Infinite Cashback: My Wealth Rebate System

The click of the marker cap echoed through the lecture hall.

Professor Warren set the marker down and faced the room. Her expression as unreadable as ever, the same permanent setting she’d worn through Ben’s public execution and Vivian’s private masterclass alike, unmoved by either outcome.

"For our next class, I expect everyone to have read the next section."

Her tone made it clear this wasn’t a suggestion so much as a formality she was extending out of pure professional courtesy.

"I will not spend valuable lecture time explaining material you’re expected to understand on your own."

Her gaze swept the room, slow and unbothered, the gaze of someone doing routine inventory rather than making eye contact with actual people.

"And if I catch anyone using a phone or talking while I’m teaching, you’ll remain standing for the rest of the lecture."

She paused.

Her eyes settled on Marcus, and Jason felt the specific, secondhand dread visible on the person standing beside him.

Marcus visibly shrank in his seat, folding in on himself with the practiced efficiency of a man who’d clearly been rehearsing this exact posture in his sleep.

Jason almost admired the precision of it. This wasn’t really a warning to the whole class so much as a personal report addressed to its one repeat customer.

A few students let out restrained laughs, the kind carefully disguised as coughs, because everyone in this room had already learned the hard way what happened to laughter that didn’t disguise itself well enough.

Professor Warren didn’t acknowledge any of it.

"Class dismissed."

She gathered her notes into a neat stack, tucked them under one arm, and strode out without another word.

No one moved, not until the door clicked shut behind her.

Then the silence cracked all at once, the whole room exhaling in unison like it had been holding its breath for the better part of an hour, which, functionally, it had.

Conversations sprang back to life across the lecture hall, chairs scraping, bags unzipping, the room finally sounding like it was full of actual students again instead of defendants waiting on a verdict.

Marcus slid down further in his seat until the back of his head hit the chair, staring at the ceiling with the hollow, thousand yard look of a man who’d just fought a war nobody else in the room had even noticed was happening.

"I have never stood that long in my life," he groaned. "Not even at my cousin’s wedding, and that ceremony had an intermission. An intermission, Ben. For a wedding."

Ben zipped up his bag, entirely unmoved by the tragedy unfolding beside him. "You stood for, what? twenty-five minutes?"

Marcus turned his head just far enough to fix him with a look of profound betrayal. "Time is relative, Ben. Ask my legs, they’ve aged considerably since this class started. Or better yet, Ask Einstein"

He paused, considering. "Actually, ask Professor Warren. She’d probably correct his math too"

Marcus finally abandoned his dramatic collapse and pulled himself upright, rubbing the back of his neck like twenty-five minutes on his feet had personally cost him a decade of his life expectancy.

"It was four minutes," he grumbled. "Four! How did she even know it was exactly four minutes? Does she have a stopwatch surgically implanted somewhere? Who does that?"

Jason shrugged. "Someone who’s dealt with you before."

Marcus frowned. "This was only our third class."

"Instincts." Jason said it with the calm authority of a man delivering a diagnosis. "Some people don’t need a pattern. One look at you and she probably knew everything she needed to know for the semester."

Marcus stared at him for a beat, then swung a finger accusingly between him and Ben before letting it settle, fully and dramatically, on Jason. "I don’t like this alliance forming against me."

Ben snorted, zipping the last pocket on his bag shut. "There’s no alliance. We’re just making objective observations. You got called out in under five minutes"

Marcus whipped a finger toward him, momentum fully committed now. "And you?"

Ben blinked, apparently only just realizing that the tribunal wasn’t finished.

"You got asked one question and practically delivered your own eulogy in real time. I felt like I should’ve stood for a moment of silence."

Ben grimaced. "I just didn’t read that topic, man. It happens."

"Right. Groundbreaking insight." Marcus nodded solemnly, folding his hands like a priest delivering last rites. "They should put that in a textbook. Right beside a picture of you standing there, mid-sentence, looking like a man who’d just discovered fire and still wasn’t fully convinced it was worth the effort."

Ben opened his mouth.

Nothing came out. He looked, Jason thought, exactly like someone rifling through an empty drawer, convinced there had to be a comeback in there somewhere.

Marcus waited, entirely unbothered, savoring it.

Ben kept searching. The comeback kept not arriving.

Marcus broke first, laughing to himself before leaning back with the deeply satisfied grin of a man who’d just won an argument nobody had technically agreed to have.

"See?" He spread both hands wide, presenting the moment like evidence to an invisible jury. "Justice."

Jason let the two of them keep trading shots without bothering to referee.

He already knew how this worked by now, nothing said today would stay contained to today and knowing Marcus, that grudge probably had a release date of tomorrow morning, latest.

The three of them packed up and drifted out with the rest of the class, folded into the steady current of students heading toward the dining hall.

"Okay, but seriously," Ben said, glancing sideways. "Why’d she smile at you?"

Jason looked over. "What?"

"The smart one," Marcus cut in, still not done extracting value from the day. "The one who answered the question Ben turned into modern art. Vivian."

Ben ignored the jab entirely, laser focused. "She smiled at you. I saw it."

Jason shrugged, landing somewhere closer to a man not looking directly at a question. "I don’t know. People smile."

"Not like that," Ben said. "She looked toward us. There were only three people in our row you, me, and Marcus. We both agreed she was looking at you."

"And it wasn’t one of those polite, absent minded smiles," Marcus added, holding up a finger like he was presenting evidence in court. "It had context."

Jason shook his head. "You’re reading way too much into it."

Marcus looked entirely unconvinced. He had the expression of a man who’d already closed the case in his own head. "She answers a question that makes the rest of us sound academically homeless, sits back down, then turns around and smiles at one specific person in a room full of thirty. That’s not a coincidence." He pointed, slow and deliberate, like he was aiming something. "That’s a targeted smile. That’s precision aiming. That’s a woman with a strategy."

Jason let out a quiet sigh, "Or she smiled at someone behind me."

Marcus stared at him for a second, genuinely wounded. "You really hate the interesting explanation, don’t you? Every single time. There’s a mystery sitting right in front of you and you’d rather file it under coincidence then go eat lunch."

"I just tend to prefer the likely one."

Marcus clicked his tongue, unimpressed, like Jason had just failed a test he hadn’t even realized he was taking.

"Boring."

They spilled into the hallway with the crowd, Marcus and Ben’s back-and-forth dissolving into background noise as Jason’s attention drifted ahead on its own, without asking permission first.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!