The days that followed his return to the living world unfolded with the quiet, suffocating gravity of a man resurrected only to discover that paradise had been replaced by a prison of marble, silence, and memory. Adrian Vale Harrington—formerly the spoiled, decadent son of Atlas and Lysandra—woke into mornings that tasted like iron and regret. He had always been the center of a universe tailored to his whims: champagne breakfasts, private jet weekends, chaos disguised as charm, arrogance masked as confidence, and a kind of self-indulgence that only the richest of the rich could afford without censure.
Now, every dawn brought only the reminder that he had no right to want anything. Not comfort. Not distraction. Not pleasure. Not even sleep.
He denied himself all of it.
The mansion, once a decadent kingdom of frivolous luxury, became an austere monastery. Curtains remained drawn. Lights remained dim. Rooms once cluttered with the detritus of an undisciplined heir—expensive toys, unopened gifts, designer clothes flung around like confetti—were stripped bare, almost violently so. Entire wings of the estate were no longer entered; others were walked through only to force himself to remember the ghost of laughter that once filled them.
He removed the alcohol from every cabinet.He sent away the chefs who made his favorite foods.He stopped touching the piano he used to drunkenly play.He cut the gym staff, the valets, the butlers, the stylists, the party planners—even though he now used the training rooms more than ever.
He believed, with a grim religiosity, that desire was contamination, indulgence was sin, and ease was betrayal.
He denied everything he loved because he did not believe he had earned even a crumb of comfort, not when his parents had died rushing toward his captors. Not when he, in his mind, had been the weight that dragged them into their graves.
Every moment of softness, of warmth, of ease felt like standing on their corpses.
So he shut the world out.
Only three old staff members remained—those who had known him since childhood, those his parents had trusted absolutely. They were loyal, gentle in a way that made him both grateful and unbearably ashamed. They stayed because they refused to leave him in this mausoleum of grief, not because he asked. Because he didn't ask. He barely spoke.
He ate the minimal amount required to stay alive.He slept only when his body collapsed.He trained until his muscles screamed and his lungs burned.
And when night fell, when the moon hung over the Harrington estate like a white, untouchable eye watching a sinner suffer, he worked.
The corporate empire—The Harrington Group—waited like a massive, wounded titan needing a new heart. It was a conglomerate so large it dwarfed entire national economies, a machine built by Atlas Harrington's bare hands and Lysandra Harrington's brilliant mind. And now it belonged entirely to a traumatized, self-loathing son who believed he had no right to fail them.
He fired the board.All of them.
Not because of vengeance or corruption or ideology.But because he discovered—through frantic, obsessive review—that they had submitted two unofficial drafts of succession plans to outside stakeholders, documents proposing potential restructuring that would reduce a single heir's decision-making authority.
Whether it was betrayal or caution didn't matter.They were gone.
A private conglomerate with a single shareholder didn't need directors, and now that sole shareholder had transformed into something colder, sharper, and infinitely more terrifying.
He replaced them with no one.
He appointed no new directors.He held no meaningless meetings.He accepted no suggestions rooted in politics or self-interest.
Instead, he did something nobody expected:
He worked.
Ruthlessly.Monastically.With a discipline that bordered on self-destruction.
He buried himself beneath thousands of pages of internal audits, legal frameworks, operational structures, legacy blueprints, global subsidiary maps, risk spreadsheets, robotics R&D proposals, logistics analyses, and innovation pipelines his father had started but never finished.
He read them not once, but dozens of times.He memorized entire pages.He understood the legal language, the economic patterns, the engineering calculations.
It was as though the kidnapping had cracked open his skull and poured in a new brain—one shaped by survival, terror, and obsession.
He hired the world's best experts—but only to teach him, never to act in his place.
He brought in Nobel laureates, former world leaders, veteran CEOs, hedge fund titans, cybersecurity pioneers, AI architects, black-ops strategists, and economists who shaped the global financial system. They taught him the highest levels of their fields. They watched, astonished, as a young man who once threw away hundred-thousand-dollar watches at parties now consumed knowledge with the desperation of a starving man devouring bread.
He listened for hours without looking away.He asked questions with surgical precision.He remembered everything.
His study became a war room.His body became a weapon.His mind became an empire.
And the company—his company—responded.
Revenues soared in months.Subsidiary efficiency multiplied.Stockless valuation models recalculated his net worth into the unchartable.Governments sought meetings.Markets trembled.Competitors panicked.
The Harrington Group, which was already one of the world's three largest, began to shift—slowly but unmistakably—toward the top position. He pursued expansion with a brutality masked by elegance. He funded humanitarian efforts with a precision masked by coldness. He struck deals with nations like he was playing chess with continents.
He worked as though his heartbeat was tied to every financial report.
And in his mind, it was.
Because every dollar wasted felt like stealing from his father.Every failed project felt like spitting on his mother's grave.Every weakness felt like proof that he was still the useless pig they'd once scolded.
So he worked like a condemned man clawing at redemption.
At the end of long nights, when the Harrington Tower glowed against the city skyline, Adrian sometimes caught his reflection in the darkened windows. The face looking back was gaunt, sculpted, inhumanly serious. The eyes were hollow pits carved by insomnia. The jaw was sharp enough to cut glass. The weight he had once carried—fat, softness, indulgence—had melted away into a cold, honed form, as if trauma itself had forged him.
He barely recognized himself.
And yet he never looked away.
"This is who you should have been," he murmured once into the glass."This is who you owe them."
Then he returned to work.
Because he believed—fully, unquestioningly—that his life depended on it.
And that the entire conglomerate depended on him.
And that redemption was not a destination, but a lifelong sentence.
He maintained absolute, singular ownership like a vow.
There would be no shared power.No divided authority.No dilution of legacy.
The Harrington Group would rise to the number one position in the world—even if it cost him the last fragments of humanity he still possessed.
Because if the company lived, then in a way…his parents lived too.