Chương 1: Start Reading

"To our gracious host! To another year of success!" She accepted the toast with a tilt of her head, letting the cheers and applause wash over her. The party was a stunning success. Anyone who was someone or wanted to be someone had begged and fought for an invitation, and from that crowd, a select estabilished few had been allowed in. Celebrities, CEO, politicians, Nobel prize winners and royalty.

They were all there, the elite of the elite, gleaming in their outrageously expensive jewelry, designer clothes and perfect smiles. The setting didn't let them down. Priceless works of art decorated the penthouse alongside modernist furniture that existed in few or even unique specimens. Michelin-starred chefs had been flown in to assemble a spread the likes of which had few equals aside from the most exclusive five-star restaurants.

Waiters who could have been movie stars themselves moved with the grace of dancers. A whole orchestra filled the halls with a prize-winning rendition of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Everything gleamed. Everything glittered and shone with the light of wealth and success. How dreadfully boring. Of course, not a shred of the thought reached her features. For all the world, she was enjoying the attention with the calm confidence of someone who expected it. No matter how much dread that toast elicited.

She wondered how many suspected. For all intents, hers was a perfect life. As the majority shareholder of Wistamere Corp, a world-leading brand in pharmaceuticals and a dozen other areas, she was the queen of an economic empire. Presidents courted her, personalities begged for her favor, boards of directors fell silent when she walked into the room. Economists who could disrupt national budgets with their public opinions knew better than to step on her feet. The market shifted to her interests and investments.

She wasn't famous. Her face was little more than a footnote for all the masses were concerned, and she had always endeavored to keep it like that. Public attention brought all kinds of annoyances and risks, the largest of which was a curtailing of independence. No, she knew better. Always had. She belonged to that very exclusive group of personalities who pulled the economic world's strings from the shadows.

Nothing as dramatic as the cabals the masses liked to shiver about, but reality came close enough to the stories that minds more receptive to irony than hers might smile about it. That was true power, and true power was the only thing she had ever chased. Glass in hand, she made her way down the podium from which she had given her speech. Her heel had barely touched the floor when a swarm of hangers-on had congregated around her. They were like bees, she had long decided.

Buzzing, always buzzing, with their pearly smiles and welcoming expression and hungry eyes. Indefatigable in layering their cheers and congratulations and compliments in double-meanings, traps and requests for favors.

"I'll think about it," she replied, like she always did, and swept away, some of the most stubborn and less prudent bees trailing in her wake. The others knew better. She could almost see their thoughts: "She smiles, but look better and you'll see the ice. It's all she's made of, since her parents introduced her to the good society. Court her for her favor, but get close at your own risk. And never, ever offend her." She wouldn't deny it.

It took more than ruthlessness to climb to her perch, and more than focus to remain on it. She had devoted her life to it, crushing rivals who would unseat her, pushing away friends who would weaken her, burning any shred of time on the altar of ultimate success. She had stained her hands with blood for it. Literally. And she had it. Success… and the emptiness. Making her way among the guests, she exchanged pleasantries, asking how they were doing and if they were having a good time. Of course they were.

And that coffee table was such a love. Wherever did she buy it? She replied to each, offering lengthy replies to some, only acknowledging a few and sidestepping the probing questions of others. At this level, everything could lead to a mistake, no matter the relaxed vibe of the party.

"I've always admired how you handled the Q3 restructuring…" A manager told her, his lapels decorated with twin diamonds.

"I was curious, though; how did you reconcile the projected liquidity gap with the revised supplier contracts?" An innocent question, framed as simple curiosity. But it was slightly too precise, revealing insider knowledge and deep preparation. A poor answer would show a lack of information. Dodging would look evasive. A full reply would reveal sensitive info.

And of course, she could see more would-be questioners in the corner of her eye, waiting for their moment to pile up their own questions and frame a deeper digging as popular curiosity. All ammunitions gifted to those who listened. Because they were always listening. She smiled mildly.

"The liquidity gap you're referring to assumes the pre-amendment supplier exposure. We renegotiated those terms two weeks earlier. Quietly. That's what closed the gap." The manager's smile turned brittle. His comrades quickly turned to other conversations, leaving him alone. Being shown as acting out of the loop and on outdated information wasn't pleasant, not here, not now. She smiled and moved on. Her gallery was beautiful.

Pieces sourced from all over the world offered guests a chance to indulge their cultural interests while conversing under recreated beachside temperatures.

"In my part of the world, we've seen many pieces… travel far from where they belong," a guest, a stern emir, told her as they admired a painting.

"This reminds me of pieces that passed through Marseille a few years ago. A particular broker was handling that stream…" A pause. A look. He was testing her. She didn't avert her gaze.

"I rely on specialists for that. Provenance research is its own discipline, and I've learned not to pretend otherwise." She nodded, smiling pleasantly.

"If a piece reaches me, it's already passed through more scrutiny than I could add myself." He didn't look convinced, but still nodded and that was enough. It had to be. Nobody could hold her accountable for more than a few moments if she didn't let them. It never ended. Another shareholder tried to get her to show herself uncommitted on a not-informal agreement while the interested party secretly listened.

