Chapter 4 — Ways to Make Quick Money
When Kevin heard that Marcus was willing to come along, he lit up. By the time they'd cleared their dinner trays he was already talking about his character build, his gear loadout, the server event that night, and — almost as an aside — the girl he'd met in-game who he was pretty sure was actually a girl.
Marcus just smiled and let him talk.
He had a vague memory of Kevin getting strung along by a guy running a fake profile somewhere around sophomore year. He wasn't going to say anything. Some comfortable illusions were better left intact until reality handled them on its own schedule.
The computer lab in the basement of the student union was open until midnight. It ran about eighty percent full most evenings — rows of monitors glowing in the dim fluorescent light, the ambient noise a mix of keyboard clicks, headphone bleed, and the occasional burst of someone reacting to something on screen.
Marcus wiped down his keyboard and mouse with a paper towel from the dispenser by the door before sitting down. Kevin, already logged in at the next station, was pulling up his character with the focused intensity of someone who had been looking forward to this all day.
Marcus opened a browser.
He started with financial news — working backward through the past eighteen months of headlines, letting the context accumulate. Stock prices, earnings reports, product announcements. He wasn't looking for anything specific yet. He was fishing, waiting to see what the details shook loose from his memory.
The financial crisis was already unfolding in real time. Lehman Brothers was weeks away from collapse — he was almost certain of that. The federal bailout conversations were happening right now, in public, in Congress. He remembered the broad shape of it: the crash, the panic, the stimulus package, the slow grinding recovery. What he couldn't remember with precision was the timing of specific events, the exact bottom of specific stocks, the precise moment when things started coming back.
He'd need to be careful about how he played this. He wasn't a trader. He'd never been a trader. If he moved too aggressively on information he only half-remembered, he could lose everything he'd built before he'd built anything worth losing.
He needed a first move that was lower-risk. Something with more certainty behind it. Something he'd experienced firsthand.
He opened a second tab and searched for Diablo III release date.
Blizzard Entertainment. One of the biggest game studios in the world — the company behind World of Warcraft, StarCraft, the whole catalog. Diablo III had been in development for years. The announcement was already public. The release was coming.
Marcus remembered it clearly because he'd been there. Not as an investor — as a player, briefly, and more relevantly as someone who'd watched the secondary market for in-game currency explode in the weeks after launch.
Here was the situation: Diablo III launched with a real-money auction house built directly into the game. Players could sell in-game gold and equipment for actual dollars. Blizzard took a cut. The rest went to whoever was farming the most efficiently.
And there was a map — a hidden area, a secret room, really — that most players didn't find until about three to four weeks after launch. No monsters. Just breakable objects scattered around the floor. When you smashed them, gold dropped. A lot of gold. Far more per minute than killing enemies anywhere else in the game.
The trick that made it truly exploitable: if you exited the area through the entrance instead of the exit, the room reset. Completely. Every breakable object respawned. You could run it again in under five minutes.
The studios that found this early made serious money. Some of them cleared fifty thousand dollars in the first week alone before enough people caught on and the gold price adjusted downward. A few of the fastest movers — the ones who'd also stacked gear that increased gold drop rates — had reportedly cleared much more than that.
Marcus had found out about the map about a month too late. By the time he'd tried to set up a operation, the market was already saturated. He'd gotten nothing but the story.
This time he had the map location, the reset exploit, and enough lead time to be positioned before anyone else knew the room existed.
He needed three things to make it work properly:
First, the accounts. Thirty separate farming characters was enough to dominate the market without flooding it so hard that the gold price crashed before he could cash out.
Second, the gear. Equipment with increased gold find percentage was already in the game at launch. Most players didn't optimize for it because they were focused on combat stats. Marcus knew exactly which items to target.
Third, and most critically — automation. Thirty accounts running the same five-minute loop around the clock wasn't something one person could manage manually. He needed scripts. Simple bots that could navigate the path, break the objects, trigger the reset, and run it again. No combat logic required. Just coordinate-based movement on a fixed route.
He leaned back and thought through the technical side of it.
