diymy Chapter 150: An Unexpected Call
Chapter 150: An Unexpected Call
William Spade sat hunched over his desk, stared blankly at his monitor, and aggressively tapped the back of a plastic pen against his knuckles. The bullpen of the newsroom was a chaotic mess of ringing landlines, shouting editors, and the constant clatter of mechanical keyboards, but William was completely checked out.
’Thirty-five days,’ he thought, his eyes dropping to the creased, ink-stained notepad sitting next to his keyboard. ’Thirty-five days since the charity gala.’
He still remembered that night, the blinding flashbulbs of the senior paparazzi, and the absolute sea of famous faces rolling up in armored limousines. Nobody had cared about the quiet young man walking down the red carpet. The veteran reporters were too busy looking for aging tech CEOs and legacy real estate heirs. But William had spent the previous night digging through the sudden inheritance from the Meridian Group. He had memorized the face from a single, low-resolution attachment in a legal notice.
When he shouted "Mr. Rivers!" into the noise, Jake Rivers had noticed him. He hadn’t answered any questions, but William vividly remembered the massive, silent bodyguard who had detached himself from Jake a minute later, walked straight up to William’s press barrier, and demanded his business card.
’I thought that was my ticket out of this cubicle,’ William muttered to himself, tossing the pen onto the desk. ’A month. Not a text. Not an email. The guy becomes a hundred-billion-mark ghost, and I’m still here writing column pieces about municipal zoning laws.’
He knew with absolute certainty that being the first journalist to secure a sit-down interview with the Gold King would completely rewrite his career trajectory. Every major network in the country was hunting for a single verified quote.
Just as he was about to log into the internal server to pull up his next assignment, his personal phone vibrated violently against the faux-wood desk. The screen displayed an unknown number.
William frowned, picking it up and clearing his throat. "William Spade speaking."
"Good evening, Mr. Spade," a smooth, intensely professional female voice replied over the line. "My name is Selena Dune. I am the Head of Public Relations and Communications for Golden Investments."
William’s posture instantly corrected. He sat bolt upright, his fingers freezing over his keyboard as his heart gave a sudden, heavy thud. He knew exactly who owned Golden Investments. It was the exact name he had been obsessing over for four straight weeks.
"Ms. Dune," William said, his voice dropping into its most clear, professional register, trying to hide the sudden spike of adrenaline. "Yes. How can I help you this evening?"
"I am calling to inquire about your current availability," Selena said smoothly. "Our Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Rivers, has requested an exclusive, one-on-one profile interview, and he has personally selected you to conduct it. Would your agency be interested in securing the rights?"
William didn’t even hesitate. He didn’t check his schedule; he didn’t call his editor. "Absolutely, Ms. Dune. I am completely available. We can accommodate any timeline, format, or location Mr. Rivers prefers."
"Excellent," Selena replied, the sound of a tablet stylus clicking softly in the background. "I will coordinate directly with Mr. Rivers’ personal assistant, Alice Stone, who received your credentials through our security detail. I will call you again in the upcoming days with further structural arrangements and our legal nondisclosure parameters. Thank you for your time, Mr. Spade."
"Thank you, Ms. Dune. I appreciate the opportunity immensely," William said, keeping his tone measured until the line went completely dead.
The moment the call ended, William slammed his fist onto the desk in a silent victory gesture, a massive grin breaking across his face. He remembered, William thought, his chest rising and falling. ’The guy actually kept my card.’
---
Meanwhile, across the city, the private elevator inside the Zenith slid open with a soft chime. Jake walked into the quiet luxury of his residence, tossing his leather briefcase onto the side table. Elias remained by the elevator doors, giving a brief nod before the metal panels slid shut, leaving Jake alone in the vast space.
Jake walked over to the kitchen counter, poured himself a glass of water, and leaned against the marble island, his mind immediately drifting back to the internal ledger accounts.
’One hundred and ninety billion marks,’ Jake calculated, staring at the ambient floor lights. ’That’s the net intake from the Sterling International trading desk over the last thirty days alone.’
He had intentionally forced himself to slow down. His left eye’s ability gave him an absolute hundred-percent accuracy framework for an hour at a time, but he knew that hitting the market every single day with massive institutional block orders would eventually cross the line from ’brilliant’ to ’impossible,’ drawing unwanted scrutiny from regulatory watchdogs. To counter this, he had adopted a highly specific trading profile: he rarely traded, but whenever he did enter the market, he went completely all-in, utilizing massive leverage. The banking desk at Sterling simply assumed he was an aggressive, high-risk savant who only moved when his internal algorithms aligned, which perfectly explained the astronomical profits without exposing his secret.
He set his glass down, walking toward his private study.
The capital distribution is always the painful part. Having money is nice till you have to part ways with it, he thought.
Out of that 190 billion marks in raw trading profit, he had already diverted 37 billion marks into a direct corporate loan to Aurelia Capitals. The capital had been immediately deployed to finalize the acquisition of the Meridian Group’s construction subsidiary.
’On paper, Aurelia Capitals looks like an over-leveraged entity drowning in debt,’ Jake mused, pulling up his private terminal. ’Adrian Vale put up a seventy-three-billion-mark loan for the Sterling Infrastructure unit, and I put up thirty-seven billion for the Meridian side. If Aurelia ever defaults on the repayment, Adrian keeps the Sterling subsidiary, and I take sole possession of the Meridian construction unit as collateral. But since the lenders are the actual board members of Aurelia, the debt is completely manageable. It’s a closed loop.’