A famous singer wasted her time trying to look good in front of an actress he fancied by acting as if they were friends. The highlights of the evening was someone attempting to slip a pill in her drink, and a waiter who had set a camera in one of the private chambers. Many would have found it extremely stressful, having to go over each word even as you kept up with the flow of conversation, making sure to weigh every meaning and be certain that each word reached or stabbed the way it was meant to and only then.

She thrived in it. She had done so for fifty-five years, since her father first introduced her to the family company. It filled her with a grim satisfaction watching them elbow each other for her attention, squirm when their little games crumbled around them, lower their heads as they recognized that she was she and they were they, and one had importance and the other craved it. More than anything, she craved the control, lived for it.

No matter if it was a quarterly project ending smoothly or a party proceeding as she envisioned it despite the attempts at disruption, it thrilled her to no end seeing her meticulous planning resist every assault, carving its way across the tracks she had laid, to the destination she had envisioned. … it was enough, once. As the party ended and the guests buzzed out, the gleam flew out with them. As the doors closed, the grim satisfaction drained away, leaving her with the only companion she had left.

The emptiness.

"Finish cleaning up," she said, dropping her smile. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. She didn't bother waiting for the servant's reply, walking away to her private quarters. If one held any doubt about the rigid separation she kept between her private and public life, one look at her bedroom would have dispelled it. The place was spacious yet modest. More importantly, it was starkly utilitarian.

She was aware that it made her uncomfortably similar to an Orwellian villain, but she had always lacked interest in comfort and wealth. Even money as a concrete thing meant little: when you were worth more than a nation's GDP, there was little to be had from it except the tingling of watching graphics lines going up. No, what was important was power, the rush of seeing the world bend to her will. She had chased that high all her life, with a single-minded focus that left space for nothing else. Why?

The answer was both banal and obvious. Changing into her sleeping clothes, she glanced at the piles of documents orderly arrayed on her desk. There were always things to take care from, but she was at that age that all-nighters had to be carefully husbanded, lest she made mistakes the next day. That was sub-optimal. She didn't do sub-optimal. She was incapable of it. Letting out a small sigh, she lay on the bed. This is it, she thought, staring at the ceiling.

These were the worst moments, when the glitz and glam disappeared and she was made once more aware of how desperately alone and empty she was. To the point that even tears wouldn't come, the last of them having dried up a long time ago. Boring. Empty. Meaningless. That's what her life was. She could feel vindictive joy from it, cold satisfaction, even overwhelming pleasure. But happiness? Never. She had no friends, only sycophants; no family, only her work. Stepping down?

Killing herself would have been easy compared to it. She needed power like she needed air to live, and a proud, nasty old monster like her had no chance at forming true attachments. Nor could she change. She was like a train launched toward a cliff, without a switch to turn to safer rails. Oh, she was too much of an old witch to feel guilt for the things he had done, or regret and feel sorry for herself for the life she had led.

Rather, her life uncoiled itself before her, a chain which links of cause and effect she could pick at. Her grandfather was a genius. A titan of pharmaceutical development, he had taken a modest-sized company and turned it into a trailblazing brand that benefited the whole world and turned massive from it. As these things always went, his success had attracted all kinds of people, from the honestly supportive to those who wished to profit off it, turning the streams meant to benefit the masses to their advantage.

Enter the son. Far less talented than his father, he had grown in his shadow. Some would have turned to hatred and envy, but not him. He adored her grandfather, all but kissed the ground he walked on. Knowing his limits, he wouldn't dare to think he could improve on perfection. Rather, he considered himself a caretaker, a custodian meant to protect the genius's legacy from those who would despoil it.

The caretaker devoted his life to it, fighting tooth and nail to keep the company in the family, making sure that it followed the shape and direction his august progenitor would have wanted. He didn't much care for the good initiatives and policies set by his father, only that they were followed. All in all, a truly mediocre man, without a shred of imagination and whose only virtues were dogheadness and loyalty. But the world changed. The leeches, as he called them, only multiplied, threatening his father's legacy.

Meanwhile, the caretaker was alone and growing old. What was the caretaker to do then? Why, a legacy of his own. A child to mould and pass his dream to. A new caretaker. Enter her. Someone would call her a monster, others a robot. Her father wouldn't settle for anything but absolute excellence for his heir. Like a crazed alchemist with his homunculus, he had her crafted in a laboratory, then shaped her whole life so that there wouldn't be a human being behind her face, only an engine of success.

The best education, the best training, the best brainwashing. All her life had been nothing but a long training session so that one day she could assume control of Wistamere and keep the flame lit. It had worked excellently… up to a point. The twisted perfectionist part of her always turned up her nose to the rough methods employed by her father. Why send her to university? Homeschool would have been far more conducive to proper thought-control.

A degree could always be bought, and the mentorship from renowned professors would make up for any possible lack in prestige. Keeping her closed in the closet? Wasteful. Ineffective. With her logical background, it did nothing but spur her to work around the problem and so undermined his authority. Far better to create a system of threat and reward upon which she would exhaust her mental resources. Many little defects had made her conditioning imperfect.

