NOVEL WEB 14 – Jeremiah 12:2
Jeremiah 12:2
You plant them, and they take root; they grow and produce fruit; you are near in their mouth and far from their heart.
James couldn't believe it had already been over ten years since he reincarnated.
His main focus was still his training as this related directly to his future safety and from what he could tell his power would both grow with time and also with training so to make the most of it he didn't let up on the training. His training seemed to be pretty linear so far though he was still waiting for puberty to hit to see if it experienced rapid growth like the rest of the body does during puberty as he suspected.
At school nothing much had changed as he was attending mostly to satisfy his parents wishes and to not dishonour their family name. He still maintained perfect grades and even completed advanced courses where he could since it didn't take him any extra study time anyway. His school had already classed him as a genius giving far more leeway for his laziness and distracted behaviour during classes. What were they going to do? Expel their star student?
Since he didn't need to study he spent most of his time on shaping his relationship with Momo, it was a welcome distraction from the boredom of attending classes for subjects he far exceeded the teachers on. The only downside was that it seems Momo had become old enough for romantic love to blossom in her heart and though that was part of his goal he wasn't into little girls so he had to maintain a careful balance of giving her some attention and closeness without actually getting intimate. Even if she tried to push him beyond cuddles and hugs at times which he expertly dodged.
Over the years his father had continued to grow their family businesses and with his mother returning to her role as CEO of their fashion and beauty departments those had experienced even larger growth which was boosted even further when James started working as a model for her. Their first international launch using him as their poster boy was a smash hit. The older women loved how cute he was while the girls closer to his age picked up on the little bit of edge he had added to his image making plenty of them wanting to buy the magazines just for the advertisements rather than the content of the magazine itself.
The modelling was a very minor job since he only worked a a model for his mother's projects meaning he only had to work a day or two every few weeks at most. Surprisingly much of it was working with Edna and Donna who were so satisfied working with him that they were actually reaching out to his mother to be part of more projects with him when originally it had been his mom working her ass off trying to convince them to be part of the first project having to take big losses to invest in the future of her company. Now they were practically begging to work with her to the point of offering to take less in pay and percentages of the profits than they originally agreed to.
What was taking him a bit more effort was he had been building an information organisation for his needs. This would have been rather easy if he had simply asked his parents for this directly it could have been established in a matter of weeks through the magic of money and political power and connections. He didn't want to involve them though as he would be using his meta knowledge of this universe to investigate things and he didn't want any oversight that would come with his parents being involved. Due to this it had instead taken him almost 2 years to build an organisation that was slowly starting to show some results. It took almost all of his very generous "pocket money". His immense luck had allowed him to invest his pocket money which was already sizeable and make near unprecedented returns providing him enough start up capital for such an organisation. However money alone wasn't enough.
He had found out something during all of that though regarding what had happened when he saved that boy from the fire. During his early hiring for his organisation some had tried to betray him. Seems when the rich young heir of a conglomerate tries to build a secret organisation sometimes people join with bad intentions, who would have thought. It turns out breaking a contract whether written or verbal made with him involved is the worst thing one can do though. When broken his contracts collect a penalty immediate and he was fairly certain that penalty was their soul given how they died immediately as if they dropped dead from their heart stopping. He suspected that their soul was torn from their body and it didn't make them a vegetable, but rather the body simply shut down immediately.
Thankfully this meant that the betrayals weren't seen as assassinations by the authorities and simply written off as heart problems on the coroner's reports.
This experience had given him some more insight into his powers as what he assumed to be full souls were collected over any distance and provided him with far more power. It turns out he had only torn off a minuscule piece of the woman's soul when he completed the deal for saving her son though that piece he got from her had been growing over the years. He suspected that when he had the complete thing she would experience the same as those that broke his contracts and received the default penalty. He didn't feel bad though from what he could tell she got many of years with her son for this price. He felt his hands were clean...enough. He suspected that the default price of a contract with him was a soul with a repayment term of 10 years unless other specified.
He noticed that the more souls he contained his pupils had started slightly shining as if brimming with power and the souls seemed to give him an all-round boost as if empowering his very quirk itself. Everyone else had simply written this off as his quirk growing naturally as he aged.
