Season 2 chapter 11
The Gold Coin and The Blessing
The next morning, a sleek, black luxury town car—sent by Leux Hueman—waited outside the Oasis Grand hotel. Malesh stepped inside, wearing a newly purchased, perfectly tailored dark suit. He was back in his corporate armor.
As the car rolled down the dusty main street toward Leux's corporate headquarters, it slowed down near the open-air market.
Malesh looked out the tinted window and frowned.
A crew of local construction workers had already arrived with surveying equipment and shovels. They were aggressively gesturing for the market vendors to clear the dirt street. The older woman who had given Malesh the stew was frantically trying to pack up her wooden stall, looking incredibly distressed. She was getting the completely wrong idea—she thought she was being permanently evicted from her livelihood.
"Stop the car," Malesh ordered the driver.
He didn't wait for the driver to open the door. Malesh stepped out into the dust and walked straight over to the commotion.
"Hey. Back off," Malesh said, his voice cutting through the noise with absolute authority. The construction workers, recognizing the billionaire who was paying them, immediately stopped and stepped back.
Malesh turned to the frightened woman. His cold, calculating demeanor softened just a fraction.
"Hello, ma'am," Malesh said gently. "You don't need to panic. You helped me at a crucial moment. I am really grateful to you. Don't worry, ma'am. These people are not evicting you. They are developing the concrete shop right here, and it is specifically for you."
The woman blinked, holding a basket of tomatoes to her chest in shock. "For... for me? A real shop? But... how can I earn revenue in the days it takes to build it? If I don't sell, I don't eat."
Malesh had already calculated the downtime. He reached into his tailored suit pocket and pulled out a solid, heavy DI'an gold coin. Gold was a universal currency, immune to local exchange rates.
"Sell this piece of gold," Malesh said, placing the heavy coin gently into her weathered hand. "I think it will be more than enough to cover your lost revenue. And if you want more, when I return from my business, I will provide you more."
The woman stared at the gold coin. It was worth more than she had made in the last 9 months combined. Tears instantly pooled in her eyes, finally clearing the panic away.
She looked up at the 25-year-old billionaire.
"Long live, son," she whispered, her voice trembling with profound emotion. "I don't need any more than this. You are a good man. You will be very, very successful in your life."
For a guy whose brain operated entirely on logic, machinery, and sociopathic corporate warfare, genuine maternal affection was a complete system error. Malesh felt a sudden, unfamiliar heat rise to his cheeks.
He was actually blushing.
"Uh," Malesh cleared his throat, suddenly looking very flustered as he adjusted his expensive cuffs. "Yeah. Just... enjoy the shop. Bye."
He quickly turned around, speed-walking back to the luxury car before his emotional firewall completely collapsed.
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The Speed Track (The Empire Rises)
Ten minutes later, Malesh sat in the penthouse office of Leux Hueman.
There were no more arguments. The paperwork was flawless. Malesh took his fountain pen and signed his name at the bottom of the five-year exclusivity agreement. In return, Leux authorized the immediate offshore transfer of 500 Billion DI'an credits to Malesh's newly established corporate accounts.
With the capital secured and the alliance forged, the timeline aggressively accelerated.
Week 1: The Iron Arrives
The Continental Express rolled into the Sulwadiya railway station, groaning under the weight of thousands of tons of steel. Kniya had delivered. A massive, mechanized fleet of SuliBulli Construction Limited heavy rotary drills, excavators, and steel piping was unloaded into the desert.
Week 2: Breaking Ground The hiring blitz worked. Thousands of local workers, paid 40% above the national average, swarmed the 85,000-square-kilometer northern ravines. The SuliBulli drills pierced the sandstone. Within days, the first massive geysers of pressurized, thick black crude oil shot into the desert sky. Malesh Energy Limited had struck the motherlode.
Week 3: The Bureaucratic Shield Leux Hueman kept his word. Using his connection to the Sulwadiyan President, all government red tape vanished overnight. There were no environmental protests. There were no zoning laws. The government simply stepped aside and let the billionaires work.
Month 2: The 300 Refineries
Malesh didn't just extract; he built. Following the contract clause, he initiated the construction of exactly 300 localized oil refineries across the nation. This masterstroke required a colossal labor force. By employing tens of thousands of Sulwadiyan citizens, Malesh Energy Limited instantly became the backbone of the entire country's economy. The government couldn't threaten them even if they wanted to—shutting down Malesh meant bankrupting their own citizens.
Month 3: The Global Shockwave The international financial markets finally caught wind of what was happening. Major global conglomerates, investment banks, and rival energy families (including the Bulwadi family back in DI) watched the ticker tapes in absolute, horrified awe.
A 25-year-old kid had quietly purchased 2% of a sovereign nation's landmass for pennies, tapped an ocean of unrefined petroleum, partnered with a local transportation oligarch, and essentially bought a country's entire workforce.