A seed of doubt that had grown and now had long sprouted and given fruit. The petty part of her blamed her father for it: with perfect programming, she may have been happy, never doubting that hers was the perfect life. It would have been a fake happiness, buttressed by doctor help and self-delusion, but it would have been happiness nonetheless. It was a ridiculous line of thought, she was aware of it. She wouldn't wish for such a thing on her worst enemy.

But she was old and empty, and the night was long and in need of something to file away its hours. And anyway, it was its own kind of injustice. She spoke from the shoulders of the modern acquisitions in psychology and thought-control. Father was a man of his time, with all its limitations and lack of spin doctors. She'd know. She had tried to do the same. She turned to look at her bedside table. An ebook waited there, as it did every night. She thought about leaving there.

A small pill would send her to the dreamless sleep her workday needed. Her body may be feeling its age, but she was still more than strong enough to hold the custom-made medication. It was a game she always played with herself, likely the only one where she allowed herself to lose. In the end, she picked up the tool and turned it on. Up to that day, she didn't know why her son kept in touch. God knew if she had tried her best to turn him into the same monster she was.

But if her programming had not been enough to make her happy, it wasn't enough to make her recognize what a travesty of a life she would condemn him to, no matter what the modern sciences could achieve. Instead, she had let him go. The hardest thing she had ever done, and the only one who spread some warmth in her cold, dead heart. He was an IT expert now. He made 2000 dollars a month, had a wife, two kids and a British Shorthair.

They lived in a little house in the suburbs, with a mortgage still to pay and a small mold problem. He liked hiking and had saved for months to be able to buy a canoe to go rafting. As always, the email he had sent her was choked full with tidbits and little stories. He liked to keep her informed of everything, no matter that she never replied. She read avidly, a complicated mix of pride and shame swirling in her chest. Tacked at the end, there was a PDF, and she smiled at seeing it. It was his latest obsession.

Novels, he called them. Silly little stories written by amateurs and published on the internet, often with the bare minimum in proofreading. He had taken an interest in them lately, and since Mother apparently had to be kept apprised of all his hobbies, he started sending some her way. She had arched more than one eyebrow at the beginning, but what had started as a way to connect with her son had quickly become the closest to an enjoyable hobby she ever had.

Those stories may lack the polish of professional publishing, but she found herself enjoying their raw honesty and creativity, even surprised herself getting annoyed at how many fell behind tropes for clout or dropped them altogether. His latest obsession was a genre called Xianxia, a type of story that revolved around cultivation in East-inspired fantasy settings and characters growing in power through it. It was… surprisingly intriguing.

You'd think that with magic at his disposal, an author would set aside scarcity and deal in intrigue and character work. Instead, cultivation stories doubled down on it, creating what was effectively a hyper-competitive resource-based world and setting all their characters' struggles around it. Some stories were simple power fantasies, the characters delving into all manner of vices while hiding behind flimsy excuses. Her son, being the goody two-shoes he was, avoided those.

Instead, he preferred tales of chivalry and friendship, of heroes rising to the occasion and poignant romance, of power wielded not for its own sake but for a greater purpose. The chapters he sent her came from one such story. Tales of Ascension was a tale about a young man who carved his path through a world that valued only power while remaining faithful to his own ideals.

It was silly, more often than not bending itself backward to have him win with a deus ex machina, or turn villains to his side with good-hearted speeches and an optimism that made her roll her eyes at the naivety. Yet, it was also surprisingly bright and pleasant to read. And her son liked it, didn't he? So the old witch would swallow her opinions and like it as well. She read for a while, skipping the more eye-rolling parts (even her patience had its limit) and forgetting the emptiness for a while.

Like always, she was less interested in the protagonist and more about characters the novel barely mentioned. The great immortals in particular attracted her attention. These were Ancestors, Sect Leaders, thousand-year hermits who attained or were close to attaining true immortality. More often than not narrative devices to set stakes and power levels, they were rarely explored, remaining aloof from the main story.

A psychologist would have likely called her interest a narcissistic one, but she couldn't help but wonder about them. For all purposes, they were those who had triumphed. The endless fight for resources, the struggle for ascension; it was a done thing for them, or at least done enough that most problems were behind them. The rat-race couldn't touch them. The world now bent to their whims, instead of the other way. And yet, she wondered. Were they happy? Or were they like her?

Having fought, bled, and given up everything for the sake of power, did they find the top of the mountain lonely? Barren and pointless? With the frenzy to survive and thrive behind them, they turned to look around and found everything to be boring and colorless? Some turned to foster great lineages, who then grew and ascended in turn. Others founded sects. Others yet turned to secluded cultivation. What did they think? Did they consider this the obvious next step to their own development?

Or the long climb had left them with dry hearts and parched throats, and now they turned to something, anything, that would quell the emptiness? Is power enough for them? Like it's not for me? She was too much of a proud old monster for complaining and regret. Yet, she wondered. She fell asleep soon after, her thoughts swirling with questions.