He scrolled down to his remaining liquid cash balance. After the Aurelia loan, Golden Investments was sitting on exactly 153 billion marks in liquid capital.
’There’s still the matter of the initial acquisition debt,’ Jake thought, his eyes narrowing slightly as he looked at a line item from the previous month. ’The fifty-billion-mark loan from Darius to secure the original sixteen percent of the Meridian Group.’
The loan carried a strict four-percent monthly interest rate. For a normal corporation, maintaining a hundred-billion-mark liability on the ledger was a structural vulnerability. But with 153 billion in liquid cash sitting in his primary accounts, keeping the debt open was completely pointless.
Time to wipe the ledger clean and make Golden Investments entirely debt-free, Jake decided.
He pulled out his phone and dialed Darius Rivers’ private line. It didn’t take long for the older man to answer, the background audio filled with the quiet rustle of corporate documents.
"Jake," Darius said, his voice deep and carrying the usual weight of a man who spent his life in boardroom battles. "I saw the consolidated valuation report for Golden Investments this morning. One hundred and sixteen billion. You’re turning into a permanent fixture on the national news feed."
"The market has been cooperative, Uncle," Jake said, sitting down behind his study desk. "I’m calling because I’m looking at our internal financing ledger. I’m ready to wire the fifty-billion-mark loan repayment back to your primary account tonight, along with the full four-percent interest fraction."
A sudden silence hung on the line. Jake could hear Darius pause, the sound of paper shifting stopping entirely.
"The entire 50 billion?" Darius asked, his tone dropping into a cautious, deliberate register. "Jake, there’s no operational need to drain your liquid reserves just to clear that line item ahead of schedule. In high-level commerce, holding cash is strategy. You can maintain that liability while using your liquidity to aggressively snap up more secondary shares."
Jake smiled faintly, leaning back in his chair. "I appreciate the advice, uncle, but clearing this isn’t going to drain me. I have more than enough capital to pay the loan in full right now and still maintain a massive liquid buffer for upcoming expansions."
A low, gravelly chuckle came through the receiver. Darius let out a long breath, clearly caught off guard but deeply impressed by the sheer speed of his nephew’s capital generation. "More than enough capital... digital trading really has changed the speed of the game, hasn’t it? Fine, if you’re determined to be debt-free, I won’t stop you. Though, I have to say, a single month of four-percent interest isn’t nearly enough. You could have waited a bit longer to repay the loan so your old uncle could collect a proper premium."
Jake chuckled quietly. "I think exactly 166 666 666.67 marks in pure interest for thirty days of use is more than enough of a premium, uncle."
"See? You truly don’t know how to take care of the elderly," Darius joked, though his tone was brimming with genuine pride. "Alright, send the wire through. My treasury desk will confirm the clearance."
Before Jake could bid him goodnight, Darius’s voice transitioned back into a serious, guarded tone. "Don’t hang up just yet. There’s something else we need to address. A formal meeting with the Minister of Trade and Minerals has been scheduled for late next week, and you’ve been personally placed on the invitation list."
Jake’s eyebrows pulled together. He looked down at his clean desk. "An invitation? My office hasn’t received any official communication from the ministry yet."
"It should be arriving in your corporate queue for another day or two," Darius explained, his voice turning cold and pragmatic. "I’m giving you the heads-up now because this isn’t a routine economic briefing. Some of the high-level political factions and older industry players feel that your sudden rise was too disruptive. They feel you haven’t properly smoothed things over with them yet, and they’re taking your complete silence over the past month as a direct personal insult."
Jake felt his jaw tighten slightly. ’So the vultures looking for a tribute huh?’ he thought.
"So it’s a shakedown under the guise of a ministerial meeting," Jake said flatly.
"Essentially, yes," Darius confirmed. "They want to see who this twenty-three-year-old is, and they want to see if you can be pressured into giving up concessions. I deliberately used our family’s leverage to secure your slot in this meeting because you need this platform, Jake. It’s an opportunity for you to establish a few critical connections against certain politicians who are currently holding regulatory keys over our Steel Refinery expansions. You can’t just out-trade them; you have to out-navigate them politically."
Jake understood the gravity of the situation immediately. In the upper echelons of power, cash was a weapon, but political influence was the shield that kept the government from rewriting the rules of the game to take that weapon away. He wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to secure his perimeter.
"I understand," Jake said, his voice dropping into a hard, unyielding tone. "Thank you for setting the groundwork, Uncle. I’ll make sure the PR team prepares the necessary files."
"Just remember who you’re dealing with down there, Jake," Darius warned. "They aren’t market algorithms. They’re men who survive on leverage."
"I know," Jake said. "Have a good night."
He ended the call and slowly lowered the phone, staring out the dark window of his study.
’The upcoming ministerial meeting isn’t just a networking event; it is probably going to be a battleground. If I showed even a fraction of weakness, those old political factions would systematically try to choke my subsidiaries with regulatory audits and permit delays causing massive losses.’
’They think I’m just a lucky graduate who struck gold on a trading terminal and an inheritance, ’Jake thought, his left eye giving a sharp, intense flare of heat in the darkness of the room. They think they can corner me because I’m new.
He stood up, walking toward the window, looking out over the moonlit city. He had already conquered the financial district, but that was no longer enough. To survive at this level, he needed to cement his name across the entire landscape of the country so deeply that no politician, no minister, and no competitor would ever dare to come after him again.
"Let them invite me," Jake murmured into the empty room, his expression completely cold. "This is exactly where the real consolidation will begin."