My Life as an Awoken

Chapter 119: Late Night Talk [3]

Xue Qing continued her story, "My company started out more in a journalistic capacity. I wanted to uncover and expose my family, for all of their wrong doings. Their wrong doings are not limited to just myself.

I was going to expose them for the whole world to see.

But, when I started looking, I could barely find any hard facts or proof. The only thing I could find was the numerous rumors.

I found out quickly that to find conclusive evidence I would need to pay for it, literally. I had to bribe people to get physical copies of forged or illegal contracts.

So, in order to make more money, I started digging up dirt and secrets of other people. I would then sell it to people to either use in court to sue them or use as leverage to get better conditions for themselves.

I realized pretty soon that the best way to get information on people was through legal channels.

You can just buy people’s information and data. Everyone knows that companies sell their information, but they don’t realize the depth of that information. They also don’t realize just what you can analyze and learn from it.

You can learn a lot from just one source of gathered information. Now if you gather all of the information being sold about a person, you can know just about everything there is to know about a person.

From their daily movement, likes, dislikes, political affiliation, personality, everything really.

And all of that is perfectly legal.

That’s when I changed the company structure. It went from a journalistic method to a data collection method.

By collecting as much data as possible about as many people as possible, especially those rich and powerful elites.

Then I started selling people’s data that I collected from companies around the world. I made my company the most neutral part of the upper class by holding everyone’s secrets. They can’t touch me or my company, because if they do they will be exposing everyone.

They know that if anything happens to me, then I will auto release all of the dirty secrets of the upper class.

Though, they don’t know who I am.

They just know that I exist.

Anyway, my company makes over a billion dollars a year. And I only make that little because I don’t abuse the information or extort the upper class.

Staying neutral is a hard thing to do, and it is more valuable than the few hundred billion I could be making.

But, with you, I... no, we, could make a lot of things happen. Make the world a better place, bring justice back to the world, we could do a lot."

"That seems unrealistic and a bit arrogant. Who’s to say that our idea of justice is right?"

"But, it has to be better than what we have now."

"You would like to think so, but that is wishful, optimistic thinking. Reality calls for realistic thinking, which more often than not is pessimistic."

We stood in the living room in the dark looking at each other, neither of us speaking a word.

After a while Xue Qing took a deep breath, sighed, then said, "Sorry, it seems like I got ahead of myself there."

"Ambition is an admirable thing to have, but don’t let it crush you. At least I think that’s how the saying goes."

"Ha~, yeah. I have to take things one step at a time."

"Well, I can’t say that you didn’t impress me with the competence in starting your own company. Especially when it is as successful as yours is. You have definitely tempted me into joining you. But, I still have to see what the field looks like first.

Ah... I just realized. I’m doing the same thing Layla does."

"Well, I’m glad I tempted you... What does she do?"

"Whenever I bring up the relationship talk she always shuts it down. She wants to be more successful before starting anything. I always found it a little annoying, but now I think I get it a little more."

"I do think people should be decisive, but making an ignorant decision is one of the worst things you can do."

"Yeah, I agree."

As the conversation was winding down, we decided to actually go to sleep.

...

The next morning I got up early and took a quick shower. I went out and started cleaning the windows. The algae had to go.

I was going to replace the windows later since they are only single panes, but I figured this would allow me to enjoy what I have right now. Sometimes it’s about the journey and all that jazz.

A short while after I started Xue Qing came out and said, "You’re up early."

"So are you."

"I usually get up a little earlier than this. So, I slept in. are you usually up at this time?"

"Yeah. I used to sleep in like crazy. Like eight to ten hours a night, and I would wake up around lunch. Though that was also around the work hours I had.

But, strangely, once I started the business, I started sleeping less and being way more productive."

"I get it, the same thing happened to me. I think the stress of having to make the business successful makes you that way. You are always focusing on what you can do to make the business work, so it interrupts your sleep."

"I can see that."

"Well, do you want to keep watching the show from yesterday?"

"Um..." I looked at the unfinished windows then said, "Yeah, just let me finish this first. It makes me anxious to not do anything productive."

"Yep, I am feeling the same. While you finish up here I will go see if I can find anything to eat."

"Ok."

I decided to speed up the work. Spraying the cleaning fluid on and using the squeegee to scrape the algae off of the windows.

I was trying not to leave streaks, but it was hard in the cold weather. I’m not sure if the cold really had anything to do with it but that’s what I was blaming it on.