2026-09-05 07:05:36The elevator doors slid shut, cutting off the panicked shouting inside Jasmine's office.
Aren sat alone in the quiet metallic cabin as it descended.
He lowered his eyes to his motionless legs.
There had been a time when he hated the wheelchair. He hated the way people looked at him when they saw it.
He hated the pity in some people's eyes and the disgust in others.
Most of all, he hated the way his disability had slowly become the only thing people saw when they looked at him.
But over the years, he had learned to live with it.
What he could not accept was being loved only when he was useful.
He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a plain black phone he had not touched in three long years.
He pressed a single speed-dial key.
The call connected on the very first ring.
"Young Master Greyson?" a sharp voice came over the line, filled with shock.
"It is me, Xavier," Aren said quietly, his voice devoid of all previous warmth. "The experiment is over."
On the other end of the line, Xavier dropped his pen in complete disbelief.
For three years, Xavier had watched in silence while the sole heir to the multi-billion dollar Greyson Empire lived as a humiliated, live-in son-in-law.
More than once, Xavier had begged Aren to return.
More than once, Aren had refused.
Not because he needed Jasmine's family.
He had simply wanted to know whether Jasmine truly loved him.
He had wanted to believe that someone could look beyond his wheelchair, beyond the Greyson fortune, and simply see Aren.
For three years, he had given her that chance.
Tonight, she had given him his answer.
"Young Master... are you certain?" Xavier asked, his voice filled with respect and caution. "If we pull back now, the Richards family will fall."
"Terminate everything," Aren commanded coldly.
"Cancel every anonymous investment. Pull back all bank guarantees. End every supplier arrangement and financial protection connected to Richards Group."
Xavier took a sharp breath. "Every single one, sir? The primary material contract alone keeps forty percent of their operations running."
"I said everything, Xavier," Aren repeated, staring at his lifeless legs.
“I gave that family three years to prove they valued me for who I was. They failed. Effective immediately, Richards Group stands entirely on its own."
"Understood, Young Master," Xavier replied without hesitation. "I'll begin the withdrawal immediately."
"Pick me up outside the building," Aren said, ending the call.
Meanwhile, back on the top floor of Richards Group, chaos erupted.
Jasmine gripped the phone receiver so hard her fingers turned white.
"What do you mean by frozen?" Jasmine yelled at her chief secretary over the line. "Our primary supplier contract was secured for the next five years! They cannot just freeze our account!"
Nikolai frowned, stepping toward the desk with a confident wave of his hand. "Calm down, Jasmine. It is probably just a minor banking glitch. Let me talk to them."
Before Nikolai could take the phone, Jasmine's desk computer chimed with a loud, red urgent alert.
An official legal notice flashed across her screen in bold red text.
Notice of Immediate Termination: All supply agreements, raw material allocations, and credit guarantees extended to Richards Group have been revoked by the parent company.
Jasmine's breath hitched in her throat.
Without those materials, three of her biggest factory lines would grind to a complete halt by morning.
Her company would lose millions in revenue every single hour of downtime.
"Nikolai..." Jasmine said, her voice suddenly trembling as she looked at him with panicked eyes. "Look at this. They just terminated our main contract."
Nikolai smirked, buttoning his suit jacket with absolute confidence.
"Do not worry, my love," Nikolai boasted, placing a comforting hand on her shoulder. "My family has plenty of connections. I will call my contacts right now and fix this for you before dinner."
Jasmine let out a relief-filled sigh, nodding eagerly. "Thank you, Nikolai. I knew I could rely on a real man."
Down on the main street, a black luxury sedan pulled up outside the building.
The driver's door opened, and Xavier stepped out in a sharp black suit.
Xavier stepped forward and opened the rear door for Aren. He carefully helped Aren into the back seat before folding the wheelchair and placing it in the trunk.
As the car door clicked shut, Xavier glanced at Aren through the rearview mirror.
"Where to now, Young Master Greyson?" Xavier asked respectfully. "Shall I prepare for your return to the Greyson Empire?"
Aren looked out the tinted window, watching the grand glass tower of Richards Group shrink into the distance.
"No," Aren said, his expression becoming thoughtful.
"If I return to Greyson now, everyone will say I succeeded because of my family name."
He leaned back against the leather seat, crossing his arms over his chest.
"Find me a struggling, undervalued company in the city," Aren ordered softly. "A business that everyone else has already abandoned. I will build my own empire first."