He'd taken a semester of Visual Basic in college, back in his first life. He remembered almost none of it. He didn't know C++ at all.
But.
He'd spent over a decade working with industrial robots — OTC welding units and KUKA grinding arms. KUKA's programming language was derived from Pascal.
He'd gotten genuinely proficient with it, enough that his skill level in the system reflected that. And the general principle of picking up a second programming language once you had one solid foundation was real — the logic transferred, the syntax was learnable, the concepts didn't have to be rebuilt from scratch.
He had roughly a month before Diablo III launched. With the system's experience boost accelerating his comprehension, learning enough C++ to write a simple coordinate-based automation script was achievable. The bot didn't need to be sophisticated. It wasn't cracking encryption or interfacing with game memory. It was just moving a character along a fixed path and clicking on things. Mouse trajectory simulation. The kind of script a competent junior developer could put together in an afternoon.
He'd do it himself. Fewer people knowing the plan meant fewer variables. If he brought in an outside developer, he'd have to explain what he was building and why, and the information would spread. The value of the exploit was entirely in the timing — being the only one who knew.
He pulled up a C++ tutorial and read for a while, letting the system log the comprehension.
After the game research, he turned to the stock question.
He already knew the answer in broad terms. Apple was weeks away from launching the App Store. Google was ascending. Facebook was private but growing at a rate that would eventually make it unmissable. Amazon was being underestimated by almost everyone.
The stock he was most certain about — the one where he remembered the numbers clearly enough to trust them — was Apple. He'd read enough retrospectives in his previous life to know that anyone who bought Apple in 2008, during the crash, and held it for ten years had made a return that was difficult to even express cleanly as a percentage.
He wasn't going to be greedy about it. He'd put a meaningful position in Apple once he had capital. He'd hold it for years and not touch it. That was the whole strategy — boring, patient, and based on something he actually remembered with confidence.
For everything else, he'd be conservative. Small positions in companies he was certain about. Nothing leveraged. Nothing that required him to predict exact timing.
The real money — the early money, the money that would give him the foundation to invest seriously — was going to come from Diablo III.
He'd estimate the Diablo play would net somewhere in the range of two to three hundred thousand dollars before the exploit was patched or the market normalized. Maybe more if the timing worked perfectly. Probably less if something went sideways.
Either way, it was enough to seed everything else.
He checked the clock in the corner of the screen. 10:30 PM.
Kevin had gone quiet beside him, headphones on, completely absorbed in whatever was happening on his server. The lab had thinned out. A few students were still working — actual homework, by the looks of it — and a couple of others had fallen asleep in their chairs.
Marcus closed his tabs and leaned back, running through the plan one more time.
Month one: Learn enough C++ to write the automation script. Build the farming accounts. Source the gold-find gear.
Month two: Launch the operation at Diablo III's release. Run it hard for two to three weeks before the exploit became common knowledge. Cash out steadily, not all at once.
Month three: Use the proceeds to buy Apple stock during the post-crash dip. Hold.
In parallel, throughout all of it: keep reading, keep leveling the system, keep building the skill base that would matter in the long run.
He felt calm about it in a way he hadn't expected. Not the anxious, scrambling energy of someone trying to outrun a bad life, but something quieter. More deliberate. He had information, he had time, and he had a system that rewarded exactly the kind of consistent, focused effort he'd always been capable of — he'd just never had a reason to point it at anything that paid.
He'd figure out the rest as he went.
He pulled out his phone to check the time — and noticed he had fourteen unread text messages.
All from Claire.
He felt his stomach drop slightly and opened the thread.
The first one, from two hours ago: Hey, you said you'd call after dinner? Everything okay?
They escalated from there in a way that was equal parts worried and increasingly pointed.
He was already typing back before he'd finished reading them.
Sorry — lost track of time. I'm fine. Calling you now.
He pushed back from the desk, grabbed his jacket off the chair, and headed for the door, phone already to his ear, the quiet hum of the lab fading behind him.
Some things didn't need a system prompt to remind him what mattered.
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