Richest Man: It All Started With My Rebate System-Chapter 23: Splurging Money

Steven scrolled through his live feed, looking for something worth stopping on. He wasn’t going to gift the first live he landed on. That wasn’t indiscriminate spending. That was just careless, and there was a difference.

Even now, even with the system and an account balance that made most spending feel theoretical, the old instinct for deliberate choices hadn’t gone anywhere. He simply had more room to work within now.

What he was looking for was specific. Not a massive live with hundreds of thousands of viewers, where a gift, regardless of its size, would be swallowed by the volume of the room and forgotten in seconds. He wanted something smaller. A few hundred viewers. Two thousand at the absolute ceiling. Somewhere the gift would actually land, where the reaction would be real and the room would feel it.

He scrolled for a few minutes, passing over cooking streams, commentary lives, a man doing card tricks to an audience of forty, two girls talking about nothing in particular to an audience of several thousand. None of them caught him.

Then he stopped.

It was a young woman, roughly his age, sitting in front of what looked like a simple bedroom setup. Ring light, a decent microphone, plain background. She was singing, and the moment Steven’s thumb slowed and the audio came through properly, he stayed there.

She had the kind of voice that settled in gradually, and by the time you noticed how good it was, it had already been working on you for thirty seconds.

She was performing a request, working through the song with the kind of focus and attention that suggested she took it seriously, which was more than could be said for most of what he had scrolled past.

He checked the viewer count. Just under eight hundred.

He stayed on the live and read through the comment section while she sang, getting a sense of the room. The regulars had names he recognised from the pinned messages. There were tippers, small ones, scattered throughout. She thanked each one by name without missing a beat in the song, which told him she had been doing this long enough to be very comfortable and familiar with it, but the viewer count told him she hadn’t broken through yet.

She was good. She just hadn’t had the right moment.

Steven decided he was going to give her one.

He navigated to the gift section and looked at the options. He moved past the lower tiers without slowing down. His eyes landed on the Universe, sitting near the top of the list. Worth 44,999 coins. He selected it without deliberating and he sent it.

The effect was immediate.

The tiktoker choked mid-note. Her hand flew to her chest and she coughed, hard, stepping back slightly from the microphone as though the gift had physically displaced her.

Her eyes were wide open when she turned back to the screen, blinking at the notification and dramatic animation effects that had appeared across her live as if she was waiting for it to correct itself into something smaller.

It didn’t correct itself.

The comment section detonated. Names and exclamation marks and capital letters stacked on top of each other faster than any individual message could be read. The name Steven appeared everywhere, the viewers calling it out like an announcement.

Yes, Steven had simply used his real name as his username.

The tiktoker pressed both hands to her cheeks, laughing in a breathless, overwhelmed way that was entirely genuine. She composed herself with visible effort, wiped the corner of one eye, and looked directly into the camera.

"Steven," she said. "Thank you so much. That means everything." She paused, still slightly flustered. "Is there a song you’d like me to sing for you?"

Steven typed his reply. Finish the one you’re singing first. I’ll tell you after.

She read it, smiled, and nodded. "Okay. Okay, yes. Of course."

She turned back to her microphone, took a breath, and started again from the top. She had been singing Love The Way You Lie, the Rihanna and Eminem collaboration, and she picked it back up from the beginning with a steadiness that took a few bars to fully return.

One could see her recalibrating, finding the thread she had dropped when the gift hit. But she found it, and when she did, she settled back into herself completely.

Steven watched and listened.

The vocal sections were what he had expected from what he had already heard, strong and controlled, with a natural sense of phrasing that most people couldn’t be taught. What he hadn’t expected was the rap verse.

She handled it cleanly. Not a rough approximation or that of someone speaking quickly over a beat. She actually rapped it, hitting the syllables with the right weight, staying on the rhythm, and landing the harder lines without stumbling. The comment section, which had been moving fast anyway, accelerated further when she got through it.

Steven nodded slowly, head tilting slightly.

She was genuinely talented. And this was not in the way that word gets applied loosely to anyone who performs with confidence. She was actually talented. It was the kind of talent that was sitting in an eight-hundred-person live when it should have been reaching a much larger room.

