"I was lucky to escape with my life... lucky to escape with my life..."
Seeing the price of cloudthunder crystal leap to more than four times its former value in a single stroke, practically soaring into the heavens, Hou Tao broke into another cold sweat, his face drained of color.
Only now did he realize that, had he not changed his mind, accepted a loss of over a hundred million, and walked away in the spirit of honoring a lost wager, he would have lost a full 1.2 billion by now.
More likely, he would never even have had that much to lose. His position would have been forcibly liquidated after losses of only four or five hundred million, leaving him without so much as a feather.
Six hundred million?
He would have to survive long enough to earn it!
Hou Tao could scarcely imagine what would remain after he lost the three hundred million talisman coins he had borrowed and surrendered his family's businesses and farmland to the money house.
Perhaps a crushing debt of one or two hundred million, to be repaid slowly over the rest of his life.
Perhaps he would end it all, hoping to spare his family the consequences.
But the Heavenly Reach Money House devoured people without spitting out their bones. The contract he had signed bound his family's assets, relatives, and fellow disciples as well. How could it possibly be kind enough to cancel his debts upon his death?
That would truly leave an endless legacy of calamity.
Only then did Hou Tao begin to glimpse the Heavenly Reach Money House's true face. It was a tool in the hands of towering Great Powers for harvesting the Myriad Heavens, a battlefield where two forces clashed and fought. It was no safer than combat