Chapter 2

The next day.

The storage room door was still locked from the outside.

To avoid waking those three pigs sleeping in the living room, I squeezed out through a ventilation window with a half-broken pane of glass.

For the sake of surviving the apocalypse, I had to make a trip to school.

The blood from the frying pan strike last night hadn't fully clotted. Along the way, the rain mixed with the scabs and trickled into my eyes, casting a hazy red tint over my vision.

I hadn’t eaten anything in a full twenty hours, and my stomach was spasming violently.

But I couldn't care less right now.

By the time I reached the ground floor locker area at school, the countdown timer in my bottom right sightline had ticked down to: [29 Days 08 Hrs 15 Mins].

Time waited for no man! I had to secure ten dollars immediately to trigger the system, by any means necessary.

"Davis, lend me ten bucks. Or just give me ten bucks. You can call it an investment, or treat it as a joke, I don't care." I stopped a male classmate who often borrowed my notes to copy, my tone weak but deadly serious.

Davis, sipping an ice-cold Monster Energy, jumped in shock at the sight of my bloody, ghost-like face.

Instantly, he pinched his nose and took a step back.

"Arthur, what alleyway did you get high in? Your brother Paul was just cruising the block yesterday in his brand-new Mustang, and now you’re coming to me begging for scraps?"

Passers-by began to stare, their eyes filled with amusement and mockery.

"Look at the state of him, probably got beat out of his house by his family, right?"

"I heard he was acting psycho on the streets yesterday, ranting about some giant flood."

I didn't argue. I just swallowed dryly and prepared to find another target.

"Hey, Doomsday Savior, make way!"

Just as I turned around, a massive force suddenly slammed into my back.

I was already incredibly weak. That hit entirely shattered my center of gravity, and I crashed onto the wet floor with a heavy thud.

The wound opened up again, and warm liquid slid down my brow bone straight into my eye.

Brad, the campus bully, was chomping on chewing gum, towering over me.

Hitting a chronically malnourished guy like me was like kicking a soda can for a 200-pound linebacker like him.

"What? Keep looking at me like that, why don't you? Gonna use your superpowers to destroy me?" Brad burst into exaggerated laughter, planting his heavy foot directly onto my ragged backpack.

Rip—

The cheap zipper of the bag gave way, spilling my second-hand textbooks and a few water-stained part-time job flyers all over the floor.

"Don't touch my stuff..." I gritted my teeth, pressing both hands onto the frigid floor as I struggled to get up.

But Brad abruptly raised his foot, bringing his muddy sneaker down hard on the back of my hand, crushing it without mercy.

"Ah—!" I couldn't help but gasp in pain. Fingers connect right to the heart; the sensation of my bones nearly splintering caused cold sweat to pour down my face.

"That's it? That's all you got?" Brad's laughter grew even more brazen. "Weren't you gonna build Noah's Ark? You can't even protect a damn backpack, how the hell are you gonna build a—"

"Brad, move your dirty foot."

A clear, cold, and heavily annoyed female voice suddenly sliced through the crowd, cutting off the corridor's laughter like an icebreaker.

Brad's laughter choked in his throat.

The crowd parted automatically. A pair of impeccably clean designer leather boots stopped half a meter away from me. Above the boots was a high-quality Scottish plaid skirt, and an imported cashmere trench coat worth half my year's salary.

Chloe.

The absolute star of our high school. Her father was a Wall Street executive, and she herself was gorgeous but possessed a notoriously fierce temper.

"Chloe, I was just teaching this psycho a lesson..." Brad's arrogant aura instantly deflated by half as he tried to explain.

"I told you, move. Begone! Don't you understand English?" Chloe slightly raised her chin, her blue eyes brimming with absolute disdain. "He still needs to do my Calculus homework. You break his hand, are you gonna get me an A on next week's quiz in his place?"

Brad's face cycled through shades of green and white. With a final huff, he awkwardly withdrew his foot and slinked away with his gang of followers.

The hallway returned to silence. Under Chloe's chilling glare, the spectators quickly dispersed.

I sat slumped on the ground, gasping heavily for air, rubbing my red and swollen hand.

Pathetic. Never had I looked so pathetic.

I didn't even dare to look up at her.

Chloe didn't speak. She just watched me quietly.

I could feel her eyes scanning my torn clothes and the horrifying, bruised scab crusting on my forehead.

