CHAPTER 77: CHRONO ALCHEMY

The room was currently in a tense silence, with Rümeysa sitting on the bed as she rubbed her temples, trying to digest the information Fatih had just dumped on them.

"So, let me recap to see if what I understood is the same thing that you have said," Rümeysa said, pausing for a moment as she maintained eye contact with Fatih, who still had a confused and worried face that showed he really didn’t understand why she was reacting that way.

She continued, "A few months after I got you the computer, you got on social media to try and find information about F1, and you saw a post asking people to give out their guesses about the upcoming grand prix. So you commented your guesses, which, as usual, came out correct.

This repeated for a few races before people started contacting you privately to ask for your guesses. But since too many of them reached out to you and you were tired of responding to them, you created a forum page and made them pay so that you could reduce the number of people.

You continued increasing the price to reduce the number of people every time they exceeded a certain amount until it now reached a thousand dollars a month, with the group now being capped at 250 people, earning you $250,000 every month for the last two years. Up to here, I’m correct, right?"

"Yes, correct," Fatih murmured, nervously twiddling his fingers..

"And during that time, since those who paid you continued asking you questions related to F1, you decided to turn the forum into an open-to-everyone section where you posted articles. As you increased your knowledge through reading various sources, the posts got more and more detailed, and millions of people started visiting the site, often crashing it and making it difficult to moderate.

So you used your earned money to commission a dedicated website to be created before you migrated the articles there. You hired freelancers to make the videos you wrote the scripts for, and now you have part-timers doing the small things like posting results, creating graphics, drawings, and other menial tasks, while you only write some of the articles.

It continued growing until it has now become the most famous and well-known Formula 1-related news and information website, and its related social media accounts each have at minimum a hundred thousand followers, with the Facebook page already having more than one million followers. Any mistakes up to here?"

"No mistakes," Fatih said.

"And then," she continued, her voice tightening, "you used a small portion of that money to buy something called Bitcoin. You bought three hundred thousand of them. They’re now worth $13 each, which means they’re valued at around $3 million. So your total assets are sitting at six million dollars."

The moment she said it aloud, the number hit her like a punch to the chest as her stress increased.

"Yes," Fatih replied, glancing toward his grandmother, who stood silently in the doorway, as she was taking longer to digest the information than her daughter was.

He had always known a reckoning would come. That’s why, just months after the money started pouring in, he began laying the groundwork.

He started by asking his mother to sign him up for an English academy, which she did happily. Through it, he showed a frightening ability to learn the language at a very fast pace, being able to speak it fluently with her in just six months since he started the academy. He then asked her to sign him up for another language, repeating the process.

Three months after he had shown that he could now speak English fluently, he had the man he had hired to run the website reset the dates of all articles and delete all of the comments, explaining it to the users as updating the backend infrastructure, and they were now required to start from the beginning by recreating their accounts.

He pulled the same stunt with his social media accounts, staging a fake hack to justify launching new profiles under his evolving brand name. After a few days, he deleted the old accounts, sacrificing follower numbers in the process. But the loss was temporary; his rising brand recognition quickly filled the gap, proving that momentum mattered more than metrics.

This slowed operations for a moment, which was exactly what he targeted to paint it as a slow migration of users from the forum, this time matching the new timeframe he had conjured.

The resetting was also done on the forum, but this one happened earlier than the website reset, as he needed it to be the starting point, just like it actually was. He started implementing it right when he began ending support for some of the lower tiers, which he then staggered acceptance for, citing a manual and detailed approval process that could now be translated as a small number of people testing the waters of his services before the increase became gradual.

All the new payments now went into a new PayPal individual account that he had made, creating a fresh, new, and verifiable trail of money that could be used as evidence for when he started, having already drained all of the previous PayPal account on services related to the new website that was then still under construction, for services like leasing server space and other website-related expenses.

The same was done with Bitcoin, but this time he just migrated them from his thousand accounts to new ones in the same delayed and prolonged transfer to simulate a purchase from individuals.

