Spending indiscriminately. Steven had never thought he would say such words to himself in his life.
When he had been doing his best to survive, micromanaging every dollar in his account, words like that had sounded like foolishness. But the current version of him intended to use exactly that foolishness. The irony wasn’t lost on him.
The problem was that he had no idea what to spend money on. Or rather, the better way to phrase it was that he had no experience with splurge spending and no instinct for how to go about it.
One might think that spending money required no special skill. Just open your wallet and let it go. But for soone who had spent years calculating every dollar with the precision of a man whose survival depended on it, the idea of spending without justification felt genuinely foreign. Every purchase his mind reached for, so old reflex imdiately asked do you actually need this? And the honest answer, most of the ti, was no.
"What a dilemma," he muttered. "Is this what people call suffering from success?"
He sat with the problem for a mont, turning it over. His thoughts drifted, moving through categories and dismissing them one by one, until his face slowly lit up.
Superbikes.
He rembered the videos. He had co across them during late-night scrolling in the old apartnt. It was the kind of content the algorithm served you when it had figured out you weren’t going to sleep anyti soon.
Riders on machines that looked less like vehicles and more like engineering argunts. The sound they made was half the content. The other half was the way they moved — sharp, precise, built for one thing and entirely committed to it.
As soone who had spent most of his life watching luxury from a distance, Steven’s fra of reference for expensive things had always been the obvious categories. Cars. Watches. Real estate. The things that appeared in the background of success stories. But superbikes occupied their own space entirely. They were expensive in a way that felt personal rather than performative, and the community around them had always struck him as genuinely enthusiastic rather than simply status-driven.
He imdiately picked up his phone and searched.
The results ca back quickly. There was plenty in the twenty to fifty thousand range, well-made machines with serious hardware behind them. But Steven wasn’t interested in that range. He was looking for the other end. The machines that started at a hundred thousand and climbed from there.
What he found gave him pause.
Superbikes at that price point were almost exclusively limited edition or collector-level vehicles. Production runs of a few hundred units at most, so far fewer. Machines that had been made years ago and never reissued. Getting one new was effectively impossible. Getting one at all required either the right connections or the kind of patience that ca with knowing exactly where to look and being willing to wait.
He set the phone down and exhaled.
The reason he wanted sothing in that range was straightforward. The system rewarded spending, and the larger the transaction, the more the rebate had to work with. Spending twenty thousand and landing a 1.5x multiplier returned thirty thousand, which was a significant amount by any normal standard. But it moved his balance by ten thousand. At his current target of three million, transactions at that scale were slow. He needed volu, or size, or ideally both.
A single purchase at a hundred thousand, even at the lowest multiplier, returned a hundred and fifty. At higher multipliers, the number beca genuinely aningful.
Simple mathematics, and the mathematics pointed clearly toward high-value single transactions wherever he could find them.
"The Ducati Superleggera V4 would work," he muttered, thinking out loud. "The Brough Superior Aston Martin AMB 001 would be ideal, but it’s not street legal, which defeats the point. The MTT 420RR Turbine is an option. The Combat Wraith doesn’t fit what I’m going for."
He made a ntal note to find a luxury dealership rather than searching online. Standard dealerships wouldn’t carry machines at that level, and trying to source them through general listings was a path to wasted ti. He needed sowhere that dealt specifically in high-end and collector-grade vehicles, where the inventory existed and the staff knew what they were talking about.
He would handle that tomorrow.
For tonight, he needed sothing else. Sothing that could move money in volu and frequency without requiring him to leave the apartnt.
His mind went to livestream gifting.
It wasn’t a new idea. He had encountered it before, mostly in passing, during the sa late-night scrolling sessions that had introduced him to the superbike videos. Occasionally a clip would land in his feed — a viewer sending a massive gift on a live broadcast, the strear’s reaction filling the screen, the comnt section erupting. He had watched so of the clips but he always quickly skipped it after a few seconds.
Gifting on livestreams was, in purely chanical terms, exactly what he was looking for. Money left his account, converted into platform currency, and moved in whatever volu he chose.
The platform didn’t care whether he spent fifty dollars or five thousand. The system would respond to the transaction either way, and what ca back would be worth more than what went in.
The question was which platform.
He picked up his phone and did the research properly, working through the options. He looked at gifting limits, recharge ceilings, paynt processing, and how quickly money could move through each platform in practice.
TikTok ca out ahead for his purposes. The recharge system was straightforward, the gifting infrastructure was built for volu, and the ceiling on individual transactions was higher than most of the alternatives. Twitch would have been his preference on a personal level — he had always been more interested in gaming content — but its structure was more restrictive in the ways that mattered to him right now.
He downloaded TikTok, went through the setup, configured his feed preferences, and added his debit card as his paynt thod. It took less than three minutes.
Then he navigated to the recharge section and looked at the options.
The maximum single recharge was $186 for 7,500 coins. He selected it without hesitating and confird the purchase.
The transaction cleared imdiately.
[You spent $186. A 3x rebate was triggered.]
[You received $558. The money has been transferred to your account.]
Steven looked at the notification for a mont. Then he recharged again.
And again.
He worked through nine more recharges in steady succession, watching the system notifications stack in his vision like a quiet, rolling tally.
[You spent $186. A 3x rebate was triggered]
[You received $558. The money has been transferred to your account] x3
[You spent $186. A 4x rebate was triggered.]
[You received $744. The money has been transferred to your account] x2
[You spent $186. A 4.5x rebate was triggered]
[You received $837. The money has been transferred to your account] x2
[You spent $186. A 5x rebate was triggered.]
[You received $930. The money has been transferred to your account] x2
He checked his balance when the last notification cleared.
$1,748,642.74.
It was up by roughly eight thousand from the last ti he had looked, which was earlier today.
"The recharge limit is the problem now but that will change slowly," he said quietly, setting the phone on his knee.
At $185 per transaction, he was working in small incrents. Ten recharges moved less than two thousand dollars. To reach three million, he needed transactions with more weight behind them, which brought him back to the superbike, and to whatever else he could find in that range.
But for tonight, this was what he had available, and there was no reason not to use it.
He had a wallet full of coins sitting in the app, unspent. He navigated to the live section, and the feed populated instantly — a grid of thumbnails, each one a different broadcast happening sowhere in the world at this exact mont.
***
I hope you all understood what I did with the multiplier attached the rebate notification.
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