This needed investigating. I picked up my cell phone and called Gloria. While I usually communicated over email with her, this time I needed more information and much more quickly.

  “Good afternoon, Eddy,” she said. “What can I help you with?”

  “Can you see where all the money went?” I asked. “I expected to have closer to fifty million left, not the small amount in the report you sent.”

  “Let me see… This might take a minute, forgive me.”

  “Take your time. I want to know everything.”

  “Alright. Well, there’s the money sent to the government for taxes and for those fines recently. The expenses for the farm have been higher than expected, but not too much—a few million in total over the last five years. Then there are the salaries to me, your parents, and the money spent on legal expenses.”

  “Are any of those significantly more than the others?” I wondered.

  “No,” she said. “The salaries to both your parents are the same as they have been since the beginning. My salary you already know. The legal expenses weren’t cheap, but they don’t make up the difference.”

  “Anything that might?”

  “Hmm… Ah! I think I’ve found it. Let me do some quick math… Yeah, that’s the reason.”

  “What is it?”

  “Your mother’s been taking a few thousand here and there. It’s not much, but it’s often and adds up quickly over many years.”

  “Shit!” I exclaimed.

  “Sorry,” she told me. “I should have realized sooner and let you know.”

  “Well, thanks for figuring it out. Can you send me the logs? I’ll handle this.”

  I bid her goodbye and read through the logs. I was pissed. While I’d given her some leeway after Grandpa Joe died, this was… extreme. This was not what I wanted. Every day she’d taken a thousand or more. Every. Single. Day. What she did with it, I had no idea. All I knew was that she’d been pissing my money away for years.

  I took a deep breath and called her.

  “Hey Eddy!” Mom said when she picked up. “How are you?”

  “Mom,” I said. “I checked the bank account and talked with Gloria. What have you been doing?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Mom, you’ve been stealing money from me. I haven’t kept as much of an eye on—”

  “It was that bitch! Gloria! She—!”

  “No, Mom,” I snapped, cutting her off. “I saw the bank logs. The money was taken out by you.”

  “I didn’t—,” Mom began before bursting into tears. “It’s been hard since Dad died. I was only making myself feel better. You would want your mother to be happy right?”

  “Mom, listen to yourself. What you did is unforgivable! And you’re trying to defend yourself and guilt me? Fuck this.”

  I hung up the phone and called Melissa. Without Al, she was the only lawyer I could rely on to do what I needed.

  “Good afternoon, Eddy,” she said. “Everything alright?”

  “Hey, Melissa. I paid the fines, so all good there. I called because I just found out my own mother’s been stealing from me for years. I need to remove her from the company because of it so she can’t take anything more.”

  “Alright. First things first, lock her access to the bank account. The next thing would be to file something with the state to get her removed. If you have evidence, this will be an easy thing to do.”

  “I do. I have the bank logs and the original company documents.”

  “Good. Send me over a copy of them and I’ll get started.”

  “Thanks. You’re a life saver.”

  “Not a problem. Again, restrict access to the bank to preserve the money. Just in case.”

  She hung up. I called Gloria to ask her to lock Mom out of the bank and kill any transactions she didn’t recognize. Mom had tried to move a significant portion of the money from the account, but thankfully, we were able to catch it in time and reverse it at the same time Gloria locked Mom’s access.

  I sat down on my bed when the whole thing was over. My own mother had betrayed me! Although I hadn’t been the best son over the years, that was uncalled for. I wouldn’t be able to trust her in future lives. At least Dad had been reliable—if distant. I was just done with people.

  The goal of saving the human race was a noble one. It was also one I was determined to complete more out of spite than anything else. I’d been chewed up and spit out by the whole process plenty, and giving the proverbial finger to the universe was the best I could manage. Giving up so that everyone died wasn’t an option. That was the easy way out. I wasn’t that kind of man.

  I had about five-and-a-half years left before I had to go back in time again. In that time, I needed to decide on what I was going to spend my accumulated experience on. The most obvious things were the baseline features I was buying in each cycle. I had enough for all—or at least the vast majority—of those. Beyond that was anything that would help humanity live through the simulation. That would get me more bonus experience when I hit the proverbial button.

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  Through the remaining years, I kept farming. I steadily withdrew from friends and family. By the end, I was well and truly on my own. Even Dad left when I turned 19 so he could do something other than farming for a while. I didn’t blame him. Doing the same thing year in and year out was exhausting mentally. I was at the point where I simply no longer cared. The days were counting down until I bought all the features I wanted and went back to the beginning.

  It was around the time that Dad left where I finally hit the height of puberty. Without my driver’s license to back me up, I would have been refused service in many places. That I was finally growing wasn’t a huge shock—that was instead just how much it had been delayed. Would it be even moreso if I put the levels on even earlier? I planned on finding out.

  I thought over the life I’d lived the past fifteen years. It had accomplished a lot more than the first go around had. At the same time, it had been a disaster when it came to my on family. I resolved to do everything on my own in the next life. Whether that was by faking an identity or manipulating the humans around me—I refused to call them people as whatever I did would just revert when I went back in time.

  Farming had been good experience, and I could steadily reach my goals while testing the system more and more along the way. But was that what I really wanted? I didn’t think so. Maybe the idea of buying a bunch of businesses would be a better plan. That way I could focus more on testing the system and less on actually earning the absolute metric shit-ton of experience the proper system would need in order to function. Maybe I could get all of that done in one more life? I certainly hoped so. Spite would only keep me going for so long.

  When Christmas Eve came, I was alone in my house. The house was now in need of repairs that I just didn’t care enough to do. It would be back in pristine condition in only a few hours, so what did I care? No, it was time to purchase the features. With 19,411,090 experience to spend, I had a lot of wiggle room.

  While I had debated not buying the leveling and leveling speed features in general, I determined that they were what I was likely to pick, so waiting wouldn’t help. It would have been detrimental to humanity not to pick them up—if just for the bonus experience. That wasn’t true of the stats, however. There were still at least two stat options I wanted to test before ultimately deciding on the final version. Since there was no undo, that was why I held off from purchasing those features.

  I looked at the time on my phone. There wasn’t enough experience to get the free refresh version of Quests III, but I had picked up almost everything I wanted. With only a couple hours until midnight, I bought the last feature I needed.

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