Richest Man: It All Started With My Rebate System-Chapter 24: Splurging More Money

The tiktoker still hadn’t fully recovered.

She was standing in front of her camera with both hands pressed flat against her cheeks, staring at the notification on her screen like it might change its mind and take itself back.

But it didn’t. The number sat there, as large and unapologetic as it had been the moment it appeared.

In less than twenty minutes, one person had sent her gifts worth close to $2,200.

She did the math without meaning to. It was the same way people do when a number is too significant to process abstractly.

That was more than she had earned across the entire previous week. More than some of her best months, when she had been consistent and the algorithm had been kind and everything had lined up the way it rarely did.

And it had arrived in twenty minutes, from a single viewer, on a Wednesday night.

The chat was losing its mind alongside her. Most of the regulars had been with her long enough to know what a normal night looked like.

They had seen the occasional gift, the small ones, a rose here, a few coins there, the kind of appreciation that felt warm without being staggering. The most expensive single gift anyone had ever sent her before tonight had been worth sixty-four dollars.

Steven had now sent her roughly thirty-four times that amount. In one sitting. And he was still there.

who IS this guy

BRO dropped another universe like it was nothing

steven we love you

WHALE ALERT WHALE ALERT

she’s crying omg she’s actually crying

She wasn’t crying. Not quite. But her eyes were bright and her voice, when she tried to speak, came out slightly unsteady.

"I genuinely don’t know what to say," she admitted to the camera, laughing softly at herself. "I keep trying to find words and they just — they’re not there." She shook her head. "Steven, I hope you know how much this means. Not just the gifts but the fact that you stayed and actually listened."

She composed herself with visible effort, straightening up and rolling her shoulders back.

"Chat, what do you want to hear?" 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

The requests came immediately, stacking faster than she could read them. She scrolled slowly, lips moving slightly as she went through the options, and then she stopped.

"Just A Dream by Nelly," she said.

She pulled up the instrumental, adjusted her microphone slightly, and when the opening bars came through, she closed her eyes for a beat before starting.

Steven leaned back into the sofa cushions and listened.

She handled it well. The song sat in a different register from what she had been singing earlier in the evening, warmer and more open, and she settled into it naturally. There was nothing forced about the way she moved through the melody.

She understood the emotional core of the song and sang toward it rather than around it, which was the difference between a technically correct performance and one that actually meant something.

The chat slowed as she sang, as everyone stopped typing to listen.

Steven watched the viewer count tick upward slightly as the song ran. Word was spreading, slowly, the way it did when a live was generating the kind of activity that the platform’s systems noticed. He didn’t think much of it at the time.

He had a more immediate task.

He navigated to the web app while she sang, found the custom purchase option he had been looking for, and set the amount to $300. He confirmed the first transaction and watched the notification appear at the edge of his vision.

Then he did it again.

And again.

He ran through ten in steady succession, keeping one eye on the live while the system responded in his vision.

[You spent $300. A 4x rebate was triggered.]

[You received $1,200. The money has been transferred to your account.] ×3

[You spent $300. A 3.5x rebate was triggered.]

[You received $1,050. The money has been transferred to your account.] ×2

[You spent $300. A 5x rebate was triggered.]

[You received $1,500. The money has been transferred to your account.]

[You spent $300. A 3x rebate was triggered.]

[You received $900. The money has been transferred to your account.] ×2

[You spent $300. A 4.5x rebate was triggered.]

[You received $1,350. The money has been transferred to your account.] ×2

He checked his balance when the last notification cleared. The jump from ten transactions at $300 each was noticeably cleaner than the $186 runs had been. He made a note to push the custom amount higher tomorrow and see where the ceiling sat.

The song ended.

She stepped back from the microphone and exhaled slowly, pressing a hand briefly to her chest. The chat erupted back to full volume immediately, flooding with appreciation. She laughed, reading through the messages and thanking them for their compliments, and then her eyes landed on his name.

"Steven," she said. "Your turn. What would you like to hear?"

He had already decided during the recharges. He typed without hesitating.

Mirrors. Justin Timberlake.

She read it, and something shifted in her expression.

"Good choice," she said quietly, almost to herself.

She looked up the instrumental, took a moment to find her footing, and when the opening came through, she began.

Steven sat forward slightly without meaning to.

Mirrors was a long song. Over eight minutes in its full version. It made demands on the vocalist that shorter tracks didn’t, requiring sustained control across a wide range and an emotional investment that had to be maintained rather than simply delivered in a single concentrated moment. Most people who attempted it at a karaoke level trimmed it or coasted through the harder sections.

She didn’t trim it and she didn’t coast.

She went through it completely, giving the long build the patience it needed, letting the choruses open up the way they were supposed to, and when the song reached its final stretch and the repetition began to accumulate the way the original artist had intended, she stayed with it all the way through to the end.

When the last note settled and the instrumental faded, the chat was completely still for two full seconds.

Then it exploded with appreciation.

Steven didn’t move for a moment. He just sat there with the controller resting forgotten on the cushion beside him, looking at the screen.

She was good. He had known that from the beginning of the evening, but this had confirmed it at a different level.

There was a ceiling to what most people with good voices could do, a point where technical ability ran out and something less definable either carried them through or didn’t. She had that something.

He picked up his phone and he sent a Universe.

The notification hit her mid-breath. She pressed both hands over her mouth immediately, eyes snapping wide.

Steven didn’t allow get to catch her breath before he sent another.

She made a sound that wasn’t a word and sat down hard in her chair, staring at the screen.

Steven didn’t hesitate as he sent the third.

The chat went completely silent for one beat, and then came back at a high volume, as messages exploded in speed up the screen.

The live’s activity had spiked three times in rapid succession, and the platform’s systems were paying attention now.

Somewhere in a server processing engagement metrics across millions of simultaneous broadcasts, the algorithm registered the unusual pattern. A small live with under a thousand viewers generating gift activity and viewers activities that outpaced rooms twenty times its size.

The engagement rate per viewer had become anomalous. The system flagged it and began adjusting accordingly, quietly inserting the live into recommendation feeds it wouldn’t otherwise have reached.

The viewer count, which had been sitting at just under nine hundred, began to move.

924.

951.

988.

The tiktoker hadn’t noticed yet. She was still recovering from the third Universe, hands still pressed to her face, laughing in that overwhelmed breathless way that had become the recurring sound of her evening.

"Steven," she finally managed, dropping her hands and looking directly into the camera with an expression that had moved past gratitude into something more genuinely emotional. "I don’t know who you are or where you came from tonight. But I want you to know—" she paused, collecting herself "—that this has been the most unbelievable live I have ever done. And I’m not just saying that."

She meant it. Steven could tell. There was no performance in it.

1,047.

The number continued to climb, quietly and steadily, as new viewers landed on the live and stayed. Most of them had been pushed there by the algorithm, arriving with no context for what had already happened and finding a live with an unusually charged atmosphere, a genuinely talented performer, and a chat that was still buzzing with energy.

Steven watched the counter move with quiet satisfaction.

He hadn’t planned this part. He had come to the live looking for a way to move money efficiently and had ended up doing something that had its own kind of value entirely separate from the rebate.

He typed one final message into the chat before closing the app.

You’re going to go far. Keep going.

She read it, and smiled.