Reborn as a Prince
Xucheng mornings didn't just wake you up; they actively tried to freeze you out.
I yanked the collar of my cheap polyester suit up around my neck and took the stairs of my apartment building two at a time. The landlord kept rolling fresh paint over the black mold near the mailboxes, but it always bled back through the eggshell white. Typical. Three years out of a useless degree, and my job description was basically selling penthouses I couldn't afford to look at to guys who made my annual salary before their morning coffee.
I dropped a few crumpled bills on the street cart. "Pork bun. Soy milk."
The vendor shoved the plastic bag at me without making eye contact. Honestly, fair. I hadn't smiled at anyone in weeks. I wouldn't want to look at me either.
I'm Ling Zhou. Twenty-six. "Real estate associate." That’s corporate speak for standing outside subway stations freezing my a*s off, holding a cardboard sign that says LUXURY HOMES STARTING AT 500K while actual buyers roll past in tinted Audis. My base pay? Sixteen hundred RMB a month. Commission was two percent on a good day. Do the math. I’d be lucky to afford the down payment on a broom closet by the time I hit forty.
The morning commute was a physical assault. Zero open seats. I wedged myself between the sliding doors, gripping the overhead bar, trapped between a guy aggressively inhaling a scallion pancake and a woman bathed in cheap floral perfume.
I dragged my phone out with my free hand. Checked the agency group chat. Anyone close Garden Villa this week? Dead air. New listing on the third ring, open house Sunday. More dead air.
Yeah. That was my baseline.
Then my screen glitched.
Not a cracked hardware glitch. A massive, obnoxious gold pop-up violently hijacked my phone.
【God of Wealth System】 You have been selected. Become the ultimate tycoon. Join the journey? [YES] — [NO]
I blinked at the glass. What the hell was this? Some aggressively terrible mobile game ad?
I let out a harsh breath, aiming my thumb at [NO]. But my hands were totally numb from the wind chill. I missed.
Tap.
My thumb hit [YES].
"Wait, no—" I jabbed the screen, but the OS locked up. Text started bleeding rapidly across the glass.
【World background detection in progress…】 【Complete. Conditions met. Transferring to parallel world…】
The interior of the bus started to smear. I don't mean a dizzy spell. I mean the physical matter of the bus—the windows, the peeling ads, the handrails—literally warped like wet paint sliding off a canvas.
A massive wave of vertigo slammed into the back of my skull. I squeezed my eyes shut, locking my grip on the metal bar until my knuckles popped.
When I managed to open them again... the bus was gone.
Sunlight was blinding me. White sand. An ocean that looked violently, aggressively blue.
I was sitting behind the wheel of a two-seater. Not a company Ford. Not a Corolla. An actual, hyper-engineered supercar. Heavy carbon fiber. Leather that smelled like a bank vault. A dashboard that probably cost more than my entire genetic lineage had ever earned.
"Prince? Are you going to throw up? You look awful."
I snapped my head to the right. A woman was sitting in the passenger seat. Heavy contouring, massive fake lashes, currently pouting at me.
Prince?
"Uh." My voice didn't work right. It was thinner. Lacked the usual gravel from cheap cigarettes.
I jerked the rearview mirror toward me.
That wasn't my face. I mean, it was—same bone structure, same dark eyes. But it wasn't the guy who ate instant ramen for dinner. This guy had clear skin, a sharp jawline, zero exhaustion. He looked like money.
Then the migraine hit.
Not a headache. A physical data dump slamming directly into my cortex. Memories, faces, bank routing numbers, multiple languages—pure Mandarin, fluent English, a localized island pidgin—just aggressively writing over my brain cells. I doubled over the steering wheel, grabbing my head with both hands.
"Prince! Prince, what's wrong with you?" The fake-lash woman panicked, reaching over and shoving her heavily enhanced chest against my arm.
"Get off." I shoved her back.
She froze, blinking. "What?"
"I said get off me."
Her mouth hung open. "But... darling..."
"Was that unclear?" I actually looked at her. Her designer bag was a high-tier knockoff. The memories were still settling into a coherent timeline, but I already knew her deal. This woman was a parasite. The previous owner of this body had dumped nearly a million dollars on her in cars and jewelry over the last three months.
Yeah. Not happening.
I pointed at the gull-wing door. "Out."
"But—"
"Right now."
She scrambled out, stumbling hard in the sand in her heels. The absolute second her foot cleared the carbon-fiber running board, I pulled the door shut and stomped the gas.
The engine absolutely screamed. The beach blurred out.
And for the first time in maybe three years, I actually laughed.
The downloaded memories finally settled into a functional narrative as I drove.
Ling Kingdom. A sovereign island territory sitting out in the Pacific, wedged in the geopolitical gap between China, Japan, and Korea. My country. Literally my country.
I wasn't the real estate guy anymore. I was Ling Zhou. Crown Prince. Only son of King Ling Wenbo. And, looking through the historical data in my head, a complete and utter garbage fire of a human being.
The original Prince was a disaster. Pampered, arrogant, heavily addicted to throwing money at anything that breathed, and aggressively oblivious to the fact that his adopted brother was currently looting his trust fund.
Ling Hai.
Just thinking the name made my jaw lock. The adopted son. Smooth operator. Fake as hell. He had been quietly feeding the original prince toxic investment portfolios for years, siphoning the royal inheritance into his own shell companies while "I" just smiled and signed the paperwork.
