Dinner with Julian that night was an exercise in surreal horror. Sitting across from him at their favorite intimate restaurant, Mo Chen watched the man she now knew was a murderer play the part of the doting fiancé perfectly. He talked about their honeymoon in the Maldives, about the London townhouse being redecorated, his smile never wavering.
Every cell in her body screamed to drive her steak knife into his throat. But she forced a matching smile, her new system-chilled composure a shield over her boiling rage.
"You seem… different tonight, my love," Julian remarked, sipping his wine. "Quieter."
"Just a little overwhelmed with the final preparations," she said, layering her voice with a believable flutter of pre-wedding nerves. "It's all so much."
"It will be perfect," he soothed, reaching across the table to squeeze her hand. His touch made her skin crawl. "And then it will be just us. Our future begins."
Our future ends in two weeks, she thought, with you in a body bag.
The system' presence in her mind was a constant, grim comfort. It was a engine of destruction, and she was its fuel. She had a new daily quota to meet: another million dollars to burn.
After dinner, she went to a high-end electronics store and bought fifty of the most expensive, top-of-the-line laptops available. She had them delivered to a storage unit she'd rented under a fake name. Once inside, she took a baseball bat and systematically reduced the $3,000 machines to piles of shattered plastic and twisted metal. It was tedious, brutish work, but with every swing, she imagined it was Julian's face.
[$150,000 USD in physical assets destroyed. Remaining quota: $850,000.]
She then visited a luxury watchmaker. She bought a $200,000 platinum watch, walked outside, and dropped it into a storm drain. The splash was deeply unsatisfying, but the system registered the loss.
[$200,000 USD in physical assets destroyed. Remaining quota: $650,000.]
She was learning the rules. The asset had to be tangible, and she had to be the one to render it unusable, either through destruction or irrevocable loss.
Her phone buzzed. It was her brother, Tian.
[Hey. Heard you were at the Bugatti dealership today. Buying me a present?]
Mo Chen's blood ran cold. Of course, her actions wouldn't go unnoticed. The family's financial monitoring was omnipresent.
[Just looking,] she typed back, her fingers trembling. [Impulse buy. Didn't like the color.]
[A $1.2 million impulse?] Tian replied. [You're usually more disciplined. Everything alright?]
[Pre-wedding jitters. Making me spend-crazy!] she wrote, forcing a light tone. [Don't tell Mom and Dad.]
[Your secret is safe with me. But maybe lay off the hypercars for a week.]
She ended the conversation, her heart pounding. She had to be smarter. More discreet. Burning a million dollars a day was going to leave a trail of financial smoke that even a distracted family couldn't miss for long.
She needed a cover. A reason for her sudden, extravagant, and destructive spending.
An idea, dark and perfect, began to form.