Jordan stared at the screen for a solid minute. His brain had stopped working somewhere around the progress bar hitting ninety percent and now it was just spinning its wheels.
A system.
He had a system.
Like in those webnovels Kyle used to send him links to at two in the morning with subject lines like "bro read this the MC gets OP in chapter 3." Like the ones where some loser got hit by a truck and woke up with a floating menu that let him punch dragons or seduce elves or both, usually both.
"No way."
He said it out loud to his empty apartment. The pizza box didn't respond. The Red Bull cans had no opinion.
The screen stayed gold-white, the heart logo sitting there with that infinity symbol inside it like it was the most natural thing in the world for his phone to have spontaneously developed sentience and game mechanics.
Jordan's hands weren't shaking anymore. They were completely steady. He felt like someone had injected ice water directly into his spine and it was spreading out through his whole body, cold and clear and sharp.
Infinite Cashback System.
Infinite meant infinite, right? That wasn't metaphorical infinite, that was actual infinite, the kind of infinite that math teachers got mad about when you wrote it as an answer because infinity wasn't a number, it was a concept.
But infinite cash.
Infinite.
Cash.
"Okay," Jordan said. His voice came out steadier than he expected. "Okay, let's see what you got."
He pressed his thumb to the heart logo.
The screen shifted. The logo dissolved into particles of light that reassembled themselves into a new interface, clean lines and soft gradients, and a prompt appeared in the center.
VERIFY USER IDENTITY
FACE ID REQUIRED
Jordan blinked. Face ID. His phone had Face ID. He'd set it up when he first got the thing two years ago and then immediately forgot about it because he kept his phone unlocked anyway.
He held the phone up. The front camera activated. A circle appeared on screen with his face inside it, and the circle turned green.
IDENTITY CONFIRMED
JORDAN MCKNIGHT
AGE: 18
STATUS: ACTIVE USER
WELCOME TO YOUR NEW LIFE
The interface expanded.
Jordan's breath caught in his throat. The screen was divided into sections now, each one clearly labeled with icons that looked like they'd been designed by someone who actually knew what good UI looked like.
At the top, a banner.
💝 CASHBACK SYSTEM
And below that, the main display.
ACTIVE CONNECTIONS
Two empty slots. Both gray. Both labeled [EMPTY SLOT] with a little lock icon next to the second one.
Below the slots, more text.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
ACCOUNT SUMMARY
Balance: $247
Quest Tickets: 0 🎫
Active Quests: 0
[View Transactions] [Quests] [Gacha]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Jordan stared at the balance. Two hundred forty-seven dollars. That was accurate. That was his actual bank balance after he'd blown through his allowance and most of his savings on Eliza and Calypso and food that came in bags.
The system knew his bank account.
"What the hell," he muttered. But he kept reading.
He tapped on the [View Transactions] button. The screen shifted. A new window appeared with a header that said SYSTEM GUIDE: HOW IT WORKS.
Jordan read.
And as he read, something cold settled in his chest.
THE INFINITE CASHBACK SYSTEM
Your path to wealth is paved with romance.
CORE MECHANIC: Spend money on registered women. Receive cashback based on their attraction level.
FORMULA: Rebate Percentage = (Attraction Level ÷ 10) × 20%
EXAMPLE: At 50% attraction, you receive 100% cashback. Break even. At 75% attraction, you receive 150% cashback. Profit.
SLOTS: You have 2 starting slots. Once a woman is registered, the slot is permanent. Choose wisely.
REGISTRATION: Physical contact + conscious intent required.
Jordan read it twice.
Then he read it a third time.
Then he put the phone down on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
"You have got to be kidding me."
Spend money on women.
That was the system. That was the infinite cashback. He had to spend money on women to make money, and the amount of money he got back depended on how much they liked him.
It was the cruelest joke the universe had ever played.
He'd just spent two months doing exactly that. So much money spent on Eliza, who had never liked him at all, who had used him like an ATM with legs and then publicly called him nobody in a hotel parking lot on Christmas.
And now the universe was telling him that was the correct strategy, he'd just been doing it with the wrong multiplier.
Jordan picked the phone back up. He read the formula again.
Attraction level divided by ten, times twenty percent.
If Eliza had been at, say, ten percent attraction, he would've gotten back twenty percent of every dollar he spent. So for forty-five hundred dollars, he would've gotten back nine hundred. A net loss of thirty-six hundred.
Which, objectively, was better than losing all forty-five hundred.
But still.
He kept reading.
At 50% attraction, you break even.
At 75% attraction, you profit.
At 100% attraction, you double every dollar.
Jordan sat very still.
Doubling money. If a girl was at one hundred percent attraction, full max, completely into him, he could spend a hundred dollars and get back two hundred. Spend a thousand, get back two thousand.
Infinite cashback.
The system wasn't lying. It was just making him work for it.
"Okay," he said. "Okay, so I need to find girls who actually like me. And spend money on them. And then I get paid."
It sounded insane when he said it out loud.
It also sounded better than sitting in his apartment eating cold pizza and watching Calypso blur her face in videos he paid three hundred dollars for.
