The Unwanted Son's Millionaire System

Chapter 91


The city in the dead of night was completely transformed. The lively, bustling place it was during the day had vanished. Now, it felt empty and lonely, like a skeleton made of shadows and silence. Ace and his friends moved through these deserted streets carefully, like scared animals hiding in ruins. Their senses were on high alert, jumping at the sound of a car engine in the distance or any movement in the dark. The little bit of cash they had in their pockets felt useless, like a paper shield against the powerful, unseen enemy that was hunting them.

Silva, with his knowledge of the city's hidden places, was their guide. He didn't take the main roads. Instead, he led them through a confusing network of back alleys, across empty fields taken over by weeds, and past the giant, silent shapes of closed-down factories. The air changed as they walked, becoming heavier and smelling of dampness, the foul sweetness of the nearby river, and the sharp odor of old, rusting metal.

After walking for almost an hour, their nerves stretched tight, Silva finally stopped. They stood in front of a tall chain-link fence. A part of the fence had been cut open and then loosely wired back together—a secret entrance for people who had nowhere else to go. "We're here," Silva said quietly, pulling the wires apart. "This is the old Henderson Textile building. It's been without electricity or running water for ten years."

One by one, they squeezed through the opening in the fence. They found themselves in a huge, neglected yard filled with the leftovers of a dead business. There were broken wooden platforms, the rusty skeleton of an old delivery truck, and piles of shattered glass that glittered in the dim light. The building itself was a massive structure of red brick that was slowly falling apart. The windows were just dark, empty holes, and a faded sign on the front door, which was chained and locked, read "CONDEMNED."

"Not that way. Follow me to the back," Silva instructed. "There's a big loading door that's bent out of shape. We can lift it just enough to crawl underneath."

He was right. At the back of the building, a large, heavy metal door was jammed slightly open, warped on its rails. They got down on their hands and knees and crawled, one after the other, into the darkness inside. The space was so enormous that the beam from Kaito's flashlight seemed weak and small, unable to reach the far walls or the ceiling.

The inside of the Henderson building was like a church dedicated to rot and abandonment. The air was cold and unmoving, filled with dust that had settled over countless forgotten ambitions. Huge, silent weaving machines stood everywhere, like ancient creatures frozen in place, covered in thick layers of dust and cobwebs that hung like ghostly curtains. High above, the ceiling was lost in shadow, and they could hear the faint scratching sounds of rats or other animals living in the walls. The floor was a dangerous mess, littered with sharp, rusted metal pieces, chunks of fallen ceiling, and torn, yellowed papers.

"Well, this is home," Silva said, his voice creating a small echo in the vast emptiness.

Evelyn hugged herself tightly, shivering from the cold and the eerie atmosphere. "It's... safe, at least," she said, trying to find a positive side.

"It's a tomb," Kaito whispered, his voice sounding very small. He moved his flashlight around, and the beam landed on a thick, black cable coming down from a hole in the ceiling. He leaned closer. "Wait a minute... is that an internet cable?"

Silva gave a casual shrug. "People living here illegally tapped into the city's main internet line years ago. My cousin Leo uses it. The connection isn't great, but it works."

A look of hope appeared on Kaito's face. "A bad connection is actually perfect. It's much harder to trace." He quickly found a corner that was less dirty than the rest, wiped the grime off an old wooden crate, and set up the laptop, powering it with a portable battery they had brought. He then carefully connected their router to the stolen cable. After a few minutes of work, he looked up and gave a thumbs-up. "We're online. The signal is weak and might cut in and out, but we have a connection to the outside world."

Getting that internet connection felt like a tiny, hard-won battle in a night that had been full of loss and fear. For the first time all night, they had managed to accomplish something positive. They had a roof over their heads, as crumbling as it was, and a way to communicate with the world beyond these walls—their lifeline.

While the others were recovering from their frantic escape, Evelyn immediately got to work. Her ability to focus on practical tasks was her way of fighting back against the overwhelming gloom of their new surroundings. She searched the debris and found a large, torn plastic tarp. She dragged it over to a corner near the back wall and hung it up, using pieces of broken pipe to hold it in place. This created a small, separate area, giving them the feeling of having a "room" instead of just being lost in a giant, empty space. She then swept a patch of the concrete floor clear of dust and glass with her foot and carefully unrolled their sleeping bags side-by-side. It was a bleak and uncomfortable setup, but it was their space. They had marked their territory in the ruins.

Ace didn't help with the setup. He stood perfectly still in the middle of the vast, dark factory floor, listening and feeling. His hearing, sharper than any normal person's, picked up every small sound: the steady drip... drip... of water leaking deep within the building, the frantic scratching of tiny feet inside the walls, and the far-off, muffled noise of the city—a world that now felt completely separate from their own. In his mind, the mysterious force that guided him, which he called the System, was calmly evaluating their new home.

<<<>>>

ANALYSIS OF LOCATION: HENDERSON TEXTILE BUILDING.

