Richest Man: It All Started With My Rebate System-Chapter 17: Contacting The Private Banking Office

What Steven wanted to know was the best way to make his money work for him and generate more wealth far more easily than the average person.

That didn’t mean he had any intention of stopping his personal spending. That would have been counterproductive. He planned to make full use of the system. But the system rewarded spending, not sitting still, and if his money was going to move, it might as well move in a direction that built something.

He had started with a broad search, pulling up articles, financial forums, and breakdowns written by people who had clearly spent years in rooms Steven had never had access to. He read without skipping, taking his time, following threads where they led and backtracking when something didn’t add up.

Almost an hour later, he had what he needed.

There were several viable approaches, but one kept surfacing across multiple sources as the most practical starting point for someone at his level. Private banking.

Specifically, becoming a Private Client at a major institution.

He had done the deeper research on this after it came up the second time. The concept wasn’t new to him in theory, but the details were.

A private banking relationship at the right institution would give him access to investment products that weren’t available to standard account holders, dedicated advisors who understood high-net-worth positioning, and perhaps most usefully, a concierge structure that could coordinate the kind of complex arrangements he was going to need when it came time to move on the restaurant. Legal introductions, financing structures, due diligence support. Things that would otherwise require him to source each piece separately and hope they connected properly.

It would essentially be like having a capable, well-connected personal assistant who also understood money.

The entry requirement for this was a minimum of $150,000 in combined assets, which is for the bank he has an account with, Chase Bank. Steven had cleared that by a significant margin. He qualified without any creative accounting.

He sat with that for a moment.

"Money gets you comfort," he muttered to himself, eyes still on the screen. "The more you have, the more comfort you can afford."

It wasn’t a profound observation. It was just true, and he was only now understanding it at the level of lived experience rather than something he had heard and accepted without proof.

Two days ago, he had been calculating whether he could afford to keep the lights on. Now he was researching private banking tiers and finding that he was already eligible.

He closed the research tabs and opened his email, with an intention to contact Chase Bank’s Private Banking Office. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

He typed the message carefully, keeping it formal and direct. He introduced himself, stated that he was reaching out to inquire about their private banking services, and noted that he believed his current account balance met the eligibility requirements for their Private Client programme.

He requested further information regarding the onboarding process and asked to schedule a meeting with a private banker at their earliest convenience. He also asked them to outline the next steps and any documentation they would require from him ahead of that meeting.

He read it back once, checked for errors, confirmed that he had not, in fact, addressed it to "dear madman," and sent it.

He set the laptop aside and exhaled.

That was done. Now it was a matter of waiting for a reply. It was a business day and already well into working hours, so he expected to hear back before the day was out. Private banking departments tended to move quickly when someone with his balance reached out. That was the nature of the business.

He turned his attention back to the television and checked the download queue. The first game had about three minutes left on its progress bar. He set the controller in his lap and watched the bar move.

While he waited, something else came to mind. He still had one exclusive point sitting unused. He had held onto it deliberately, wanting to think it through rather than spending it on impulse. He had already put one point into Physique, and the result had been subtle but genuinely real. The ease in how his body moved, the baseline improvement in how everything felt. Small enough that even he almost wouldn’t notice.

The remaining point was going into Intelligence. He had already made that decision but he just hadn’t acted on it yet.

He thought about what it would actually mean to raise that stat. The description had referred to it as a representation of the host’s intelligence, which was broad enough to cover almost everything. Memory. Comprehension. Analytical thinking. Problem-solving. The ability to hold multiple variables in mind at once and arrive at conclusions faster. If those were the areas it affected, even a single point improvement could be useful in ways that were hard to quantify but easy to notice over time.

"I guess I can only confirm after I’ve increased it," he said quietly, and called up the status screen.

[Rebate System]

[Name: Steven Craig]

[Physique: 13] +

[Intelligence: 18] +

[Account Balance: $1,740,548.74]

[Exclusive Points: 1]

He glanced at the account balance for a moment, then he moved his focus to the Intelligence stat and tapped the plus sign.

The change came immediately, and it was not what he had expected.

It wasn’t dramatic, as there was no flash, no pressure behind the eyes, no sudden rush of clarity that rewrote the room around him. It was quieter than that, and somehow more unsettling for it.

The best way he could describe it was that the world opened up slightly in the way information sat in his mind.

He became aware, in a way that was difficult to articulate, that things were connecting faster than they had been a moment ago.

The research he had just spent an hour working through arranged itself in his memory with a precision that hadn’t been there before. He could recall some specific phrasing from articles he had read. Details that had blurred at the edges were now sharp.

The structure of the private banking research, the sequencing of the steps he needed to take, the rough timeline of the restaurant acquisition; they all sat in his mind with a kind of ordered clarity that felt new.

He opened and closed his hand slowly, the same way he had after the Physique upgrade, as if testing something.

His hand felt the same as it had before. But his head felt different.

"So that’s what that does," he said, as if noting to himself.

He sat with it for a moment, adjusting.

He smiled quietly to himself. He hadn’t been expecting much from a single point. But a single point, it turned out, was not nothing.

A soft chime from the television pulled his attention back across the room.

The download had completed.

He set the status screen aside and leaned forward, picking up the controller properly this time. He navigated to the game, selected it, and watched it boot up. The loading screen gave way to a terms and conditions agreement, which he accepted without reading, the way every person who has ever lived has accepted a terms and conditions agreement without reading it.

Then the opening cutscene began.

The screen filled with darkness, and then with scale. A single figure, small and still, looking upward at a sky that had been interrupted by something vast.

Multiple enormous entities stood at the horizon, their silhouettes pressing against the edge of the world.

Steven watched without moving and the controller rested in his hands, forgotten for the moment.

He had seen the trailers and watched the clips that circulated online, and absorbed secondhand enthusiasm from people who had already played it. But none of that had fully prepared him for what he was watching.

"Beautiful," he muttered, as he settled deeper into the sofa.