The Shadow Tycoon
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 109: The Road Toward Bupain
Early that morning, William sat in the dining room watching the maid move back and forth in front of him in an ultra-short skirt. Every so often she would bend over to carefully tidy the room. They were obviously simple household chores, yet somehow she managed to give them a rather different atmosphere.
William knew perfectly well what was going on.
The woman, who was in her early twenties, wanted a more personal relationship with him.
Five years ago, a beautiful woman did not need to know how to do much of anything. As long as she was attractive enough, she could become a receptionist at a large company, an office secretary, or even an executive secretary.
But five years later, many of those women had lost the positions they once held. Worse, the nature of those jobs had caused them to lose some of their ability to function in ordinary workplaces.
Still, William believed most of them would continue to live quite comfortably. At the very least, over those five years, they had acquired certain alternative survival skills.
Pulling his gaze away from the maid’s thin suspender stockings, William picked up The Wall Street Journal.
Almost immediately, his attention was drawn to page three.
The Baler Federation had three major stock exchanges: Eko, the Union, and the Union Stock Exchange.
They were located respectively in the Federation’s political center, economic center, and the capital of Southern Destlant State. However, their primary trading floors were all located in the federal capital.
Because of limitations in information transmission and communication technology, the three exchanges had jointly developed a more advanced information-processing system in order to share trading data more quickly and accurately.
The system, however, had its own limitations. Transmission distance was one of them.
As a result, the main trading floors were all concentrated in the same area. Branch offices elsewhere might experience brief information delays, usually somewhere between twenty seconds and a minute.
The exact delay depended on telecommunications traffic throughout the Federation at the time. If fewer people were using the main communication lines, information updates traveled faster.
Generally speaking, anyone serious about playing the financial game chose to trade in Bupain, the federal capital.
The three great paper exchanges sat in the same district. Over time, the neighborhood became known as “The Jewel in the Crown.”
The wealthy, the major capitalists, not only from across the Federation but from abroad as well, gathered there daily, living inside a world built entirely of numbers.
All it took was a walk down that street to witness every variety of human life.
Some people were sixty or seventy years old and still strode with energy and purpose. Their faces remained full of ambition, fighting spirit, and a calm confidence that seemed to laugh at life itself.
Others were only in their twenties or thirties yet already struggled to put one foot in front of the other. Their faces carried a sense of decay that should never have appeared at such a young age.
It was a magical place.
Countless people lost their minds over numbers.
Countless others died because of them.
Joining their ranks, becoming the center of attention, was actually very simple.
All you needed was a trading seat at one of the three exchanges.
Again, because of limitations in information processing, trade matching was still performed manually. That meant there was a limit to how many transactions could be handled simultaneously, so the exchanges imposed restrictions on trading volume.
It looked clumsy.
But it minimized the possibility of costly mistakes.
In the beginning, the three exchanges had imposed few restrictions on trading seats.
As more and more capital flooded into the securities market, however, they began limiting the number of available seats.
Overnight, trading seats themselves became a valuable resource.
Following the principle of fixed supply and transferable ownership, seat prices climbed steadily from thirty to fifty thousand dollars in the early years.
Just yesterday afternoon, a priority seat at the Union Stock Exchange changed hands for the staggering price of one million dollars, surpassing the previous record of nine hundred seventy thousand dollars that had stood before William arrived in this world.
A new legend had been born.
Why had trading seats become so expensive?
The answer was simple.
There were only so many of them.
Even if ordinary people owned stock accounts, even if they stood inside the exchange itself, they were still merely spectators.
To buy or sell stocks, they first needed a trader to execute transactions on their behalf.
The problem was that, speaking only slightly hyperbolically, the eyes of the entire world were fixed on that place.
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