Dark Lord Seduction System: Taming Wives, Daughters, Aunts, and CEOs novel Chapter 140

Chapter 140: Making Tommy a Millionaire

Sitting in Mrs. Henderson’s economics class—which was ironic on a level that bordered on spiritual comedy—I tried not to let my eyes glaze over as she explained supply and demand like we were still bartering for goats in the Stone Age.

It was painful.

Not just because she was wrong, but because she was confidently wrong, which is a special kind of violence. I probably understood more about real economics than she did—and by "probably," I mean I could destabilize a small nation’s currency before lunch.

But I forced myself to reel in the superiority complex—temporarily—and focus on the bigger problem that had been gnawing at the edges of my otherwise immaculate high: the massive, gaping, IRS-sized flaw in my master plan.

I’d pulled it off. Total ghost mode. Zero trails. Nobody could trace Charlotte’s rescue or the sudden influx of her company later to me.

Even Mom had a neat, believable explanation: she’d watched me sign a legitimate deal, complete with credentials and a golden handshake.

It was perfect.

Until it wasn’t.

Because here’s the thing about being a sixteen-year-old genius secretly building an empire—eventually, the world starts noticing when broke families stop being broke.

Mom had started driving her brand-new GLE to work. You think hospital nurses don’t gossip? Please. They’re basically intelligence operatives with gossip degrees.

And when she trades our poor house for a modernist condo or mansion with fingerprint scanners and a wine wall, the neighbors will either assume she hit the lottery or joined a cartel.

And guess who loves when working-class people suddenly get rich? The IRS. That delightful three-letter parasite doesn’t give a single shit about my consulting contract when it smells like fraud, and they’ve got a nose for this kind of thing.

One audit, and it’s dominos. Questions me or my mom can’t answer. Money in her accounts she can’t explain.

And carefully cultivated shadow existence blown wide open.

So. Yeah. Problem.

’How do I fix this?’

The answer was sitting in my contacts list—probably at home right now, eating instant noodles and wondering why his best friend had started talking like an emotionally unstable Bond villain.

Tommy Chen.

’Congratulations, buddy. You’re about to become a millionaire.’

Sure, he didn’t know it yet. But that was a minor detail.

With my current intellect and ARIA’s borderline illegal capabilities, I could whip up software that would make Silicon Valley investors wet themselves. The trick wasn’t building something valuable.

The trick was pretending it came from a sleepless teenage coder with an anime addiction and a modest God complex—not someone who could casually dismantle the Pentagon’s firewalls just to see if they updated their password.

The plan: build a startup-style software package. Slap Tommy’s name on it. Sell it for $20 million, minimum. We split the payout, and suddenly the Carter family’s come-up looks a whole lot more believable. "My son’s best friend made a lucky tech breakthrough and pulled my son’s hand with him" plays way better on the evening news than "sixteen-year-old quietly becomes the next Rothschild."

I could already hear the whispers: Boy genius makes it big, helps friend’s struggling family. What a heartwarming American story. No one would even notice the part where I was puppeteering everything from the shadows.

And for the record, I didn’t need Tommy for any of the actual tech. I could build the entire thing in an afternoon, in between eating lunch and deciding which corrupt system to dismantle next.

But that wasn’t the point.

Tommy was my friend. My real friend. We’d been through everything together—childhood sleepovers, cafeteria wars, and the time I almost got us both suspended for turning the school firewall into a cryptocurrency miner.

You don’t throw that kind of loyalty away just because you woke up one day smarter than a god and more dangerous than the NSA.

"You make them rich."

Because when the empire starts expanding, you need generals who remember the dirt we crawled through. And Tommy? He’s been in the mud with me since the days we fought over rare Pokémon cards and lied about brushing our teeth at sleepovers.

Now he was about to be rich. And I was about to have the perfect smokescreen.

"I want them to applaud me while I did it... and I’ve been ignoring my fat friend for days while building my empire. Time to fix that and change his life in the process."

My eyes lit up like I’d just tasted power again.

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