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Chapter 130: Foundations
The morning sunlight streamed through the sheer curtains of the bright suburban living room, casting soft golden beams across the polished hardwood floor. Jasmine sat at the dining table, her laptop open alongside a stack of formal estate planning and trust formation documents. Beside her, her baby daughter sat contentedly in a high chair, soft baby babble filling the warm, peaceful room. Helen walked in from the kitchen holding a steaming cup of tea, her eyes immediately darting over Jasmine’s shoulder to examine the numbers displayed on the laptop screen. Helen’s face was bright with an energetic, restless excitement—a stark contrast to the quiet, serene atmosphere Jasmine had built around her home. "Jasmine, I was talking to Mrs. Chen from down the street yesterday," Helen began, setting her tea down on the table and leaning in close. "Her son just bought a luxury penthouse in the Bayview District." "It has flo
Chapter 129: Unburdened
Inside the quiet, glass-walled developmental hub of Nova Tech, the faint hum of high-performance server towers filled the room. It was two o'clock in the morning. While the rest of the city slept beneath a blanket of pale moonlight, Jasmine remained at her desk, her dark eyes sharp, focused, and reflecting thousands of scrolling lines of code on her dual widescreen terminals. Her dark hair was tied back in a loose, comfortable bun, a lukewarm mug of herbal tea sitting untouched beside her keyboard. For three continuous weeks, Jasmine had personally overseen every build, diagnostic pass, and memory allocation loop for the deep-sea pressure telemetry module. She did not merely meet the technical specifications set by Lewis Enterprises—she exceeded them at every structural layer, refining the code until the data-queuing latency dropped to a near-impossible 0.0001 milliseconds. Toby stretched his arms over his head from his des
Chapter 128: The Weight of Chains
The heavy iron door of Cell Block Nine slammed shut with a deafening, metallic crash that reverberated through the damp concrete subterranean corridor.Two heavily armed corrections officers dragged Nikolai Wynn across the cold stone floor, his boots trailing uselessly in the standing water.His left ankle, swollen and purple from the thirty-foot fall off the fence, was bound in a rigid medical brace.Crude white plaster covered his shattered ribs beneath his orange jumpsuit, every ragged breath sending a sharp, agonizing stab through his chest.Behind them, four riot guards equipped with full Kevlar body armor and ballistic shields maintained a five-foot perimeter, their shock-batons drawn and humming softly.Nikolai offered no physical resistance.His scarred face was streaked with dirt and dried blood, his gray hair wild and matted, his dark eyes hollowed out by a profound, soul-crushing exhaustion.They halted before the reinforced steel portal of Sol
Chapter 127: The Caged Wolf (2)
However, deep within the primary routing kernel resting in Starburst Tech’s data center, the newly upgraded quantum firewall executed a millisecond-level balance shift. A sudden, hyper-dense voltage surge leapt across the regional transformers, bypassing the six-minute delay entirely. It was a statistical impossibility, a localized energy realignment that defied every standard electrical safety protocol programmed into the state grid. High on the perimeter fence, Nikolai raised his heavy wire cutters toward the steel strand. A sharp, violent, high-pitched hum suddenly exploded through the rainy night air.ZZZZZZZZT! A blinding, brilliant arc of blue-white electrical current detonated across the top coils of the fence, illuminating the entire exercise yard in incandescent light. The heavy copper cables surged to life three minutes ahead of schedule, pulsating with a terrifyin
Chapter 127: The Caged Wolf
The deep, guttural roar of three hundred rioting inmates echoed down the concrete corridors of Blackwood Maximum Security Penitentiary. Thick, acrid smoke from burning foam mattresses rolled through the shattered glass observation windows of Sector Four. High above the central courtyard, emergency klaxons wailed in a dissonant, screeching pitch, their amber strobe lights painting the wet asphalt in rhythmic flashes of warning. Inside the subterranean control room, three corrections officers lay unconscious on the floor, their master access keycards missing. Nikolai Wynn stood in the center of the chaotic corridor, draped in a stolen guard’s dark tactical windbreaker, his scarred face illuminated by the flickering overhead lights. The regional chief of the Debt Collectors had been transferred to Blackwood less than forty-eight hours after his safehouse was raided by federal authorities. Ye
Chapter 125: Beyond the Spreadsheet (2)
"My Chief Technology Officer tells me an electrical power surge rewrote kinetic malware into an advanced security firewall.""My treasury directors tell me you have eighty-five billion dollars sitting in a private sovereign trust that no global intelligence agency has ever indexed.""And now, dead court dockets from thirty years ago wake up on command to hand you exact cash deficits."Naomi took three slow, deliberate steps back toward the desk, her eyes locking onto his motionless form."I want the truth, Aren," she demanded, her voice cutting through the quiet room like a blade."Do you hold off-grid, high-level political connections inside the International Monetary Fund and federal judicial boards?""Or are you running a black-market intelligence network that blackmails central bankers and court clerks into staging these 'miracles' whenever your empire is pressed?""Tell me what kind of shadow you operate in, because I refuse to believe that the unive
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