The Unlimited Black Card: The True Power of Money!

The offices of Chaos Direction. The president's office.

Link leaned back against the soft sofa, exhausted, and closed his eyes.

Two vast torrents of information still surged through his mind.

One was the knowledge of money, capital, and business empires accumulated over generations by the Wayne family. Like a set of finely engineered gears, it was rebuilding his understanding of the world's economic order.

The other was Batman's combat memory, forged through more than twenty years of pain and sweat, day after day. Every muscle and nerve seemed to have been branded with the instinct to fight.

Harley Quinn slipped in carrying a cup of hot coffee.

For once, she wasn't chewing gum. She quietly set the coffee on the table and looked at Link's pale face, a flicker of concern in her blue eyes.

He had been like this ever since they left Wayne Tower.

"Sweetie, are you okay?" she finally asked. "What did that old man and that playboy do to you?"

Link opened his eyes. The exhaustion in them was gone, replaced by a calm so deep she couldn't see the bottom of it.

He shook his head, and that familiar smile returned to his lips.

"No. They didn't do anything."

"They just... gave me a tremendous gift."

With that, Link stood and walked to his desk.

He opened his right hand.

Harley leaned in curiously.

A card lay still in his palm.

A metal card, pure black.

It looked like something from another dimension, its black surface so deep it seemed to absorb all the light around it.

There was no design on it, no numbers, no chip—not even a scratch.

It was like the physical embodiment of nothingness.

"What's that? A new credit card? It looks so cool." Harley reached out to touch it.

Link snapped his fist shut and put the card away.

He could feel that it was bound to his soul.

He sat down at the computer, his fingers flying across the keyboard.

Harley stared at their speed and rhythm.

Link had always been smart, but his command of finance and computer networks had remained at the level of a hacker.

Now, as his fingers danced across the keys, he looked like a god controlling the flow of capital around the globe.

Complex financial models and hidden chains of international transactions became as clear to him as the lines on his palm.

Soon, he found a target.

Prometheus Mechanical, a midsize robotics company in Germany.

Its heavy investment in next-generation bionic prosthetics had broken its cash flow. It had filed for bankruptcy protection just three days earlier and was seeking a buyer for the entire company.

The asking price was ninety-three million euros.

Link didn't hesitate. Through a dizzying series of moves, he set up an anonymous shell company in the Cayman Islands and submitted a full buyout offer in its name.

The other party replied almost at once, demanding immediate payment in full.

A standard international bank payment screen appeared on the monitor.

Link took the black card from his pocket and laid it beside the keyboard.

Then something strange happened.

The screen flickered. The complicated payment interface vanished, replaced by a remarkably simple page.

At its center was a plain black rectangle, with a button marked "Confirm Payment" beneath it.

Link moved the mouse and clicked.

No text-message verification code. No password. No security question.

Not even a tenth of a second's delay.

A line of green German text appeared on the screen:

[Payment successful. Acquisition complete. Welcome, new owner of Prometheus.]

Harley's mouth slowly fell open.

She knew little about finance, but even she knew an international acquisition worth nearly a hundred million euros couldn't be that simple.

"That... that's it? Where did our money go?" she asked without thinking.

Link didn't answer.

He quickly broke into Germany's business registry and refreshed Prometheus Mechanical's shareholder information.

The owner field now showed the shell company he had just registered.

He checked every bank account he owned that he knew of.

Not a cent had been spent.

He understood.

This card wasn't for "spending money."

When he confirmed the payment, ninety-three million euros hadn't been withdrawn from an account.

The world had created the money out of thin air and completed the transaction.

The card didn't represent wealth.

It represented the power to define wealth.

It wasn't a credit card with an unlimited limit.

It was... the printing press itself.

Link leaned back in his chair and finally let out a low laugh.

His laughter grew louder until he was laughing without restraint.

Bruce Wayne's proudest weapon was his vast fortune.

He used money to build the Batsuit, make high-tech gadgets, and keep the Justice League running.

Now Link had a greater Money Power than Wayne could ever wield.

Wayne's wealth had to obey the laws of human economics.

Link's wealth was the law.

Far from being frightened by his wild laughter, Harley watched him with shining eyes.

She liked him like this.

Confident. Powerful. Mad enough to overturn everything.

"Sweetie." She hopped onto Link's lap and wrapped her arms around his neck, her breath warm against his skin. "You look like you just bought the whole world."

Link stopped laughing. He stroked her long blond hair and looked out at Gotham City at night.

"No."

"Not yet."