Garrett Orion had never known poverty.
He had known disease, weakness, humiliation, and the constant ache of bones that felt like chalk sticks rattling inside him. But poverty? That was foreign. He'd been born into money the way some people were born into freckles or brown hair—inescapable, inherited, stamped into his DNA long before the Bloodline System entered the picture.
And what money it was.
Garrett's father had been an unremarkable man, a lawyer with a penchant for cheap whiskey and expensive mistresses. His mother, an heiress of some half-forgotten real estate dynasty, had been more interested in breeding dogs than raising a child. Both were gone now, their lives cut short in one of those ironic twists fate loved to toss at the wealthy: a plane crash, while Garrett—their sickly son—continued living against every odd.
What they left behind wasn't just money. It was legacy. And that legacy was, in a word, absurd.
The Orions had always been landowners, stretching back to colonial days. Unlike most old families who sold off property piecemeal, the Orions had kept meticulous records and airtight contracts. And somewhere along the way, one of Garrett's great-great-grandfathers had done something insane.
He had bought Washington.
Not just a plot of land in Washington. Not a chunk of forest or a string of businesses. No—he had bought the entire state of Washington.
On paper, at least.
It was a loophole so bizarre it shouldn't have existed. Back in the days of frantic land trading, deeds were handed out like candy to anyone who knew how to push paperwork. The Orion ancestor had purchased, through a convoluted string of shell companies, a deed that technically encompassed the whole state. At the time, nobody took it seriously. How could anyone "own" a state? Surely the government would override it eventually.
Except… nobody ever did.
The deed passed down, generation to generation, buried under layers of Orion wealth. Until Garrett turned eighteen and, out of boredom, had a team of lawyers dig through the family archives.
And there it was.
A legal claim to Washington State.
Most people would have laughed and framed it as a curiosity. Garrett did the opposite. He sued the United States government.
The case should have been thrown out instantly. Instead, it turned into one of the strangest legal battles in modern history. The Orion lawyers presented documentation stretching back centuries, unbroken, airtight. Washington, North Carolina, and California—the Orions had technical deeds to all of them, thanks to some ambitious ancestor with too much free time and an obsession with land contracts.
The government balked. Judges balked. But the law… the law was a funny thing. Legal was a loose term, a shifting line depending on who was rich enough to redraw it. And Garrett Orion was very rich.
The final settlement was headline news.
"Orion Heir Legally Owns Washington, California, and North Carolina."
"Bizarre Court Case Grants Billionaire Revenue Rights Over Three States."
"Richest Invalid in the World: Meet Garrett Orion."
It became a cultural meme for months. Comedians joked that the President had to pay rent to a man who coughed when he sneezed. Late-night hosts laughed about the "sickly landlord of America."
In the end, the compromise was simple. Garrett allowed people to stay in "his" states, in exchange for revenue. Specifically, five percent of all taxes and revenue generated within Washington, California, and North Carolina would funnel directly into his accounts.
Five percent didn't sound like much. Until you realized the states in question were economic giants.
Garrett Orion became, overnight, the richest man in the world.
Legally.
Oh, sure, his family's history was shady. Technically, the original purchases might have been fraudulent, underhanded, or even illegal by modern standards. But the paperwork was ironclad, and courts only cared about paperwork.
Garrett never gloated. He didn't have the energy. Instead, he did what he always did: lived in quiet misery while the world howled in disbelief around him.
---
So how did the richest weak man alive find happiness?
The answer was: he didn't.
Not in the conventional sense. Happiness was a luxury, and Garrett couldn't afford luxuries. What he could afford, however, was indulgence.
Every month, he donated five percent of his wealth to charity. Cancer treatment, HIV research, heart disease programs—he had them all covered. He gave to NASA once, simply because he liked the idea of his money launching a rocket that might kill an astronaut. He gave to orphanages, food banks, disaster relief, even obscure wildlife sanctuaries.
Five percent of Garrett's wealth was more than most governments spent on aid.
It wasn't altruism. It was self-amusement. "I've got everything," he once said, "so why not give some away? It's not like I can spend it all on myself. Can't exactly go skydiving in this body."
The public adored him for it. They called him a saint, a philanthropist, the Sickly Savior. Garrett thought that was hilarious. If they could see him in his recliner, sweating from the effort of walking to the bathroom, they'd know he wasn't a savior. He was just too rich to care.
He owned 17.8% of Stark Industries. On paper, that gave him incredible power. He could attend board meetings, sway decisions, influence the future of technology. In practice? Garrett Orion couldn't even make it to the car without collapsing. The idea of sitting in a room with Tony Stark was laughable. He'd sweat through his silk shirt before the meeting began.
And so he stayed in his penthouse, watching the world from his chair, his wealth multiplying endlessly as five percent of three states filled his accounts.
It was a life of misery, gilded with gold.
---
But money wasn't enough anymore. Not since the System appeared.
Garrett's new obsession was blood.
Not in the vampire sense—though, pale as he was, he fit the aesthetic. He wanted DNA. The genetic codes of the powerful. Wolverine had been the first. But he knew he needed more.
So he went shopping.
The black market was a fascinating place. With the right connections, you could buy anything. Mutant hair clippings. Alien skin flakes. Metahuman blood samples. Of course, most of it was garbage—scams, mislabeled junk, sometimes just dyed goat hair. But Garrett had money to burn, and burning it was half the fun.
He started small. A vial labeled "Atlantean Tissue," supposedly scraped off a soldier from Atlantis. A strand of hair said to belong to some washed-up B-list meta from Gotham. A fingernail fragment claimed to be from a speedster nobody remembered.
They weren't X-Men. They weren't A-listers. But Garrett didn't care.
"Better to have a stockpile of fertilizer," he muttered as he clicked purchase, "than be a cow waiting for grass to grow."
He knew most of it was fake. Maybe ninety percent. But if even one vial was real? One percent of a real power was better than nothing. He could collect scraps until they amounted to something.
After all, wasn't that his whole life? A pile of diseases that should have killed him, balancing each other out until survival became inevitable.
Garrett Orion, the world's weakest man, was also the richest. And now, with the Bloodline System, he might one day be something more.
For now, though, he reclined in his chair, weak smile tugging at his lips, as his bank account dinged with another billion in revenue.
"Another day, another fortune," he murmured. "And maybe tomorrow, another gene."