Rebate King: Every Beauty I Spoil Makes Me a Billionaire

Stan drove back to Aurelia Heights with the quiet satisfaction that always followed an evening that had unfolded exactly as he’d intended.

He had just turned onto the main avenue when a familiar system notification appeared.

[Ding!]

[Maya Zimmerman: Favorability has crossed 120.]

A faint smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

The kiss at the restaurant had probably done it. Or perhaps their conversation about her company. Or the goodnight kiss in the car. More likely, it had been all three. Whatever combination of moments had tipped the scale, Maya had crossed the threshold cleanly. Her rebate multiplier now sat firmly in the 12× tier.

Two more notifications followed in quick succession.

[System interface update available. Tap to view.]

[Shop inventory refreshing. New items now available for purchase.]

Keeping his eyes on the road, Stan mentally opened the first notification.

...

The interface unfolded across his vision, cleaner and more streamlined than before. A banner at the top displayed the upgrade in crisp, understated text.

[Supreme Rebate System 2.0]

He skimmed through the upgrade summary as he drove.

The first change concerned rebate scaling.

Previously, the system had capped at a 10× multiplier once a target’s favorability exceeded 100. Now the multiplier increased progressively with higher favorability, according to a clear tiered structure:

Favorability 100–110: 10× rebate

Favorability 111–119: 11× rebate

Favorability 120–129: 12× rebate

Favorability 130–139: 13× rebate

Favorability 140+: 14× rebate and beyond, with no upper limit

Stan grasped the implications immediately.

Sophie, at 125, would now generate a 12× rebate. Maya, having just reached 120, would do the same. Amelia, who had been sitting at 128 the last time he’d checked, also qualified for the 12× tier and judging by how quickly her favorability had been climbing, she would likely break into the 13× bracket within a matter of days.

The second change increased the daily binding limit.

The original system had restricted him to two new binding per day. Version 2.0 raised that limit to four.

The implications were obvious. He could now expand his roster of bound targets four times as fast.

The third upgrade raised the weekly rebate limit for each individual target.

Instead of two rebate cycles per week, each bound target could now generate up to four.

With Sophie, Maya, Amelia, Xenia, Mia, and Sarah all maintaining exceptionally high favorability, the practical effect was staggering. Not only could he trigger rebate cycles twice as often, but the multipliers themselves were now significantly higher.

He read the summary a second time. Then he exhaled slowly. The system was no longer a curiosity.

For the first two weeks, it had been exactly that, a strange, almost amusing mechanism that quietly accumulated wealth without ever fully revealing its potential.

Version 2.0 changed that.

It wasn’t merely a convenient source of money anymore. It was infrastructure. A scalable machine. A structured engine for generating capital with extraordinary efficiency.

And with higher rebates came faster point accumulation, bringing the supernatural items in the shop within much easier reach.

The shop. The thought resurfaced.

Stan guided the Audi into his parking space at Aurelia Heights, shut off the engine, and remained seated for a moment, the interface still hovering before his eyes.

He resisted the urge to open the shop immediately.

There was something more pressing to take care of first.

He rode the elevator to his apartment, unlocked the door, tossed his keys onto the kitchen counter, and pulled out his phone.

...

He sat down at the dining table and opened the documents Maya had sent him.

This time, he read them with greater care.

The financial projections. The sourcing strategy. The manufacturing partner shortlist. The proposed legal structure. The brand positioning. The five-year expansion plan.

He worked through every page with the focused concentration of a man preparing to commit a meaningful portion of his liquid capital. Before making that decision, he wanted to understand exactly what he was funding.

The plan was solid. Not merely optimistic, professionally viable.

Given competent execution and the right partnerships, Maya’s company could realistically begin generating meaningful revenue within eighteen months and establish itself as a respectable mid-tier cosmetics manufacturer within three years.

The Wanhai partnership, the one Stan would now arrange quietly through his own connections instead of relying on Wanhai’s public supplier network, would likely shorten that timeline by at least a year.

Even if the proposal hadn’t been this strong, he would have invested anyway.

The system’s rebate mechanics made the decision difficult to ignore.

Maya’s favorability had just crossed 120, placing her firmly in the 12× rebate tier. Every dollar he invested in her company would ultimately return to him twelvefold.

But the fact that the business itself was genuinely promising made the decision far cleaner.

He wasn’t bankrolling a vanity project or rescuing a failing startup.

He was investing in a company with a credible business model, realistic projections, and the potential to create substantial long-term value.

The rebate wasn’t the reason the investment made sense.

It was simply an extraordinary bonus attached to an already sound opportunity.

Stan opened his banking app. His available liquid balance stood at approximately $620 million.

That morning’s billion-dollar conversion into a single system point had carved a noticeable chunk out of his holdings, but what remained was still more money than most people would see in several lifetimes.

According to Maya’s projections, the company required an initial investment of $8 million to $12 million. That would cover the manufacturing facility lease, the first round of equipment purchases, eighteen months of payroll, initial inventory, and a healthy working capital reserve.

Eight to twelve million dollars. Stan studied the figure in silence. Then he made his decision.

He wasn’t going to invest eight to twelve million dollars in Maya’s company.

He was going to invest all of it. The full $620 million. By any rational standard, the amount was absurd.

Maya didn’t need that much capital. Her company couldn’t deploy it efficiently in its first year, or even its second. The investment exceeded the business’s projected capital requirements by well over fifty times.

But Stan wasn’t optimizing for Maya’s balance sheet. He was optimizing for the rebate.

Ever since the system had awakened, he’d barely scratched the surface of what it could do.

His first few bindings had produced extraordinary returns, Sophie’s $1.4 billion, Amelia’s $300 million, yet over the past two weeks he had done very little to create additional rebate cycles. His personal spending was negligible compared to his wealth. His investments had been conservative. The system had quietly waited for him to use it as intended.

He hadn’t. That changed tonight. Earlier that afternoon, he had spent $1 billion on a single book. The price had been one system point. The implication was unsettling.

That book had been nothing more than an introductory text. If future shop items included genuine cultivation manuals, advanced pills, artifacts, weapons, intelligence assets, or other supernatural resources, their prices would almost certainly be measured in multiple system points.

At the current exchange rate, each point represented a billion dollars.

Which meant he would eventually need billions, perhaps tens of billions, in liquid capital simply to keep pace with what the shop offered.

He could no longer think in terms of millions. The scale had changed.

If the system demanded billions, then he needed an engine capable of producing billions.

Tonight would be the beginning. With that, Stan opened his banking app.