The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 692

The ink on the tile contract wasn't dry when the door didn't knock. It slammed.

"Beatrix." Cornelius Hargrove filled the doorway the way he filled every room he'd ever walked into — loud first, right second, if at all. "Twenty minutes. I sat in that boardroom for twenty minutes."

Beatrix didn't stand. "Uncle—"

"Don't." He threw a folder onto her desk hard enough that it slid into the tile Alex had set down an hour ago. His eyes found Alex, flicked once, and dismissed him completely. "And you're in here with — whoever this is."

Nobody had ever looked at Alex like he was furniture. It was almost restful.

"Two years." Cornelius's voice cracked down the middle of the word, somewhere between fury and something rawer underneath it.

"Two years watching Ferrowgate eat us alive, quarter by quarter, and every time I ask what the plan is, I get told to trust you. I don't trust you. I trust numbers. And the numbers say this company's a corpse that hasn't stopped twitching yet."

"We have something," Beatrix said. "A new line. It changes—"

"The same speech." Cornelius didn't even raise his voice for that one. "You gave it last year. And the year before. I stopped writing it down."

Beatrix's jaw tightened. Just that. Nothing else moved.

"I'm selling," Cornelius said. "All of it. Ferrowgate's already named a price, and it's a good one, because they'd love nothing more than to own a piece of the carcass they killed. Match it, or I sign with them by Friday."

"You'd hand them a seat at this table."

"I'd hand them a company that's already theirs in every way that counts." He said it flat, a diagnosis he'd already grieved. "Ten percent. Two hundred million. Buy it or lose it."

Beatrix didn't have two hundred million. Everyone in the room knew it. Including her.

The company did not have that money too.

"I'll buy it," Alex said shocking everyone on that place.

Cornelius laughed before he could stop himself — one short, ugly bark. "You?" His eyes dragged over Alex again, slower this time. The plain clothes. No signet. A man who looked like he'd walked here.

"Sweetheart, this one couldn't buy the chair he's sitting in."

Beatrix didn't correct him. She was watching Alex the way she'd watched the tile an hour ago — waiting to see what happened next before she decided how much of it to believe.

"Two hundred million," Alex said. "I don't carry that in currency. I carry it in gold."

The room went very still.

"Gold." Cornelius said it like the word had walked in wearing someone else's face.

"Five hundred kilograms. Delivered today." Alex said it the way he said most things that mattered — flat, unhurried, nothing performed for the room.

While gold was an extremely rare and exorbitantly expensive treasure in the United States of Magic, to Alex—the unrivaled Emperor of Xia—it held almost no special value. It was merely currency, something used casually in buying and selling. Gold coins were so abundant that they were sometimes dropped in the streets, yet the busy citizens rarely bothered to pick them up.

After all, he possessed an inexhaustible supply within his spatial storage ring.

Cornelius's mouth opened. Closed. Greed did the arithmetic faster than pride could stop it.

"Show me."

He placed a heavy box of gold in front of Cornelius. The moment the man opened it, his face went pale with shock. It wasn’t the spatial ring that surprised him—nearly every wealthy magician in the United States of Magic owned one. What stunned him was the sheer quantity of gold Alex possessed.

“This… this is fake, right?”

Alex shrugged casually. “You can have it appraised if you want.”

An hour later, the vault scale displayed a number so large that two junior appraisers fell completely silent. The legal team prepared the documents in just thirty minutes.

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