The servers and hardware had cost Ethan a lot by present standards.
He still refused to waste money on the most expensive units in the catalog.
No matter how new they were, they still belonged to this era.
He was going to tear them apart and rebuild them anyway.
A few machines, a pile of components, specialty tools, soldering supplies, replacement parts, and the other materials he needed had eaten through two-thirds of the money.
After everything, he still had a little over a hundred thousand dollars left.
That was enough to move.
He called a moving company that same morning.
The bed was trash.
Most of the furniture was trash.
Half the junk in the apartment was not worth the effort of touching, much less transporting.
He took the computers, the servers, the useful tools, the important materials, and left the rest behind.
A storefront would have been too visible and too cramped.
Office space would have looked better, but he did not want to burn money on a real lease before the company even existed.
So he rented a house instead.
Not a mansion. Not some luxury fantasy. Just a large, finished place with enough space to sleep in, work in, and rebuild into a temporary headquarters.
The neighborhood was decent. The wiring was modern. The rooms were large enough to split by function.
Most importantly, it was move-in ready.
The owner told him he was not the first renter to use a place like this as a small business base.
In neighborhoods like that, it happened often enough that no one cared as long as the cars stayed off the lawn and no one turned the garage into a meth lab.
The rent was a hundred thousand dollars a year.
Ethan paid the deposit and the first month of rent without bargaining.
Then he called the telecom company again.
This time, they moved fast.
By the next morning, the data line was installed.
The official setup alone would have been enough to improve things dramatically, but Ethan had no intention of stopping there.
The moment the technicians were gone, he started exploiting every weakness in the surrounding network environment he could reach.
Not enough to trigger a spectacle.
Just enough to squeeze more out of the system than he had paid for.
Then he installed the new servers and transferred the game data over.
By the time he finished, it was close to noon.
He could have opened the new environment immediately.
He chose not to.
The old version stayed online so the current players could keep grinding.
Meanwhile, Ethan sat down in the new office and started opening tabs.
How many licenses did a company need?
How many approvals did a live game need?
What filings were required to register the business properly, formalize operations, and stop looking like an idiot with a miracle product and no legal shell around it?
He had no idea.
That irritated him more than it should have.
The future had taught him how to think at a civilizational scale.
It had not taught him how many forms a twenty-first-century founder needed to submit just to keep a local government clerk from ruining his week.
He checked the remaining balance.
A little over fifty thousand dollars.
Enough to breathe.
Not enough to stay sloppy.
So he opened a job board and started reading resumes.
He skimmed for half an hour before one of them finally made him stop.
Leo Mercer.
Forty years old.
Management experience across multiple internet companies.
Never a CEO, but close enough to real operations to understand how things actually got built, registered, staffed, and kept alive.
The resume looked strong.
The comments underneath it were even more useful.
Fired.
Urgently looking for work.
That made Ethan smile faintly.
'Good. Desperate people move faster.'
He picked up the phone and called the number listed on the profile.
Half an hour later, Leo Mercer walked into the rented house.
He was dressed with the kind of rigid professionalism Ethan disliked on sight.
Dark suit. Clean lines. No wasted motion.
The sort of man who looked as though he judged the moral worth of strangers by how neatly they stacked paper clips on their desks.
Ethan took one look at him and thought, 'He probably makes everyone around him miserable.'
Leo took one look at Ethan and thought, 'This has to be some rich kid startup disaster.'
Their mutual dislike arrived instantly.
"Hi," Ethan said, standing and offering a hand. "Ethan Cole. Owner of this little internet company."
Leo shook it. "Leo Mercer—"
"I read your resume. You don't need to repeat it."
Leo stopped.
That was not how job interviews were supposed to go.
Ethan leaned against the side of the desk and asked, "Do you like sticking your nose into things that aren't your business?"
Leo blinked.
"What?"
"Simple question."
"I..." Leo frowned, then shook his head. "Not especially."
"Good."
Ethan nodded once.
"Can you register a company, manage one, and handle all the paperwork and approval garbage I don't want to waste time on?"
Leo opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Opened it again.
"I mean, that depends on the exact—"
"Fine. Then you can do it."
Ethan waved a hand as though the issue had already been settled.
"Stay."
Then he turned and walked toward the back of the house.
Leo stood there for a second, still processing what had just happened, before hurrying after him.
What did that even mean?
Stay?
There had been no proper interview.