Not anymore.
The car tore down the coastal highway. Palm trees. Crashing surf.
I mentally pulled up the UI. It was still there, sitting quietly in my peripheral vision like a cracked AR contact lens.
【Name】: Ling Zhou 【Wealth Points】: 100 【Task】: Achieve a small goal first – spend 100 million dollars. Reward: Random. Penalty: System unbinds. User returns to original world.
Hard pass. I was not going back to a moldy apartment and a bus pass.
One hundred million dollars. In thirty days.
Yesterday, that number would have made me throw up. Today? It actually felt like a Tuesday. I had the bank routing numbers. I had the political leverage. And I had a system hack in my head that fed me future market data.
I hit the palace gates. Heavy wrought iron, flanked by paramilitary guards who immediately snapped to rigid attention as the supercar rolled through. The estate was massive. White stone, gold trim, sprawling acres of manicured hedge mazes.
Home.
I killed the engine in the driveway. A guy in a perfectly tailored suit—the head butler—was waiting by the bumper before I even opened the door.
"Your Highness. Princess Lanxin is requesting your presence in the west study."
Lanxin. The sister.
Sifting through the memories, she was literally the only person in this royal nightmare who gave a damn about the prince. The king ignored him. The queen was a ghost. Lanxin was the one covering his massive debts and bailing him out of local police stations when he wrecked his cars.
"Tell her I need ten minutes," I grunted, tossing him the keys.
"Your Highness, the Princess explicitly said—"
"I said ten minutes." I walked right past him. Rule one of squatting in a royal body: act like you own the real estate. Because functionally, I did.
The west study smelled like old money and expensive scotch. Floor-to-ceiling mahogany, heavy leather armchairs, a fireplace big enough to park a compact car in.
Princess Ling Lanxin was standing by the glass, scrolling through a tablet. She turned when the heavy doors opened.
She didn't look like a magazine cover. She looked like a CEO who could ruin your life and not lose sleep over it.
Sharp amber eyes, heavy black hair.
"You're early," she noted.
"I missed the family."
She didn't even blink. "Did you total the car, or is this fallout from the actress on the beach?"
Right. The parasite with the fake lashes.
"I dumped her," I said, walking over to the decanters.
Lanxin lowered the tablet. "Are you actually serious?"
"Dead serious. Cut her access."
She just stared at me. Assessing. Running a silent background check on my posture. "You're acting entirely different."
"People adapt."
She let the quiet hang in the room for a long time. Then the corner of her mouth ticked up. A real smile. "Good. Maybe the throne won't go to waste after all."
I didn't smile back. Don't get arrogant, Zhou. One decent conversation doesn't erase a decade of being a degenerate. But it was a foothold.
I spent the next six hours locked in the palace archives, pulling up every financial record I could find on a secured terminal.
The geopolitical map was basically Earth, just slightly reskinned. China was Huaxia. The US was still the US. But the tech sector was lagging. They were sitting a few years behind our timeline. Which brought me to BlueStar Technology.
My system's 'Future Fragment' module had flashed the data earlier. BlueStar was currently a failing hardware startup bleeding venture capital. My beloved adopted brother, Ling Hai, had aggressively dumped a massive block of their worthless shares onto the original prince to cover his own margins.
But five years from now? BlueStar was going to hold a monopoly on global mobile processors. It was going to be worth billions.
I pulled out the prince's encrypted phone and dialed.
"Ling Hai."
"Brother!" The voice on the other end was dripping with forced warmth. A corporate sociopath playing family man. "What an excellent surprise. Did you finally review that asset portfolio I pushed over?"
"I'm buying it."
A beat of dead air on the line. "The entire package? All three shell companies? One point two billion?"
"Two hundred million flat."
"Are you out of your mind? That's literal robbery."
"That's my final offer, Hai. Liquid cash. Take the margin or leave it."
The quiet on the line stretched out. When he finally spoke again, the fake warmth was completely gone. "Fine. I'll have legal draft the transfer."
"Appreciate it."
I killed the call and tossed the phone on the heavy mahogany desk.
Two hundred million to lock down an asset that would mint billions. Not a bad pivot for a guy who was rationing soy milk this morning.
The UI pinged in the corner of my eye.
【Task in progress】 【Required expenditure: $100,000,000】 【Current spent: $0】 【Time remaining: 29 days, 23 hours, 58 minutes】
Time to start burning cash.
Later that night, I was lying on my back on a mattress that was physically larger than my entire Xucheng apartment.
The pillows were absurd. The sheets smelled like imported lavender. Out the reinforced glass windows, the Pacific Ocean was just a massive black void reflecting the moon.
This was actually happening.
No 6:00 AM alarm. No dodging the landlord in the stairwell. No desperately cold-calling clients who had already signed with a different brokerage.
I was royal. A literal, obscenely funded crown prince.
But the board was incredibly hostile. The system had a g*n to my head to spend a hundred million dollars. Lanxin was waiting for me to slip up. And somewhere on this estate, Ling Hai was definitely assembling a legal team to screw me over.
Let him try.
I stared up at the vaulted ceiling. I had the system. I had the bank routing numbers. And I had absolutely nothing to lose.
"Your move," I muttered to the empty room.