The desert transit country was no longer a wasteland. It was the beating, toxic, highly profitable heart of the global energy sector.
And Malesh was the king of the sand.
The Economics of a Monopoly
The speed at which Malesh Energy Limited conquered the global market was not magic; it was pure, sociopathic mathematics.
A month after the SuliBulli equipment arrived, Malesh sat in his newly built, air-conditioned corporate headquarters overlooking the 300 active refineries in the Sulwadiyan desert.
He opened his ledger.
Before Malesh entered the market, the global price for a standard barrel of unrefined crude oil was 120 DI'an credits. The traditional energy families spent a fortune shipping raw crude across the ocean to be refined, paying massive transit taxes along the way.
Malesh bypassed all of it. Because he had been forced by Leux Hueman to finance the 300 local refineries, Malesh extracted and processed the oil on the exact same plot of land. His total overhead cost per barrel was a pathetic 8 credits.
He flooded the international market, pricing his premium crude at 78 DI'an credits a barrel—a catastrophic 35% collapse in global energy prices.
The traditional oil barons bled billions overnight. They couldn't lower their prices without going bankrupt, but nobody would buy their expensive oil when Malesh was practically giving it away. Meanwhile, Malesh was pocketing 66 credits of pure profit on every single barrel, pumping out millions of barrels a week.
But Malesh was not satisfied.
He flipped to the next page of his ledger. It documented his initial purchase.
He had bought the original 85,000 square kilometers of Sulwadiyan desert from the government for exactly 115 million DI'an credits. To the government, it was a massive influx of cash for "useless sand." To Malesh, who now knew that this specific patch of desert contained exactly 12% of the entire planet's global oil reserves, it was the greatest heist in human history.
But he had 500 Billion credits from Leux Hueman sitting in his offshore accounts, and leaving capital stagnant was a sin.
If Sulwadiya sits on a geological oil basin, the neighboring transit countries must share the same subterranean fault lines, Malesh calculated.
He didn't wait for geological surveys. He didn't wait for permission. Using a network of shell companies, Malesh deployed 100 Billion credits of Leux's money over the next two months. He quietly bought up millions of square kilometers of "useless" desert, rocky plateaus, and dead zones across three neighboring countries.
By the time the global energy commissions finally sent geological teams to investigate the 35% market crash, the truth was officially documented, and it sent shockwaves through every government on the continent.
Malesh Energy Limited didn't just control the Sulwadiyan supply. Through his aggressive, blind land acquisitions, Malesh officially owned 20% of the Earth's total oil reserves.
He had achieved absolute monopoly status.
The Sand in the Boots
The global economy was officially having a heart attack.
In less than a year, the world had faced two apocalyptic market breakthroughs. First, Kavilson Steel had annihilated the construction and military steel markets out in Sulwai. Now, the energy sector was bleeding out. Because there was no global cartel of countries to regulate oil—only private, cutthroat companies—a single guy suddenly owning 20% of the earth's crude oil was an extinction-level event for his competitors.
Before Malesh entered the market, the global price for a standard barrel of unrefined crude oil was 120 DI'an credits. Malesh bypassed the entire global supply chain. His total overhead cost to extract and refine a barrel on his own dirt was an absolute joke—just 8 credits.
He flooded the international market, pricing his premium crude at 78 DI'an credits a barrel. He was pocketing 70 credits of pure profit on every single barrel, pumping out millions of barrels a week, and destroying the traditional energy barons.
But Malesh, currently standing on the catwalk of his massive primary fractional distillation tower, was not celebrating his monopoly. He was staring down at his steel-toed boots, looking profoundly pissed off.
"I literally control twenty percent of the global energy supply," Malesh muttered to himself, gripping the metal railing. "I have five hundred billion credits in liquidity. I own three hundred refineries. And I still have this fucking sand in my boots."
He kicked the metal grate, but the annoying feeling of grit between his toes remained.
"This is the fundamental flaw of organic evolution," Malesh complained, glaring out at the endless desert. "Why the fuck did all the prehistoric biomass have to die and decompose in a wasteland? Could the dinosaurs not have walked somewhere with air conditioning before turning into hydrocarbons? I am a billionaire, and I am sweating like a pig because millions of years ago, a fern decided to rot in a fucking desert."
A site manager walked up to the catwalk, holding a clipboard and looking nervous. "Uh, Mr. Malesh? The Novation Energy Coalition is threatening to boycott our shipments."
Malesh slowly turned his head, his eyes dead and cold.
"Yeah, let them fuck this shit," Malesh snapped, his voice dripping with absolute venom. "I don't care about fucking them. They don't have the domestic reserves to survive a winter without my oil. They will freeze for a week, realize their morals don't generate heat, and buy my crude anyway. Now get out of my sight, I need to figure out how to engineer a boot that repels microscopic silica particles."