“I’m afraid that this case has already been investigated and closed, Mr. Cæ.”

Cæ gritted his teeth. “What…?”

“It has been six months since your accident. This case has already been investigated,” the police superintendent before him replied sternly. “We have investigated the accident and have come to the conclusion that no crime was committed.”

Cæ’s expression cracked with rage. “No crime? That truck ran a red light! He crashed into us and killed a person!”

“Mr. Cæ, the records of our investigation suggest that it was you who ran the red light,” the police superintendent retorted coldly. “We have multiple witness testimonies that it was you who recklessly drove into the road of ongoing traffic.”

Cæ clenched his fist with cold wrath.

Testimonies that he ran headfirst into traffic?

Bullshit.

His memory had gotten exponentially better after he was diagnosed with his Acquired Savant Syndrome. He was able to recreate the memory with perfection in his mind in three dimensions, as excruciatingly painful as it was.

“You’re wrong.” Cæ glared at the superintendent with a murderous expression. “He was the one who ran headfirst into traffic. I urge you to do the right thing. You must charge the driver with manslaughter.”

“That won’t happen, young man,” the officer growled. “If anything, we ought to charge you with reckless endangerment and manslaughter for killing a beautiful young woman.”

“If you don’t investigate this case properly and bring justice to Lilia…” Cæ’s tone grew menacing. “Then I will have to take legal actio—!”

In the blink of an eye, the man’s arm surged forward, glowing with magic as he lifted Cæ up by the collar.

“Listen to me, you little shit,” he growled. “You have the gall to threaten me after I took the effort to look into your case and break the truth to you nicely and gently? I’ll fucking kill you.”

“You’re no officer of the law…” Cæ squeezed out with an expression of fury. “You… you’re just a pathetic, corrupt police officer…”

The police officer’s expression bristled with rage as he dragged Cæ out of his office with one hand despite all the stares the commotion drew, before literally throwing him out of the police station.

“Don’t ever come back here,” he growled, before returning to his office. “I will beat you to a pulp if I ever see your face again.”

Cæ gritted his teeth, grimacing as he got up from the pavement, immune to the puzzled looks he got from onlookers and passersby.

And yet, not a single person stepped to help him.

They had all seen what had just happened to him and by whom.

None of them wanted to risk getting involved with someone on the other side of law enforcement.

They simply moved on with their day, averting their gaze.

Pure anger boiled in the depths of Cæ’s eyes as he gritted his teeth and clenched his fist. The virulent intensity of the hatred that erupted in his heart exceeded anything he had ever felt in his entire life.

His emotional turmoil only grew increasingly tumultuous.

He struggled to rein in the ferocious hostility that emerged from the very core of his being.

A deep abhorrence that lurked in the depths of his eyes.

He hated everything.

He always had.

But in that moment, the sheer depth of malevolence he harbored against the entire world was so immense that it was palpable in every fiber of his being.

He wanted to burn the world down.

He felt a maddening urge to tear it down brick by brick with his own two hands.

He yearned to do to the world what it had done to him.

For what it had done to him his entire life.

It wasn’t enough that his father was gone and his mother died when he was born, causing him to be thrust into a broken foster care system from which he had run away many times.

It wasn’t enough that he was born with less than nothing to his name.

It wasn’t enough that he had been almost entirely barren of mana his entire life.

It wasn’t enough that he was born in the slums, spending much of his life struggling just to survive.

It wasn’t enough that he had spent his life clawing out of his way from the abyss of the streets, desperately trying to obtain something resembling a normal life.

And now after everything he had overcome with a ferocious perseverance and determination, the world robbed him of everything he had ever worked hard to obtain.

It robbed him of the one person that he had come to love with all his life.

It robbed him of a life that he had gone through hell to build.

It robbed him of justice for her death.

In what was just a blink of an eye to him, he had been robbed of everything and left with crippling debt.

“Damn it…” he squeezed out with rage and hatred. “Damn it all…!”

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If only he had the power to change it all.

If only he had the power to change the entire world.

If only he had the power to set ablaze the entire world and mold a new one from its ashes.

If only he had the power to tear down this world brick by brick and build a new one from the rubble.

If only he had the power to do the world what it had done to him so that it would never do it to anybody else.

And that was when it hit him.

That was when a thundering realization struck him.

His eyes widened as time slowed down to a crawl in his eyes.

“‘If only I had the power…?’” A stunned whisper escaped him. “…What if I could?”

Wealth was power.

Magical power.

If he wanted the power to change the world then…

“I just need to acquire it.”

It was precisely at that moment that he came to understand.

It was exactly then that he comprehended.

An epiphany exploded in the depths of his mind.

Enlightenment dawned upon his very soul.

The doctors had never managed to pinpoint precisely what field or domain he had Acquired Savant Syndrome for.

And now, Cæ knew.