Jordan tapped back to the main screen. He looked at the empty slots again. Two slots. Permanent once filled. That meant he had to choose carefully, because once he registered someone, that was it. No take-backs. No swapping them out for someone with better stats or higher attraction potential or whatever metrics this thing used.
He frowned.
Where were the stats?
In every webnovel he'd read, the system came with stats. Strength, agility, intelligence, charisma, luck. Little numbers you could level up by doing pushups or studying or getting into fights or whatever the plot required.
This system had nothing.
No strength stat. No charisma meter. No luck counter. Just attraction percentages and cashback formulas and two empty slots mocking him from the top of the screen.
"Seriously?"
He scrolled through the interface. There had to be more. Systems always had more. Skill trees, talent points, hidden perks you unlocked at level ten.
He found the Gacha button and tapped it.
A new window appeared.
🎰 GACHA SYSTEM
Spend Quest Tickets to unlock rewards!
BRONZE GACHA: 10 tickets
SILVER GACHA: 50 tickets
GOLD GACHA: 100 tickets
PLATINUM GACHA: 250 tickets (milestone rewards only)
[Insufficient Tickets: 0/10]
Jordan stared at his ticket count. Zero. He had zero tickets. He couldn't even afford the cheapest gacha pull.
He backed out and tapped the [Quests] button.
The screen changed again.
QUEST LOG
ACTIVE QUESTS
Two items appeared. One was grayed out with a timer next to it. The other was glowing faintly gold.
Jordan tapped the gold one first.
DAILY QUEST: Path to Becoming Adonis
He read through the objectives. Ninety minutes of physical activity. Shower with soap. Brush teeth for two minutes and floss. Skincare routine. Talk to three different women for two minutes each without apologizing for existing or offering to buy them things.
The restriction at the bottom made him laugh.
WARNING: Axe Body Spray is permanently banned.
"Fair," he muttered.
The rewards were listed below. Full stamina recovery, whatever that meant. Three quest tickets.
Three tickets per day. Ten tickets for a bronze pull. That meant he could do a gacha every three or four days if he kept up with the daily quest.
It was a grind. Classic system grind. Do your dailies, save your tickets, don't waste resources.
Jordan had played enough gacha games to know how this worked. The real rewards were in gold and platinum pulls, which meant he'd be grinding dailies for weeks before he got anything good.
He backed out and looked at the second quest.
TUTORIAL QUEST: Ground Zero
The title alone made his stomach drop.
He tapped it.
The quest window expanded and Jordan read through the objectives slowly. Each one hit like a punch.
Environmental Purge: Deep clean the apartment. Bag all trash. Remove the biological anomaly under the bed.
Jordan glanced at the pizza box. At the Red Bull cans. At the corner of his room where he'd shoved dirty laundry three weeks ago and then just kept piling more on top.
Biological anomaly under the bed.
He didn't want to know. He also knew exactly what it was.
Textile Decontamination: Wash all clothes. Wash the bedsheets. (System Note: Three months is a crime against hygiene.)
Three months. Had it been three months? Jordan tried to remember the last time he'd changed his sheets and came up blank.
Damage Control (Physical): Visit a licensed salon. Eradicate the fried CVS box-dye disaster. Revert to natural dirty blonde or acquire a cut suitable for a human male. No flowbee allowed.
His hand went to his hair automatically. The dye job had been a bad idea in October. He'd thought it would make him look edgy. It made him look like he'd lost a fight with a bottle of Clairol.
Damage Control (Social): Call David McKnight (Father). Apologize for recent behavior. State your commitment to change. (Requirement: Do not ask him for money. Speak clearly. Mean it.)
Jordan stopped reading. He stared at that last objective for a long time.
Call his dad. Apologize. Mean it.
The system knew. It knew he'd been dodging his dad's calls for a week. It knew he'd been furious about the allowance cut. It knew he'd spent Christmas alone because he couldn't face going home after the parking lot.
His mom's text was still sitting in his messages. We know you're meant for great things.
Jordan looked at the rewards section.
REWARDS:
10 Quest Tickets 🎟️
$1,500 System Sign-On Bonus (Deposited to secure System Account)
Ten tickets. Enough for a bronze pull. And fifteen hundred dollars, which would bring his balance from two forty-seven to over seventeen hundred.
But the penalty was listed below in red text.
FAILURE PENALTY: Immediate System Uninstallation. Permanent reversion to Tier 4 Simp Status.
Tier 4 Simp Status.
Jordan didn't need the system to explain what that meant. He was living it. He'd been living it for months.
The system was giving him a choice. Clean up his life, fix his mistakes, call his dad and actually apologize, or lose the system forever and go back to being the guy who stood in parking lots crying on Christmas.
TIME LIMIT: 24:00:00
Twenty-four hours.
Jordan looked around his apartment. At the mess. At the evidence of two weeks spent dissolving into his mattress. At the textbooks he hadn't opened and the hygiene routine he'd abandoned and the hair dye disaster he saw every time he looked in a mirror.
Ground Zero.
The tutorial quest was called Ground Zero because that's what this was. Rock bottom. The lowest point. The place you started climbing from if you were going to climb at all.
Jordan pressed accept.
The screen flashed gold.
QUEST ACCEPTED: GROUND ZERO
TIMER STARTED: 23:59:58