"You don't have to drink it. A 1997 Romanée-Conti goes for over two hundred thousand on the open market."
Stan studied the bottle for a moment, then looked back at the man. A gift worth two hundred thousand dollars, delivered out of nowhere, there had to be something behind it.
"Two hundred thousand is a lot of money to spend on someone you've never met."
The suit-clad man held Stan's gaze, his smile thinning into something more deliberate.
"For most people, yes. It would be."
The implication was barely hidden. It was as if he was saying, you're no one. You have nothing. And you're not worthy of Maya. It was an open but subtle way of declaring the Zimmerman family stance on Stan's friendship with Maya.
Stan noticed it, smiled, and shook his head. He couldn't be bothered with matters like this. He ignored the meaning behind the suit-clad man's words entirely...
He let out a low sigh...
"Hold on a second." Saying this, he walked back into the dormitory, rummaged through his things, and returned carrying a plain wooden box.
Inside were the tea leaves, the system's reward from earlier. Stan didn't drink tea, and despite their intent, he wasn't about to let someone give him a gift without offering something in return.
The suit-clad man blinked, clearly not expecting a reciprocal gesture from a broke college student. But he accepted the box with a polite nod and left without another word.
Twenty minutes later, the man stood before a broad mahogany desk in a private study. The surroundings were dark, so one couldn't see much...
But one could see the dark silhouette of an elderly man tracing something on a board. It was unknown what he was doing...
"Sir, the young man, Stan Harrison, sent you a box of tea in return."
Mr. Zimmerman didn't look up from his papers. A box of tea from a college kid was hardly worth acknowledging.
"Keep it. It's yours."
The suit-clad man gave a small bow and lifted the lid.
The fragrance hit the room like a wave.
It was layered, ancient, and impossibly refined. The scent was so good and rich that the suit-clad man's hands went still the next second...
Mr. Zimmerman's pen stopped mid-stroke.
He knew that fragrance. He'd encountered it exactly once in his life, decades ago, inside the private reception hall of the Valemont estate in Aurum City.
Celestine Leaf.
The Valemont family was one of the Nine Sovereign Houses, with bloodlines stretching back over eight hundred years to the Age of Crowns. Families whose influence didn't merely shape nations but predated them.
And Celestine Leaf was the tea the Valemonts reserved for a single purpose: receiving guests of equal standing. Other Sovereign patriarchs. Figures whose names moved markets and toppled governments.
It was never served casually. Never gifted. Never seen outside those walls.
Mr. Zimmerman had only tasted it once, and even then, only because his father-in-law, an elder-level figure within one of the Nine Houses, had brought him along as a companion to the family patriarch. He'd been permitted a single cup. One sip, seated at the far end of the table, barely acknowledged by the hosts.
That memory was thirty years old, and he could still taste it. From this alone, one could tell how rich those tea leaves were...
Now that same tea was sitting in a plain wooden box, handed over by a twenty-year-old college student like it was a courtesy gift from a convenience store.
'How could he possibly have this?'
Mr. Zimmerman rose slowly from his chair.
'And he just gave it away? Without a second thought?'
The realization crept in like ice water through his veins.
It's impossible to buy the Celestine Leaf. It wasn't sold. It wasn't traded. It existed within the Sovereign Houses and nowhere else, passed between bloodlines as a matter of protocol, not commerce.
Which meant the boy hadn't purchased it.
He had it.
And for someone to have it so naturally, so unremarkably, that parting with it meant nothing to him meant only one thing...
Mr. Zimmerman's hands trembled against the edge of his desk.
'A direct descendant. Sent out for tempering.'
It was the only explanation that fit. The Sovereign Houses had done it before, placing their heirs in ordinary lives, stripped of status and privilege, to test their character before granting them true authority.
And he had just sent a man to that boy's doorstep to imply he wasn't good enough for his daughter.
A thin bead of sweat rolled down Mr. Zimmerman's temple.
'What have I done?'
Back in the dormitory, Stan lay on his bed staring at the ceiling. Sleep wasn't coming. His mind kept circling back to the same thought, the double rebate.
Ten million in, twenty million back. The math was almost too clean.
Sighing, he pulled out his phone and opened TikTuk Live.
'If spending money on bound targets triggered the rebate, then the fastest way to scale was volume, and livestream gifting was the most frictionless way to burn through cash.'
He scrolled through the top channels until one name caught his eye.
Xenia.
She was one of TikTuk's most popular female streamers, with nearly two million followers, a regular fixture on the platform's trending charts. Word was she lived somewhere on Inksea Island too.
[Xenia: Beauty Rating 8.9. Can bind as a consumption rebate target. Bind?]
"Bind."
[Binding successful. Reward: 30% of Wanhai Group shares.]
Stan's eyes widened slightly, but he filed it away. He could look into that later. Right now, he had work to do.
He tapped into Xenia's room.
Entering the stream, he found her singing, her soft and soothing voice instantly drawing people in.
Under the warm lighting, she looked stunning, her flawless, delicate skin glowing gently, her presence both elegant and captivating.
Every small movement carried a natural grace, making it hard to look away.
More than just her beauty, it was the atmosphere she created, calm, mesmerizing, and almost spellbinding, that made the entire stream feel silent, as if no one dared to interrupt her moment.