No structured questions. No discussion of reporting lines, job scope, or formal expectations.
They had not even talked about salary.
He followed Ethan anyway.
The largest room had been turned into a bedroom.
The second largest was now an office.
The third had become a server room full of humming machines and patched-together hardware that looked far more serious than anything else about the place.
"Boss, I..." Leo began.
Then he caught himself.
He had not even agreed to work here yet.
Why had he almost called him that?
Ethan glanced back at him.
"Oh. Right. Salary."
He thought for a moment.
"What were you making before?"
Leo answered automatically.
"With bonus, around a hundred and fifty thousand a year."
"I'll give you three hundred thousand."
Leo froze.
"There. Anything else?"
"No," Leo said reflexively.
Then, because some distant fragment of professionalism was still trying to survive inside him, he added, "Actually, yes. What exactly does the company do?"
"Games."
"Online games?"
"Browser game first. PC client next."
Leo nodded slowly.
That part, at least, made sense.
"All right," he said. "What kind of quarterly revenue are we looking at?"
"None."
Leo stared at him.
Ethan kept going.
"The game is free right now. No cash shop yet. No formal monetization. Yesterday I crowdfunded about three hundred thousand."
Leo's expression changed so quickly it almost looked painful.
"What?"
Ethan gave him the short version.
The game.
The streamer push.
The server crisis.
The hidden funding page.
The explosive response.
The relocation.
The need for company registration and operating approvals before the whole thing turned into a legal circus.
By the time Ethan finished, Leo felt two opposite instincts tearing at each other inside his head.
The first told him to leave immediately.
No registered company.
No completed approvals.
A live game already online.
A founder in his twenties running operations out of a rented house while upgrading servers by hand and talking about business structure like paperwork was a contagious disease.
If the wrong person noticed the wrong detail, this whole thing could collapse into fines, shutdowns, or something even uglier.
The second instinct told him to stay.
Because the game was real.
That was the problem.
It was not an empty pitch.
Not vaporware.
Not some lazy reskin built to milk children and die in a month.
The product existed, and worse for his peace of mind, it was good.
Very good.
Potentially absurdly good.
If the legal and operational structure caught up with the product, if the server rollout stabilized, if the browser version expanded and the promised PC version really existed, then this thing was not merely viable.
It was explosive.
And the founder, whatever else he was, clearly had teeth.
He paid quickly. Decided quickly. Understood product instinctively. Built like a lunatic. And somehow already had the next stage planned.
Leo took the seat Ethan had pointed at and, despite himself, started testing the game.
At first, it was professional.
Purely professional.
He needed to evaluate the product.
That was all.
Then he kept playing.
Then he leaned closer.
Then he forgot Ethan was even in the room.
The class progression loop was vicious.
The pacing was manipulative.
The rewards were timed just well enough to keep anticipation ahead of satisfaction.
The opening village felt bigger than it had any right to feel.
The hidden triggers made every ordinary corner of the map suspect.
It was exactly the sort of design that should not have worked this well.
Which meant it probably would.
Ethan watched him for a while, then almost smiled.
Where had all that professionalism gone?
A minute earlier, Leo had looked like a man who ironed his own conscience.
Now he looked like every other player.
Hooked.
Finally, Ethan asked, "Can it blow up?"
Leo did not look away from the screen.
"Yes," he said. "Not just a little. This thing can go huge."
Now he looked up.
His expression had changed.
The caution was still there, but it had been joined by something sharper.
Possibility.
He set the mouse down and said, "Boss, I'm going to start the registration process immediately. Company setup, approvals, whatever operating documents we can secure first."
"The current government process is fast if you know how to push it. Give me three days. I'll get everything moving."
"Good," Ethan said.
He nodded once, already turning back toward his own screen.
"Then three days from now, we start the formal closed beta for the PC version. Until then, I'll open a few more browser servers and let the people who are desperate enough keep playing."
Leo stood.
Then stopped near the door.
The cold air from outside touched his face just enough to clear his head.
He looked back at the rented house.
At the improvised office.
At the founder who had hired him without a proper interview.
At the fact that he still had not signed a formal employment contract.
And then he muttered to himself, "This company has to be cursed."
But he did not leave.
He pulled out his phone and started making calls before he even reached the sidewalk.
A/N: If you enjoyed the chapter, add it to your library and drop a power stone. It really helps support the novel.