BUILDING STABILITY: ACCEPTABLE. THE BUILDING IS NOT IN DANGER OF FALLING DOWN ON US.

SECURITY LEVEL: POOR. THERE ARE MANY EASY WAYS FOR SOMEONE TO GET INSIDE. WE ARE PHYSICALLY EXPOSED.

COMFORTS: ABSOLUTELY NONE. NO RUNNING WATER, ELECTRICITY, OR HEAT.

STRATEGIC VALUE: EXCELLENT. WE ARE HIDDEN, ISOLATED, AND HAVE A HARD-TO-TRACE INTERNET CONNECTION. THIS IS GOOD FOR SECRET WORK.

FINAL JUDGMENT: THIS LOCATION IS SUFFICIENT FOR OUR CURRENT NEEDS.

<<<>>>

Sufficient. The word was cold and impersonal, much like the building itself. It was not a welcoming thought. This place felt like the very bottom, the last stop before giving up completely.

But the System was not emotional. It was logical. And the logic was clear: this tomb of brick and dust was where they would plan their fight back.

After they finished the urgent tasks of setting up their camp, a deep and heavy tiredness washed over them. The energy and fear that had been keeping them going finally drained away, leaving them with the cold, painful truth of their situation. They all gathered in the small space Evelyn had made with the tarp, zipping themselves into their sleeping bags to fight off the chill. A single lantern, powered by batteries, sat in the middle of them. Its light was weak, making their long, dancing shadows loom like giants on the rough brick walls around them.

The silence felt enormous until Evelyn broke it, her voice soft. "We can't live here forever," she said. "A few days, at most. We need to figure out what we're going to do next."

Kaito, hugging his knees to his chest, was the first to suggest a path. "We have the proof," he said, meaning the stolen files. "And we have the money now. We should use it to run. We could find an expert forger, get completely new names and papers, and just vanish. We could leave the country and start over."

Silva immediately challenged the idea, his voice a low, skeptical grumble. "And then what?" he asked. "We just sit around in some foreign city, waiting for OmniCorp to track us down? They're everywhere, Kaito. There's no hiding from a company that big. To them, we're a loose end. And they always tie up loose ends."

"It's true," Ace said, his voice firm and clear, cutting off the argument. He had been staring into the lantern's flame, his face set in a look of hard determination. "Running is exactly what they think we'll do. It's all we've ever done. If we run now, we'll spend every day for the rest of our lives waiting for another man like Sterling to find us." He looked at each of his friends in turn. "That job offer he gave us? That wasn't a rescue. It was a nicely decorated prison cell. A comfortable one, but a prison all the same."

He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the cold, dusty air of the factory. "I'm done running," he stated, a new strength in his voice. "I'm finished with being their victim, with being a piece in their game. But now, for the first time, we have a real weapon. We understand how OmniCorp operates. We know their secret plan, and we know the CEO's biggest weakness."

Evelyn leaned forward, her eyes locked on his. "So what's the plan, Ace? Do we just send everything to a news station and cross our fingers?"

"No," Ace replied, and there was a dangerous new confidence in his tone. In his mind, his unique abilities were laying out strategies like a general surveying a battlefield. "The news is too slow. They have lawyers and PR teams who can bury a story, twist it, or just outright lie. We have to hit them faster and harder, in a way that causes maximum public damage. We have to create a scandal so huge they can't possibly look away."

He leaned in closer, the lantern light carving deep shadows under his eyes, making him look older and more severe. "We won't just leak the data," he explained. "We will turn it into a weapon. We'll send it directly to the very people OmniCorp plans to destroy—the shop owners and community leaders. We'll send it to every single person who owns stock in the company, to every financial expert on TV, and to all of OmniCorp's rivals. Most importantly, we will link the CEO's name, Emerson Vance, to this evil plan so tightly that he can never escape it. We won't just reveal a dirty project; we will demolish the legacy he cares so much about."

The sheer scale and boldness of his plan left the others stunned. This wasn't just fighting back; it was like challenging a giant to a duel in the middle of a crowded square.

"They'll crush us for this," Kaito whispered, his face pale.

"They will try," Ace admitted, not denying the danger. "But if we do this perfectly, they will be so busy putting out the fire we start—saving their company and their reputation—that they won't have time to chase us, at least not right away. This chaos is our only chance to truly escape for good."

His gaze swept around their grim, dusty shelter, meeting the eyes of his only friends in the world. "This place isn't just a hideout anymore," he declared. "This is our command center. We aren't hiding in here. We are preparing for war."

A solid, determined quiet fell over the group. The fear was still there, a cold, hard lump in each of their stomachs, but now it was mixed with something new: a powerful sense of purpose. They were no longer just trying to survive from one day to the next.

They were a small, determined army, getting ready to attack a fortress.

There in the darkness of the broken-down factory, surrounded by the ghosts of a dead industry, a new machine was starting up—a machine powered by revenge, built from stolen secrets and desperate bravery. These ruins would be the furnace where their fightback was forged.

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.


Use arrow keys (or A / D) to PREV/NEXT chapter