Chapter 1Dreams Beyond the Stars

I’m the fake young master in a story about a swapped-at-birth heir.

My life was a whirlwind of extravagance and excess. I was the kind of guy who could bankrupt a company on a whim, just for the hell of it.

Then the real heir showed up to claim his birthright, and the Shaw family kicked me to the curb.

Without their protection, my enemies found me that very night. They killed me and left my body in a ditch.

Now, I’ve been reborn. And this time, I went straight to the slums and found the real heir, beaten half to death in an underground fight, and saved him.

The System, thinking I was finally going to suck up to the protagonist, was about to reward me with a cheat ability.

Instead, I planted my foot on the protagonist’s fresh wound and ground my heel into it.

“I’m giving you a choice,” I said, looking down at him. “Be my dog. Yes or no?”

* * *

I found Caleb in the slums right after he’d finished an underground fight.

In a dimly lit, abandoned parking garage, the bare-chested teenager lay covered in his own blood on the makeshift ring, his fingers still clutching two crumpled bills.

I crouched down, pushed his damp hair off his forehead, and patted his bruised, swollen face.

He managed to pry one eye open, his gaze sharp and wary. “Who are you?”

Seeing he was still alive, I smiled and stood up, then brought my foot down on a dark purple bruise on his arm.

“I know you’re desperate for money,” I said conversationally. “And it just so happens I have a lot of it. I can give you more than you’ve ever dreamed of. The condition is, you have to be my dog. So, what do you say?”

Before Caleb could answer, the System exploded in my ear.

Host, your mission is to win him over, to get on his good side! Not to start bullying him ahead of schedule!

The noise was annoying. I took out my cochlear implant, manually silencing the world, and continued to stare down at Caleb.

He refused to speak. I pressed my foot down harder, grinding it into his injured flesh.

“Answer me,” I urged.

He gasped in pain, his hand shooting out to grab my ankle. He looked up, his bloodshot eyes studying me for a long, silent moment. Finally, his pale, blood-stained lips moved, shattering what little was left of his pride.

I couldn’t hear him, but I knew what he was saying.

“Yes.”

On my way here, I’d had my people run a check on him. His adoptive parents—my biological ones—had been in prison since he was thirteen for vehicular manslaughter. Not only that, but they’d left him with a chronically ill younger sister.

To pay for her medical bills, Caleb had started collecting trash and working odd, under-the-table jobs, scrambling for every last dollar. Eventually, he was forced onto this path, fighting in these illegal matches.

To him, money was more important than anything. It was the only thing keeping his sister alive.