The Shadow Tycoon
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 170: The Shares No One Could Steal
At that moment, the manager of Dawn Asset Management was sitting in William’s room. The manager’s name was Asher, full name Asher Eluelio. He was not native-born in the Baler Federation, but came from another country.
The Baler Federation was fairly casual when it came to names, but not casual enough to produce something that awkward on the tongue. Add in his slightly brown complexion, and he was clearly an immigrant.
Not all immigrants were wealthy people. Middle-class immigrants made up a large share as well, and in earlier years, labor immigrants had been extremely common.
A few years earlier, the Federation had received a large influx of international hot money. Every trade and industry began to flourish, and a labor shortage appeared in society. That gave birth to a new profession: human trafficker.
Operating under the title of labor contractors, these people scraped together laborers from all over the world, some willing to work abroad, others trying to avoid war, then sent them to the Baler Federation to perform heavy manual labor and other bottom-level jobs. This greatly eased the labor shortages that had appeared during the Federation’s early period of rapid development.
Later, as the population concentrated from the countryside into the cities, the labor problem eased and was even solved. Some people began to believe these “illegal workers” had stolen jobs that should have belonged to the country’s own working people.
So, under the influence of the Federal Conservative Party, the Immigration Bureau came into being. Many illegal aliens who may originally have been brought over by those very people were later caught by them and sent back.
But some stayed in the Federation. There were always a few lucky ones.
Asher was one of them. He was very smart and soon distinguished himself from ordinary laborers. Because he had attended school and could read, write, and do arithmetic, not long after arriving in the Federation he became a foreman.
He spent all his spare time reading and studying, and early on married a local girl, an ordinary-looking fat girl who weighed a full two hundred pounds. Because of that, Asher escaped disaster. He was not sent back, and he successfully obtained an insurance number and began paying Social Insurance.
Even so, the entire labor market remained prejudiced against immigrants. If life had already become difficult for native-born citizens, it was even harder for immigrants.
When William was recruiting managers, he discovered Asher, a young man smart enough for the work.
In truth, there had been many more outstanding professional managers who interviewed at the time. They had better knowledge and academic credentials than Asher, and richer professional résumés. But none of them earned William’s favor.
Instead, this young man interested William. He was not interested in the young man’s life story. What interested him was the smile on Asher’s face.
It was difficult to describe that smile. His smile was very different from William’s.
William’s smile was clean, bright, transparent, filled with openness and confidence. It was like a spring wind thawing the last of winter, like sunlight that made everything feel alive again. People instinctively liked him the moment they saw it.
Asher’s smile, by contrast, was like a flower in late autumn covered with frost yet still unwilling to lower its head. Strong, courageous, giving people the immediate impression of reliability, tenacity, and an unwillingness ever to give up.
That smile had an encouraging quality. The longer one looked at it, the more it seemed to inspire a person, filling him with drive.
That was the smile William valued. He understood very clearly that whether a business was legal or illegal, the first step of every business was communication and exchange.
Say you had the highest degree, say you had held some important post. When you sat face to face with a picky, difficult customer, would the other party look at you more highly because you were outstanding?
No.
On the contrary, a smile was the most powerful weapon. It could quickly dissolve the other party’s defenses without language or communication. That was the most formidable weapon.
As for everything else, as long as a person was willing to put in the hard work, it could be trained. But this particular texture of smile was difficult to acquire.
William had spent half his previous life mastering that kind of smile. Yet on this young man, it seemed to be natural. Sometimes, a person’s innate gifts were truly enviable.
At the time, William made the decision on the spot and signed Asher, making him manager of several companies under his control.
The thin, tall man had not guessed wrong. Behind Asher and Dawn Asset Management stood William himself.
Just like the heavy subject of capital plunder, the nature of capital was always ugly. Perhaps at the beginning, they and it had not been this way, but by now they and it had already recognized reality.
So could this kind of plunder not be countered?
Of course it could. The simplest method was to establish other companies for cross-shareholding, just as William was doing now. William used another company under his name to acquire stock in Interstellar Trading Company. Viewed purely from the perspective of Interstellar Trading Company, his shareholding ratio kept declining.
In reality, however, apart from the shares he had truly sold, he had not lost much power at all.