Chapter 2 — The Joy of Grinding Experience
If he had the ability, Marcus would want a lot. Everyone has a desire for money.
And when people reach a certain level of financial security, they start chasing something more — a career that actually means something. A life that feels earned.
But he was in the early stages. Most conditions weren't there yet.
On the first day of his second life, the first order of business was taking stock of himself.
Marcus walked to the small mirror propped against the wall above his desk and looked at his reflection. Memories surfaced and settled. He was still exactly the same as before — just younger.
Ordinary handsome. The kind of face that didn't stop traffic but didn't get overlooked either.
Finally. I can actually feel this.
He was six feet even, with dark brown hair that fell across his forehead, clean features, and a build that was lean and solid — the product of years doing physical work on his family's farm, plus the two weeks of freshman orientation drills the university ran every August. His skin had caught a lot of sun lately. He looked healthy. He looked young.
He was wearing an old pair of jeans, a gray t-shirt with a small bleach stain near the hem, and a pair of New Balance sneakers with soles worn so thin he could feel every pebble through them. The whole outfit had probably cost him forty dollars total, and most of it had been secondhand.
He studied himself in the mirror for a moment. The corners of his mouth turned up. Not vanity — just relief. Pure, almost overwhelming relief at being back inside a body that worked. A body without the grinding gastritis, the stiff shoulder, the neck pain that had followed him through his thirties. No thinning patch at the crown of his head. No soft belly from too many late nights at a desk.
He was eighteen years old.
Does this mean only decent-looking guys get reborn?
He laughed at himself and pressed a hand flat against his chest — solid, quick pulse, full lungs. He hadn't felt like this in a long, long time.
He stepped back to his desk and checked his phone. A cheap prepaid flip phone, the kind that still had physical number keys and a screen the size of a playing card. He'd bought it used from a junior student for thirty bucks at the start of the semester so he'd have an easier way to stay in touch with Claire.
Otherwise he wouldn't have bothered with the monthly plan fee.
There were still a few guys in the dorm who didn't own phones at all.
After years of smartphones, holding this thing felt like picking up a relic from a museum — small, solid, almost comically simple.
He scrolled through the contacts until he found the name he'd saved: Claire 🌟.
His chest tightened. He hit call before he'd fully decided to.
The phone rang twice. Then her voice came through, quiet and warm.
"Hey, Marcus — I'm in the middle of class. Is everything okay? If it's not urgent I can call you back after—"
"Yeah, everything's fine." His voice came out steadier than he felt. "Just wanted to hear your voice. I'll let you go. See you this weekend."
A beat of silence. "Okay. I'll call you later."
He hung up and sat there holding the phone for a moment.
As long as she's alive, everything is fine.
No more worrying. Not about that.
Down the hall in her lecture room at Ohio State's main campus — about ten miles west — Claire tucked her phone quietly back into her jacket pocket, glanced down at her notes, and bit back a small smile. Her roommate, sitting in the next seat, caught the expression and leaned over.
"Who was that?" she whispered. "You look like you just got asked to prom."
"Stop," Claire said, still smiling. "Pay attention."
She'd angled her head down when she answered so her hair covered the phone. She didn't want to be that girl.
Marcus set the phone down and made one more call — to his dad. They talked for a few minutes. His dad's first question, as always, was whether he'd eaten yet. Marcus said yes. His dad said okay and that was more or less the whole conversation. There wasn't much they ever needed to say to each other. The call itself was the thing.
His mom didn't have a cell phone. She thought the monthly fee was a waste. Every dollar counted at the farm.
He didn't argue with that logic. He understood it completely.
His family ran a sweet corn operation outside of Columbus — sixty-some acres, decent yields in a good year, but the margins were razor-thin once you factored in seed costs, equipment maintenance, diesel, and the general unpredictability of commodity prices. Not poverty, exactly. But the kind of situation where a single bad season or an unexpected repair bill could tip everything sideways.
His sister was still in high school. Her semester fees still hadn't been squared away. He remembered now — she'd quietly cried about it alone at night rather than tell anyone. Her teacher had been sending home notices and she'd been too embarrassed to say anything.
He was going to fix that.
His own tuition was around nine thousand for the year, covered by a small personal loan his parents had taken out. His monthly expenses ran to maybe two hundred and fifty dollars — the dining hall, his phone plan, occasional basics. He bought clothes secondhand and wore them until they fell apart. A pair of jeans from Walmart. Sneakers from the clearance rack at Target.
He wasn't complaining. He'd grown up watching his parents work themselves into the ground and still come up short, and he'd internalized it — the idea that you kept your head down, didn't ask for more than you needed, and hoped the math eventually worked out in your favor.
That approach had not served him especially well the first time around.
He sat down at his desk and tried to think clearly.
He had the Reading System. That was real and it was working. At his current rate, he could reasonably pull in two to three hundred dollars a day through focused, genuine reading. That was more than most entry-level jobs paid per week in 2008.
But he didn't want to be dependent on it. That was a trap.
A lion raised in a zoo still has claws, but it forgets how to hunt. If he just sat in his dorm room collecting system payouts and letting the world happen around him, he'd end up soft in a different way than before. The system was an accelerant — not a replacement for actually building something.
He needed to think about what else he could do.
He knew, in broad strokes, how the next decade was going to go.
Google and Facebook were still ascending. Apple was about to change the world with the App Store. Amazon was growing faster than most people realized. Housing was going to crater in the next twelve months and then, after a few brutal years, start climbing toward prices that would eventually seem insane.
But knowing that a stock goes up and knowing when to buy, how much to commit, when to get out — those were different things entirely. He wasn't a trader. In his previous life he'd never once bought a single share of anything. He'd been too cautious, too risk-averse, too buried in day-to-day survival to think strategically about money.
He remembered that Bitcoin would eventually be worth a fortune. He remembered that it wouldn't really start moving until 2013. But he also knew that touching it too aggressively — buying up too much, moving too early — could ripple outward in ways he couldn't predict. The butterfly effect was real. He wasn't going to blow up the timeline chasing a windfall.
Small positions. Patient moves. Nothing dramatic.
The honest truth was that he hadn't figured out a fast play yet. And that was okay. The system gave him income and time. He'd read, he'd level up, and somewhere in the process he'd find clarity on the next move.
He glanced at the class schedule pinned to the back of his door, grabbed a few textbooks, and stuffed them into his backpack.
He wasn't planning to actually sit in the lectures. He'd read in the back row, or find an empty study room, or walk the campus paths while reading if the weather held. The goal was comprehension — genuine engagement with the material, not passive attendance.
He'd play the role of a student who was quietly turning things around. By the time anyone noticed a difference, the change would already be real.
Lakewood State's campus covered nearly a thousand acres — big enough that you could get a twenty-minute walk in without retracing your steps. Most students were in class at this hour. The paths were quiet and shaded by the rows of oaks that lined the main quad.
Marcus walked with his Calculus II textbook open in his hands, reading as he went, letting the material settle. Every block of comprehended text registered against the system's counter in the corner of his vision.
Not bad. A thousand words in five minutes. That's breakfast money right there.
He caught himself smiling at a calculus problem and immediately felt a little ridiculous. But the feeling underneath it was real — the pleasure of absorbing something difficult. The sense of steady, measurable progress.
He found the right building and headed for the classroom. Class had just broken. Students were filing out into the corridor, talking in small clusters, a couple of guys near the emergency exit leaning against the wall.
A heavyset guy near the door spotted Marcus and pushed off the wall, walking toward him with a look on his face like he'd just watched someone step in front of a bus.
"Webb," he said. "Dude. You got caught."