Anthony’s quiet triumph.
The next morning, social media exploded.
“Anthony, the New Lottery Millionaire,” one headline read.
“Expelled Student Shocks Everyone at Vionna’s Birthday Bash.” Another wrote, “Anthony Beats Jackson and Darren in Record-Breaking Challenge.”Every platform was filled with memes—Jackson’s stunned expression, Darren’s forced smile, and the moment Anthony handed the car key to Vionna. Students filled the comment sections with theories, jokes, and wild guesses about who Anthony really was.
But the biggest shock came later that afternoon.
The university’s official page released a statement from the rector, publicly apologizing for expelling Anthony and reinstating his name among the students.
No one could remember anything like that ever happening before.
By evening, Anthony Parker had gone from an expelled, humiliated student to the most talked-about name in All Star University—an enigma wrapped in quiet power, walking through a world that was only just beginning to realise who he truly was.
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Chapter 163: The Fracture in the Symmetry
The return to the Highland Vault was not the homecoming of heroes that the planting team had envisioned. As the heavy-lift crawler hissed to a halt in the primary docking bay, the thick, pressurized doors groaned open to reveal an atmosphere that had soured in their absence. The humid, sweet scent of the Greenhouse had been replaced by the sharp, metallic tang of ozone and the underlying smell of unwashed bodies and rising panic. Anthony stepped off the ramp, his boots still caked with the gray, neutralized ash of Edinburgh’s ruins, and immediately felt the shift in the "Sum." The collective hum of the vault—the steady, rhythmic heartbeat of two hundred people working in unison—had fractured into a discordant mess of whispered arguments and sharp, defensive glances.Mark was the first to notice the digital discrepancy. He didn't even have to look at his handheld terminal; the wall-mounted status monitors in the docking bay were flickering with a rhythmic, amber pulse that shouldn't ha
Chapter 162: The Genesis Export
The vibration of the heavy-lift crawler was a low, rhythmic thrum that traveled through the soles of Anthony’s boots, a mechanical heartbeat in a world that had gone silent. Outside the reinforced viewing ports, the Highlands were a monochromatic blur of swirling white and jagged obsidian, but inside the hold, the air was thick with the scent of wet peat and the electric charge of a desperate hope. They were no longer just moving people or data; they were moving the "Hard Assets" of a new world. Secured in pressurized, climate-controlled pods at the center of the bay were the first thousands of "Bio-Shield" saplings—genetically reinforced white oaks, fast-growing tubers, and nitrogen-fixing shrubs designed by the Greenhouse team to survive the toxic, sulfur-heavy soils of the decaying coast.Anthony stood at the head of the hold, watching the twenty people selected for the "Genesis Export." They were a ragged mix of the original St. Paul’s survivors and the newly "audited" refugees fr
Chapter 161: The Solvency of Salt and Steel
The Firth of Forth did not look like a harbor anymore; it looked like a graveyard that had refused to stay buried. As the vault’s reconnaissance drone hovered over the slate-gray waters, the feed it beamed back to the Highland spire was a jagged collage of desperation. The leading vessel of the fleet, a massive, blocky container ship renamed the Aurelian, sat low in the water, its hull encrusted with the white salt of a cross-continental flight from the Mediterranean. Behind it trailed a chaotic tail of white yachts, rusted fishing trawlers, and even a few listing luxury liners, all huddling together against the biting North Sea wind. Anthony stood in the cold, salt-sprayed air of the observation deck, watching the screen as the first of the fleet’s shuttles detached and began its long, hesitant crawl toward the shore.The "Solvency Audit" was no longer a theoretical exercise in a ledger; it was a physical barrier. Mark had spent the night configuring the vault’s short-range transmitt
Chapter 160: The Horizon Scan
The air in the Observation Tier was several degrees cooler than the humid, oxygen-rich embrace of the Greenhouse, and the transition felt like a splash of cold water to Anthony’s senses. He climbed the spiral staircase of polished carbon fiber, leaving behind the earthy smell of the planting beds for the dry, metallic scent of high-altitude electronics. Here, at the peak of the mountain’s internal spire, the vault’s sensors didn’t look inward at the budding forests; they looked outward at a world that was currently tearing itself apart in the silence of the "Zero." Mark was already there, his face illuminated by the flickering blue radiance of the Omniscope—a massive, hemispherical projection table that mapped the thermal and electromagnetic pulses of the entire northern hemisphere.Mark didn't look up as Anthony approached. His fingers were dancing across a glass interface that was slick with the condensation of his own breath. On the map, the world was a sprawling web of darkness, p
Chapter 159: The Greenhouse Effect
The first morning of the new era didn’t begin with a bell or a digital alarm; it began with the humid, heavy drip of condensation falling from a philodendron leaf onto Anthony’s forehead. He woke up on a pallet of recycled shipping foam, his body aching with a bone-deep fatigue that no amount of artificial sunlight could quite cure. For the first time in months, the air he breathed didn't taste of London’s metallic soot or the high-altitude ozone of the transport flight. It tasted of photosynthesis—bitter, green, and aggressively alive.The Highland Vault was no longer a tomb for the elite; it had become a frantic, sweating laboratory of human necessity. Beyond the obsidian atrium, the "Indoor Valley" stretched for half a mile, a tiered landscape of terraced gardens and hydroponic bays that looked like a jagged scar of emerald across the mountain’s granite heart. The survivors—the "Surplus Personnel" who had spent their lives being audited—were now the architects of the planet’s resur
Chapter 158: The Final Tally
The door didn't just open; it exhaled. As the massive triangular slab of white stone receded into the belly of Ben Macdui, a rush of humid, pressurized air collided with the Highland chill, creating a ghostly fog that swirled around Anthony’s knees. This air didn't smell like the sterile, metallic tang of the London vaults; it smelled of damp earth, blooming jasmine, and the heavy, sweet rot of a rainforest. It was the scent of a world that hadn't been allowed to die, preserved behind air-gapped logic and three meters of reinforced granite.Anthony stepped over the threshold, his boots leaving muddy smears on a floor of polished obsidian that was so clean it felt like an insult to the two hundred shivering souls behind him. Sloane followed close, her hand still resting on the hilt of her blade, though her eyes were darting toward the ceiling. Above them, a network of artificial suns—massive LED arrays—pulsed with a soft, golden light that mimicked a perfect Mediterranean noon. It was
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