The Infinite Wealth System

Chapter 8: The Company That Shouldn’t Exist

Kaelor pressed his palm against the tracker beneath his skin, his mind racing through every possible danger that single word implied. Whoever had placed it there could find him anywhere, anytime, and there was nothing he could do about it standing alone in a dark alley at three in the morning.

[Recommendation: Removal requires medical facility. Immediate extraction not advised without proper equipment.]

“Great,” Kaelor muttered. “So I just walk around as a walking target until then.”

[New Mission Available.]

Kaelor almost laughed at the timing. “Of course there is.”

A fresh screen unfolded in front of him, steady despite his shaking hands and racing heart.

MISSION 003: Buried Assets Objective: Purchase Sterling Vance Holdings before 9:00 AM. Reward: Unknown until acquisition complete. Penalty for failure: System dormancy for seven days.

Kaelor frowned. “Sterling Vance Holdings? Never heard of it.”

[Public records indicate the company is bankrupt and scheduled for liquidation this morning.]

He rubbed his eyes, exhaustion pulling at every part of his body. He had been awake for what felt like days, chased through tunnels, shot at, humiliated, and now marked with a tracking device buried in his own shoulder. Yet the countdown in the corner of his vision kept ticking, relentless, and he had learned enough tonight to know the System never handed out missions without purpose.

He found the liquidation office two hours later, a small, forgettable building squeezed between two larger corporate towers downtown. A tired clerk barely looked up when Kaelor asked about Sterling Vance Holdings.

“That old shell?” the clerk said, flipping through a stack of papers. “Nobody wants it. The previous owners drained it dry years ago. You can have it for twenty thousand if you’re really that desperate.”

Kaelor signed the paperwork without hesitation, transferring the funds directly from his account. The clerk barely reacted, sliding a folder of documents across the desk like he was handing over garbage nobody else would touch.

The moment Kaelor’s fingers closed around the folder, the System screen flared to life.

[Ownership confirmed.] [Accessing archived servers…]

“Servers?” Kaelor asked. “It’s a bankrupt company. What servers?”

[Sterling Vance Holdings maintained private data storage separate from public records. Decryption in progress.]

Kaelor stepped outside into the pale grey light of early morning, the city slowly waking around him, and found a quiet bench near an empty park to sit while the System worked. Minutes passed in tense silence, the countdown for his real mission still ticking somewhere in the back of his mind, until finally new text bloomed across his vision.

[Decryption complete.] [Warning: Contents classified as high risk information.]

“Show me anyway,” Kaelor said.

The screen expanded, filling his vision with rows of scanned documents, financial transfers, and encrypted email threads suddenly rendered readable. Kaelor scrolled through them slowly at first, then faster, his heart pounding harder with every new page.

Contracts revealing hidden payments between construction companies and city officials. Records of falsified safety inspections on buildings later condemned. Wire transfers moving millions of dollars through shell companies designed specifically to hide their true origin. Names of politicians he recognized from television. Names of billionaires whose faces appeared on magazine covers celebrating their supposed philanthropy.

And then, buried deep within a folder labeled Silver Crest Development, a name that made his blood run cold.

Alistair Vale.

Seraphine’s father.

Kaelor’s hands trembled as he opened the file further, reading through years of documented corruption, bribery payments disguised as consulting fees, land deals rigged years in advance, competitors bankrupted through manufactured lawsuits and manipulated stock crashes. Alistair Vale’s name appeared throughout, sometimes directly, sometimes hidden behind shell companies, but always connected, always present.

Then Kaelor found something that stopped his breathing entirely.

A file dated exactly three years earlier.

Subject: K. Voss, financial standing. Recommend immediate credit freeze through Halcyon subsidiary. Ensure loan applications are denied across all major lenders. Priority: complete before engagement announcement.

Kaelor stared at the screen, reading the words over and over, his mind refusing to accept what they clearly meant.

“This isn’t a coincidence,” he whispered.

[Correlation confirmed. Document indicates deliberate financial sabotage targeting Host prior to engagement termination.]

Three years ago, Kaelor had been building something real. A small logistics startup, modest but promising, enough that he had genuinely believed he could build a future worthy of standing beside Seraphine. Then everything collapsed within months. Loans denied without explanation.

Investors suddenly disappearing. Contracts falling through at the last possible moment. He had blamed himself for years, believed he simply was not good enough, not smart enough, not capable enough to succeed in a world built for people like her family.

But it had never been about his ability at all, Someone had destroyed him on purpose. Alistair Vale had made certain Kaelor failed, made certain he became exactly poor enough, exactly desperate enough, for his own daughter to humiliate in front of hundreds of guests without a single flicker of guilt.

The entire engagement party, the mocking laughter, the security guards throwing him into the rain, all of it had been engineered years in advance by a man who saw Kaelor as nothing more than an obstacle to remove.

“Why?” Kaelor said aloud, his voice shaking with a rage he had never allowed himself to feel before. “Why would he go through all this trouble over me?”

[Insufficient data. Recommend further investigation.]

Kaelor closed his eyes, forcing himself to breathe slowly, forcing the fury building inside his chest to settle into something colder, sharper, something he could actually use. Seraphine’s cruelty at the engagement party suddenly made a horrifying kind of sense. She likely had no idea what her father had done. She had simply seen a poor man who once dreamed too big, exactly as her father intended her to see him.

But Kaelor knew the truth now.

He had not failed on his own. He had been sabotaged, systematically, deliberately, by a man powerful enough to erase an entire company’s worth of evidence and still sleep peacefully every night since.

[Mission 003: Complete.] [Reward delivered: Full ownership of Sterling Vance Holdings, including recovered assets valued at $340,000.]

Kaelor barely registered the reward notification, his mind still spinning from the documents burning behind his eyes. Money no longer felt like the point of any of this. Somewhere in this city, a powerful family had decided his life was worth destroying, and he intended to understand exactly why.

He stood from the bench, the cold morning air biting against his skin, the first light of sunrise finally breaking over the horizon. Twenty two hours had passed since he stood on that bridge, ready to end everything. In that short amount of time, his entire understanding of his own life had been rewritten.

[Analysis complete.]

Kaelor straightened, sensing something different in the System’s tone, something almost hesitant.

[Additional pattern detected within recovered files.]

“What kind of pattern?”

[Multiple references to an entity referred to only as “The Continuum.” Origin unknown. Connection to Host’s termination from previous employment suspected.]

Kaelor frowned, his exhaustion momentarily forgotten. “The Continuum? What is that?”

The screen flickered, hesitating for the first time since it had activated inside his mind hours earlier, as if even the System itself was uncertain how much to reveal.

[Insufficient clearance to disclose full details.]

[Hidden Storyline Unlocked.]