If she had the right people around her and the resources for proper sessions, he thought, she’d do very well.

The song ran to its end. She exhaled, stepped back slightly, and spent a full thirty seconds thanking the room and Steven specifically, which she did by name and with a sincerity that the comment section responded to warmly.

While she was still talking, Steven navigated back to the gift section and sent a Lion and Leon, worth 29,999 coins.

She stopped mid-sentence, looked at the screen and covered her mouth with both hands.

The comment section, which had barely settled, went loud again immediately. The room understood that something unusual was happening, that the person on the other end of this gift wasn’t passing through. He was staying.

"Steven," she said, when she had recovered enough to speak. "You have to stop doing this to me." She was laughing again, that same breathless overwhelmed laugh. "What song would you like?"

Steven typed without hesitating. She Doesn’t Mind. Sean Paul.

She read it and her face shifted into a genuine smile of recognition. She pulled up the instrumental, settled back into her chair, and when the intro came in, she started.

Oh, oh, oh, oh. 🎶

Steven smiled. He had chosen it deliberately after the rap verse. He wanted to see how she handled a different register entirely, something lighter and rhythmically looser than what she had just done.

The answer, it turned out, was well. She moved through it naturally, matching the energy of the track without forcing it, and the comment section drifted into a noticeably warmer tone as the song ran, people dropping shorter messages.

While she sang, Steven navigated to the recharge section and ran through another ten top-ups in steady succession.

[You spent $186. A 3x rebate was triggered.]

[You received $558. The money has been transferred to your account] x2

[You spent $186. A 4x rebate was triggered]

[You received $744. The money has been transferred to your account] x5

[You spent $186. A 5x rebate was triggered]

[You received $930. The money has been transferred to your account] x3

The notifications moved through his vision quietly, stacking without demanding attention. He had enough in the app for now. He turned back to the live.

The song finished. She stood, smoothed her clothes, and looked at the camera with the easy warmth of someone who had genuinely enjoyed what she had just done rather than simply performed it.

"How was that?" she asked, directing the question at the room but landing her eyes on Steven’s name in the comment section.

Steven typed. Perfect.

Then he sent another Universe.

The reaction was louder than the first two combined. The tiktoker made a sound that wasn’t quite a word, stepped away from the camera entirely for a moment, and when she came back, she was pressing the back of her hand to her mouth and shaking her head slowly in disbelief.

"You cannot keep doing this," she said, laughing and overwhelmed in equal measure. "Another song? Whatever you want. Anything. Just name it."

Steven smiled at the screen. Give the room a turn. Let them request.

She read it, paused, and then laughed softly, shaking her head in a way that suggested she hadn’t expected that. "Okay. Chat, you heard him. What do you want to hear?"

The comment section filled immediately. Requests stacked on top of each other, dozens of them arriving in seconds. She read through them, scrolling with one hand while the other rested on the back of her chair. After a moment, she stopped and looked up.

"Mockingbird," she said. "Eminem."

Steven smiled and nodded in agreement with her choice. He never knew he would be so invested in something like this, but he was genuinely enjoying it.

While she sang, he topped up again.

[You spent $186. A 3x rebate was triggered.] ×6

[You received $558. The money has been transferred to your account.]

[You spent $186. A 4x rebate was triggered.] ×4

[You received $744. The money has been transferred to your account.]

His bank flagged the final transaction and requested OTP verification before it would process. He completed it without frustration and made a mental note to call tomorrow and adjust his alert settings.

Beyond that, the evening had moved without friction. Going forward, he planned to switch to the web app and use the custom purchase option.

He intends to start at $300, before moving upward gradually toward $10,000 per transaction—if that’s possible. The standard bundle had served its purpose, but he needed more velocity than $186 could give him.

He turned his attention back to the live and saw that she was finishing the last requested song. He watched the last few seconds of the song settle, and then, before she could speak, he sent another Universe. The third of the night.

The live erupted all over again.

Steven smiled quietly to himself as he watched the reaction unfold.

"This is going to be fun."