He felt his mind expanding into a myriad of different dimensions of thought as he found the direction in which his Acquired Savant Syndrome had expanded his aptitude and talent for.

“Cultivating power…” he whispered. “Cultivating wealth. Cultivating magic.”

In the blink of an eye, his mindscape brimmed with an ocean of ideas. An inferno of imagination and creativity almost spontaneously erupted from within his mind, generating immense potential for creating wealth unlike anything he could have ever imagined before.

An entirely new world of possibilities that he had been blind to before was now waiting for him.

“I just need to cultivate the power that I need to tear this world and build a new world for myself.”

Had anybody else paid heed to what the crazy man lying on the road was murmuring to himself, they would have concluded that he had lost his mind.

Tearing down this world and building a new one?

Only a delusional fool could have possibly uttered such nonsense with complete seriousness.

Any sane man would have instantly realized how mind-bogglingly and astronomically difficult even a tiny portion of the objective was.

And yet.

Cæ’s eyes flared with a menacing intensity.

He was serious.

Dead serious.

He understood just how maddeningly difficult it truly was.

And yet…

“It’s not impossible.” A whisper escaped him.

In a world ruled by the powerful, only by becoming the strongest cultivator could he possibly change the world. Only by becoming the most powerful man in the world could he possibly tear down the existing evil order and replace it by building a better one in its place.

And thus, while lying on the pavement outside a police station, he spontaneously carved a new goal onto his heart.

“I will become the most powerful man in the world.”

His tone was laced with a fierce determination.

“I will become the richest man in the world.”

His expression steeled with ferocious willpower.

“I will become rich and strong enough to tear down this entire world and forge a new one in its place.”

It was the oath of a madman.

A mission that he had already decided to dedicate his entire life to.

Had anybody else gone through what he did, they would not have chosen to go down this path of madness. And indeed, of the countless people who had been abused and tortured by the malice of the establishment like Cæ had, none of them had sworn an oath to change the world.

They too harbored deep resentment and anger towards the existing order.

Yet, none of them had even considered, for even the slightest moment, that they could possibly destroy it. None of them had even conceived of even the slightest notion that they could not only destroy it, but could also build a better world.

And why would they?

It was beyond crazy.

It was beyond maniacal.

It was beyond lunatic.

Language was too limited to fully convey just how nonsensically delusional such a thought was.

It took a broken man with a broken brain.

It took endless malevolence, hatred, and anger against the entire world to stare at it in its entirety and decide to raze it until there was nothing left and raise a new world where the old one had been.

By the time his mental state stabilized and cooled down, it had changed.

It had changed at its very root.

For most of his life, he had lived with just one goal.

To live a life worth living.

Born in the slums, he would often walk past wealthier districts and neighborhoods with a dreamy look of envy.

Spacious, clean streets and sidewalks.

Luscious gardens and immense greenery.

Large homes.

An abundance magicars and magimobiles.

He could almost smell the sheer amount of collective mana in all the magicapita in the air. The residents walked around with a sense of safety and wellbeing that he yearned to have.

He had just achieved the very inception of that life before the world cruelly robbed him of his dream and the person he had come to love with all his heart.

And thus, his goal had changed.

He was not content with a ‘good’ life.

His ambitions had come to swallow up the entire world.

He would change the entire world.

That was his new goal.

STEP

By the time he got up from the ground, he looked completely unhinged.

Many would say he was.

And yet, he was also entirely serious about the mind-bogglingly difficult and lunatic goal he had set for himself.

“How do I cultivate all that power? How do I cultivate all that money?”

That was where the sheer impossibility of his quest was.

He needed to not only gain enough money to be the richest man in the entire world, he also needed to gain enough wealth and power to single-handedly overcome the forces that sought to maintain the tyranny of the existing world order.

Only then would he have gained enough power to create a new world from the ashes of the old one.

A flicker of madness lit up in his eyes as his mind conjured a myriad of ideas through which he could possibly cultivate all the money he needed.

“Regardless of how I do it, it most certainly is not going to be through the salary of an assistant manager.”

That was certain.

No one had ever become a rich powerhouse of a tycoon with a salaried income.

In fact, no one had ever joined the richest class of trillionels, people with a net worth of a trillion standard units in any given magicurrency, through labor income—that was, income earned through labor.

There was only one way to become truly rich and powerful.

“Capital income.”

Income by virtue of magicapita.

The richest of the richest grew rich by virtue of ownership.

Ownership of equity, bonds, resources, credit, intellectual property, financial instruments, and other forms of magicapita yielded much greater income than fixed salaries ever could.

“If I wanted to become the richest…” The intensity in Cæ’s eyes grew. “Then I need to cultivate capital income, not labor income.”

It was easier said than done.

And yet, Cæ was entirely prepared to do everything it took to cultivate all the capital income it took to become the richest of the richest, no matter how much time it took him.