Richest Man: It All Started With My Rebate System-Chapter 21: Excitement And Anxiety

After leaving the bank, Steven made his way back to the car. He loosened his tie the rest of the way and pulled it free as he walked, folding it over his arm. The afternoon had cooled slightly, and the parking lot was quieter than it had been when he arrived.

He got in, started the engine, and pulled out onto the street.

The drive home was not the relaxed one he had imagined on the way there. His mind wouldn’t settle. It kept circling back to the meeting, specifically to the moment Adrian had asked about the source of funds, and to the answer Steven had given without flinching.

Inheritance.

It had been the right answer in the moment. The only answer, really, that covered everything without opening doors he couldn’t close. It explained the deposits. It explained the size of the balance. It explained why a young man with no visible employer had more than a million dollars sitting in a bank account. A properly structured trust inheritance covered all of it cleanly, and Steven had delivered it with enough steadiness that Adrian had moved on without pressing.

But moving on in the room and moving on in the bank office were two different things. What happened now was out of his hands. The verification team would look where they looked, pull what they pulled, and either the paper trail would be there or it wouldn’t.

The system had told him, clearly and directly, that he did not need to worry about the legality of the funds. And everything about the system so far had been true. Every single thing.

He had reason to trust it on this.

That didn’t stop the quiet anxiety from sitting in the passenger seat with him the entire drive home.

He exhaled slowly and let it settle without fighting it. Worrying wasn’t going to change what the bank found. The verification would either clear or it wouldn’t, and if it did, he would be a fully onboarded Private Client within two to three business days. If it didn’t, he would deal with that when it happened.

He hoped Adrian got back to him soon. The waiting was the part he was least built for.

***

Almost thirty minutes later, he stepped into the apartment and closed the door behind him.

The city outside the windows had shifted into its early evening register, the light dropping and the skyline beginning to show itself against the darker sky.

He was hungry. He had considered stopping by a restaurant somewhere on the way back but had dismissed the idea almost as soon as it occurred to him. Eating out had never been something he particularly enjoyed. Not because of any principle against it, but because the food he made himself was usually better, and cooking was something that had always brought him a particular kind of quiet satisfaction that restaurants couldn’t replicate.

He walked to the bedroom and changed out of the suit, hanging the jacket carefully on the back of the door and draping the trousers over the hanger beside it. He put on a plain t-shirt and a pair of comfortable trousers and stood there for a moment, feeling the shift in his body that came with changing out of formal clothes.

He walked to the kitchen.

Since breakfast had been light, he wanted something proper tonight. He settled on steak with mashed potatoes, butter, and vegetables. It was nothing complicated, but done correctly, it was the kind of meal that felt like a reward.

Steven had picked up his cooking ability gradually over more than two years of working at the restaurant. His relationship with the kitchen staff had been easy and genuine, built on camaraderie that develops between people who share long shifts and tired feet.

They had shown him things without making a lesson of it, and he had absorbed more than he had realised at the time. Technique, timing, the small adjustments that separated a meal that was merely edible from one that was worth sitting down for.

It helped, also, that cooking was the one activity during the lean years that had felt entirely his own.

He pulled the steak from the refrigerator and let it rest on the counter while he prepared everything else. He peeled and quartered the potatoes, set them to boil, and seasoned the steak with what he had available — salt, black pepper, a small amount of garlic. He let the pan get properly hot before he laid the steak in, and when it hit the surface, the sound it made was exactly right.

He cooked it without rushing. He had the time and there was no reason to hurry.

***

Forty minutes later, he carried his plate to the dining table and sat down.

The steak had rested correctly. The mashed potatoes were smooth and finished with butter. The vegetables were simple and worked. He had plated it without any particular thought and it still looked like something worth eating.

He picked up his fork, cut into the steak, and took the first bite.

He chewed slowly, looking out at the city through the window, and said nothing for a long moment.

Then, quietly, to himself: "Still got it."

After he had cleared his plate, washed up, and put everything away, he moved to the living area, dropped onto the sofa, and picked up the controller.

He switched the console out of rest mode and navigated back to the game. The screen loaded and he went back to the first game that had given him headache.

"Round seven," Steven said, as the game started.

He didn’t beat it on the seventh attempt. He beat it on the eighth, and only barely, finishing with barely any health remaining and a move that connected more through instinct than any deliberate strategy. When the defeat animation played and the screen shifted to the next area, he sat back and exhaled.

"Finally," he muttered.

He set the controller down on the cushion beside him and let his mind drift. His thoughts moved without being directed, and they finally settled.

The Private Banking onboarding was in motion. That was one piece. The next piece was the restaurant.

He wanted it. Not just because he had the money now, and not entirely because of Jason, though Jason was a part of it. He wanted it because it was a genuinely profitable business being run into the ground by someone who had no desire running it.

The establishment had good bones, a loyal regular customer base, and a location that worked in its favour. Everything wrong with it came from the management layer, which was a solvable problem.

The owner was someone Steven had never met directly, but knew enough about through two years of working there. The man had several businesses and treated the restaurant as a secondary concern, which explained why someone like Jason had been able to operate the way he did for as long as he had.

The owner wasn’t incompetent. He was simply absent, and absence at the ownership level created the kind of vacuum that people like Jason filled badly.

Steven was confident the man would sell. An offer well above market value, arriving from someone with the backing of a Private Banking relationship and a clean financial profile, would be difficult to ignore. He had a figure in mind — somewhere around three million, for an establishment that was realistically worth around five hundred thousand on a good day. For a business the owner was already neglecting, that number would be very hard to say no to.

The Jason problem was separate, and Steven intended to keep it that way.

He didn’t just want the man to lose his job. Losing his job was the minimum outcome. What Steven wanted was for the information he had been sitting on for two years to reach the people who needed it, in a form they couldn’t dismiss.

Jason had been skimming inventory for as long as Steven could remember, and had spent two years making Steven’s working life miserable partly because Steven knew it and hadn’t played along. That debt had been accumulating. Steven intended to collect it properly, with documentation that made the outcome inevitable.

He would deal with that after the acquisition was complete.

But first, there was the question of capital. Three million was within reach in theory, but not at his current pace of organic spending. He needed something with more velocity.

His mind went to trading and gambling.

Both involved money leaving his account at speed and in volume, which was exactly what the system rewarded. Trading offered analysis and strategy. Gambling was faster, less predictable, and by most reasonable standards, a poor financial decision.

Steven was not particularly concerned about losing money on gambling when the system would return it to him multiplied. The loss wasn’t actually a loss. It was a transaction. A conversion. You put money in, the money left, the system responded, and what came back was worth more than what went in.

The question was efficiency.

"Actually," he said quietly, setting the controller on the coffee table. "Why go through all of that?"

He sat forward.

Trading had friction. Setting up accounts, learning platforms, waiting for markets to move. Gambling had its own friction — platforms, limits, verification. Both required time and attention that could be spent elsewhere.

What the system actually rewarded was spending. Money leaving his account. The destination, as far as he could tell, was irrelevant. The mechanism didn’t appear to care whether the money went to a grocery store or a casino. It cared that the money moved.

Which meant the most efficient approach was the simplest one. Buy things. Buy a lot of things. Buy things with volume and frequency, across categories, and let the rebate do what it was built to do.

He leaned back.

"Let’s try the indiscriminate approach first and see what that looks like at scale," he said to himself.