She let out a sigh. Rummaging into her ridiculously expensive designer handbag, she pulled out a bill, bent over, and pinched it between two fingers directly in front of my face.

A crisp ten-dollar bill.

"Don't get the wrong idea," Chloe's tone was laced with her usual high-and-mighty tsundere vibe. "I don't buy into that 'end of the world' garbage. But if you die halfway looking like a zombie, who's going to write my test papers? This is advance payment. Go buy a hot dog at the corner stall and treat that disgusting wound of yours, got it?"

Was she... looking for an excuse to buy me a meal?

I’d tutored her before, and whenever I refused her direct payments, Chloe always found ridiculous excuses to slip me money.

I stared at the slightly crinkled green bill.

Just last night, my own mother wanted to bash my skull in for some car repair money, and my brother squeezed every last dime of my living expenses dry.

Now, Chloe, a classmate I shared no blood relation with, was handing me ten dollars.

I took a deep breath and grabbed the cash holding it tight in my palm.

The exact second the paper money touched my skin, an explosion of sound deafened my mind.

[Ding—]

[External Capital Transfer Detected!]

[Capital Source: Chloe Swanson]

[Condition Met: Employment/Investment established.]

[TEN-MILLION-FOLD RETURN — TRIGGERED!]

Deep within my pupils, the semi-transparent metallic panel aggressively flashed crimson red, followed by numbers rolling at a terrifying speed.

[Base rate of $10 locked.]

[Injection Complete: Current Available Construction Funds in Virtual Space — $100,000,000.00]

One hundred million dollars.

A whole one hundred million!

In reality, I was squatting in a muddy puddle in my school hallway.

But inside my mental space, an absurdly long string of green digits hovered in mid-air, capable of purchasing God-tier items!

[System Shop Fully Unlocked.]

Without a millisecond of hesitation, my consciousness swiped fiercely across the blueprint of the three-billion-dollar Judgment-Class Ark.

"Buy the chassis."

[Construction Funds Deducted: $85,000,000]

[Purchase Successful. Target object loading into Virtual Space—]

Right behind my eyelids, reality rippled like water.

Inside that vast, alternate dimension that only I could see, thousands of pitch-black TiAl-7075 acid-resistant titanium alloy main girders pierced out from the void.

The brutal, mechanical interlocking of the metal sent shivers down my spine.

In mere seconds, a steel foundation stretching thousands of square meters—robust enough to hold immovable against a hundred-meter tsunami—locked itself dead onto the center of the Virtual Sea.

[Warning: Host, please take note.]

[Bound by the Law of Return, all physical resources materialized within the Virtual Space are strictly bound to the initial investor (Chloe Swanson) as the legal owner and sole beneficiary. Host retains only Supreme Administrative and Residential Rights.]

I stared at the "Property Ownership Agreement" aggressively generated at the bottom of my panel, then shifted my gaze to Chloe, who was just opening her umbrella to step out into the rain.

Chloe probably thought she had just spent ten bucks to save my miserable pride.

Little did she know, she had just bought herself the one and only golden VIP ticket to Noah's Ark in the entire world!

"Still not going to get food? Don't die on your way," Chloe glanced back over her shoulder.

"Got it."

Silently, I shoved my textbooks back into my torn bag, stood up straight, and headed toward the classroom.

Though my body was still shivering from the cold, my heart was soaring.

I got my first investment!

Going forward, as long as I hung around Chloe, acting attentive, doing things for her, and tutoring her, I might just squeeze more and more investments out of her!

How did I not think of her before I left the house this morning?

What a miscalculation!

I watched the black rain pouring harder outside the window, my mind completely checked out of class. I was entirely submerged in the system's mental space, recklessly spending the remaining fifteen million dollars, rapidly purchasing all sorts of mechanical resources.

But it wasn't enough. It was nowhere near enough.

To complete the Doomsday Ark, I needed so much more money!

If only my family had actually believed me.

But clearly, that was a fairy tale.

I'd still have to go home tonight.

My mother laid down a death warrant yesterday: I had to get the money for Paul's car repairs next month.

If my guess was right, those two were probably already plotting on selling me to do some fatal black-market jobs to pay it off.

I reached up and touched the blood scab on my forehead, a firm resolve flashing in my eyes.

Want me to be their blood bag? No way in hell!

I decided to finally accept the after-school private tutoring job Chloe had been bringing up to me.

It was the only way I'd ever have a chance to scrape together the three billion dollars needed to finish the Ark.