His modified history now showed that he had been doing this for about two and a half years, removing all of the questions he would have been expected to answer had he not done that, like, "Where did you learn English?" As it could now be explained by matching everything else with him having already learned it to a fluent level at the academy she sent him to, and through the language, he watched videos, read articles and technical manuals, and everything that helped him write the articles that he then hired editors and proofreaders to go through before posting them to the website.

Although he could have left the timeline as the real one and explained his English communication as being facilitated by the use of Google Translate, that would be stretching the field of believability even more than he was already pushing with his current modified story.

"How did the ideas of subscriptions and tiers come from?" Rümeysa asked.

"I saw it on the internet."

"What about creating a forum?"

"Someone suggested it."

"Is it the same about hiring moderators?"

"Yes."

"Freelance workers and part-timers?"

"Yes, but also because it would take a long time for me to learn all of those things, so I paid for their services."

"Why *The Conqueror* as a name for the website?" Güldane asked next, trying to give Fatih a breathing spell from her daughter’s questioning.

"Google Translate said it was my name in English," Fatih answered, passing the credit to Google Translate, which at this moment was still not as accurate as it would be in the future.

Rümeysa immediately picked up from where she was and continued asking questions. Fatih diligently answered those he could, and for those that would reveal he knew things that his current naive self was acting unaware of, he answered in a manner that would keep that act intact as the interrogation-like conversation went on for ten minutes before the room entered an extended, awkward silence.

"I know it’s very surprising, and even I’m having difficulty believing it, but why are you reacting as if it’s a bad thing that he made money? It’s not like he was the one gambling," Güldane asked her daughter when she saw the look of distress on her face. Though she too was surprised, she took it as a positive surprise after hearing Fatih’s explanation. The most she felt was realizing that he was just a naive child with faster maturity than others, but his innocence was still there, making her wonder if she had missed something.

"That’s not why I’m stressed. I’m surprised that his PayPal account has yet to trigger its Anti-Money Laundering protocol when his personal, unverified account now has millions. I know that digital banks are still lax, as regulation has yet to catch up with the progress, but this is stretching it too far.

Then there is the tax issue; he hasn’t paid a single cent in taxes from his earnings for the last two and a half years.

And if any of those two things are triggered, let’s say his account is frozen for review due to it being suspected of money laundering, then it is I who is considered to have broken the law as his guardian. Plus, who will believe me if I tell them it was he who made the money behind my back without my knowledge? It’s a bomb waiting to explode at any tremor," Rümeysa explained, revealing the reason for her stress.

"I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was a bad thing," Fatih apologized with his head lowered in shame, as if he had just realized what he had done through her explanation.

Hearing Fatih apologize, Rümeysa raised her head and looked at her son, feeling a pang of guilt before she said, "Doing it is not a problem, not telling me is." Her voice softened, but the weight of responsibility hadn’t lifted. She wasn’t angry at what he’d done, she was terrified of what it meant.

"But the bomb has yet to explode, so you can defuse it, right? You specialize in Corporate and Commercial Law, with a focus on... what did you call it?" Güldane snapped her fingers as she tried to remember the words she needed, but they weren’t coming to her mind.

"International Contract Law and Intellectual Property," Fatih said, coming in clutch as it was something he had heard a few times from his mother.

"Yes, that," Güldane said, grateful for Fatih mentioning what she was trying to say. "Isn’t this situation similar to what you are doing at the company, but just on a smaller scale?"

"Yes. I’m currently thinking of a path of least resistance to untangle this web of problems," Rümeysa said without raising her head, pinching the bridge of her nose as she continued thinking.

"It’s fine," Güldane said, walking to Fatih and rubbing his shoulder, trying to console him. "You just didn’t know what you were doing, and things escalated to that point. But from now on, you have to tell us about everything you are about to do so that we can prevent situations like these from happening, okay?"

"Yes, I will do that," Fatih said in an apologetic tone as he hugged his grandmother, who continued patting his back as the room once again descended into silence.