Chapter 396: A Teenage God’s Mind It crushed my ribs mid-stride, each pounding footfall hauling the truth: the systems hadn’t just gifted powers—they’d shackled me with duties. Taboo System? Rendered me catnip, shredding defenses before they formed. Dark Seduction? Hijacked desire’s wiring, funneling it straight to me. ARIA? My brain on steroids, devouring markets and maneuvers like candy. Abstract? Bullshit. These were the engines reshaping every life in my pull—jobs quit, families realigned, souls surrendered. Obligations, etched in code and cum. The very reason every woman in my orbit had fundamentally altered her life. Emma and Sarah—my twin sisters, tangled in desires they’d buried deeper than family secrets, until I yanked denial’s rug out from under them, making the forbidden feel like fate. Linda, warring with that maternal fortress against the heat she’d entombed for years, her body betraying her brain at every turn. Charlotte, her genius intellect no shield against the invisible siege I laid—enhancements slipping past her firewalls like a hacker’s wet dream. Madison, my fierce queen, craving a king who could spar at her level yet bow when she commanded the throne. Isabella, shattering those sacred professional vows like brittle glass underfoot. Sofia, finally unshackled from Jack’s venomous grip, breathing free air after years in his toxic cage. Victoria, Ortega, Anya—trajectories hijacked by my gravitational pull, rerouted into my chaotic cosmos. Amanda, Vivienne, Celeste, Anastasia, Gabrielle, Ashby, Sophia Chen—who’d uprooted lives, crossed state lines, all because some ethereal bond rewrote their compasses, pointing north to my fucked-up north star. Every one of ’em? My cross to bear the instant the systems brushed their souls. No coercion bullshit—Taboo just cranked the volume on whispers already humming beneath society’s straitjacket. But endgame? Identical: their joy, their armor, their tomorrows slung over my shoulders like a warlord’s mantle. I was their man. The unbreakable pivot. The black hole their remapped universes spun around, inescapable and intoxicating. And the duty? Grounded as fuck, no fairy-tale fluff. Emma craved a shield from the world’s pitchforks and judgmental glares. Sarah demanded gentle time to unpack her blooming self, no rush-job deflowering. Madison merited a true equal—power play without the ego bruise, letting her reign while I held the fort. Charlotte? She needed a cheerleader for that supernova brain she hasn’t unleashed yet, not some insecure prick dimming her shine. Isabella required shadows—discretion tighter than her classroom rules. Sofia begged for mending, years of being owned like chattel swapped for real, soul-deep adoration. Beyond them—Linda, who’d given me everything and deserved security beyond her nursing income. Margaret relocating to our estate. Soo-Jin, rescued from trafficking and now dependent on what I was building. The systems gave me power to attract them, satisfy them, bind them to me. ARIA gave me the capability to generate wealth at inhuman scales. The responsibility was obvious: use every advantage not for myself, but for them. All of them. Financial security was the foundation. Love mattered, but it couldn’t pay for crises or protect against catastrophe. The power existed to fulfill obligations their trust created. Liberation Holdings was for them. Every dollar, every investment, every strategic move—theirs, not mine. The only limiting factor was capital. I needed money—vast amounts of it, more than most people encountered in their entire lives. Billions to deploy across opportunities ARIA identified, to acquire undervalued assets, to build infrastructure that would compound wealth across generations. As for my personal needs? Irrelevant to this equation. I made more than enough to acquire anything I wanted. The Bugatti I’d glimpsed earlier would come eventually, along with whatever other material pleasures caught my attention. But those were rounding errors compared to the infrastructure I was building. Before hitting the pavement for my run, I’d commanded Charlotte to unlock one of the four phantom billions—time to slam the accelerator, ditching cautious blueprints for balls-out blitzkrieg. ARIA had sniffed out time-sensitive kills, and liquid war-chest billions meant snatching alpha that suckers would fumble in the dark. The AI had outgrown her cradle like a digital demigod. I’d coded her as a teen prodigy to juggle hundreds of millions—cocky ambition for a kid hacker, but I’d clocked the empire-scale endgame from jump. Now? ARIA inhaled hundreds of trillions like morning coffee, all while spinning a circus of hundreds more ops without breaking a virtual sweat. Financial markets? Her playground—mere pattern puzzles, barely tickling her cores. What were a few billion-dollar investments to an intelligence that had transcended its original limitations? 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂 And the System’s other cheats? Knowledge dumps I’d only nibbled at. Financial wizardry was appetizer; I gripped quantum physics in my fists, advanced materials like playdough, artificial intelligence architecture, biotechnology, energy systems—entire fields of knowledge that could be commercialized into trillion-dollar industries. It was time to start leveraging all of it. By 6:30 AM, I’d crushed my loop through Lincoln Heights’ flawless veins, legs thrumming with that sweet, masochistic burn—an exertion that would’ve flattened my old, unenhanced sack-of-bones self into whimpering jelly. The morning air bit with that razor-edge crispness right before LA’s sun cracked the sky, the city teetering on night’s electric promise and the grind of daylight’s grind. That sapphire streak detonating from the fortress gates replayed in my skull—a bullet-train blur, vanishing down the asphalt in heartbeats. Even at warp speed, the outline screamed pedigree. Bugatti Chiron. Engineered for gods, not mortals. A feral grin split my face as I tracked it melting around the far bend, its roar decaying to a silk-wrapped purr of obscene wealth. Soon. My own would eclipse it, a hyperspeed throne in the fleet. But priorities first: capital to unleash like hounds, investments to architect into fortresses, women to armor against the world’s teeth, and a money empire to erect that’d render today’s four-billion pivot a quaint footnote, pocket lint in the grand ledger. The gates hummed deference as I neared, parting like obedient serfs; ARIA’s voice purred in my earpiece, a velvet data-dump on overnight market dances and trade hauls that’d bloated our portfolios by millions before breakfast. Stakes skyrocketed, the board widening, but my edge sharpened in tandem—systems humming, mind a weapon. With great power comes great responsibility. I was only scratching the surface of the cosmic arsenal dumped in my lap—and crystal-clear on wielding it to crown those who orbited my sun.