He plugged in his earbuds and started reviewing.

The footage was sorted by location and time, organized by the algorithm he'd written to flag conversations containing certain keywords. His name. The Maxtons. The Legacies. Anything related to the social hierarchy that had made his life hell—now making theirs a living comedy.

The first flagged clip was from Wednesday. The day after his transformation.

Brett and Anderson, huddled in the corner of the senior lounge like two rats plotting to bite the cat that had just grown claws and a bad attitude.

After listening he chuckled—low, dark, the sound of someone who'd just realized the bullies were now the ones checking under their beds.

So, they're planning something. Just haven't figured out what yet... if it was what I'd expected them to do or something stupider.

Good to know.

He kept scrolling.

More clips. More conversations. The princesses gossiping about him in the cafeteria—he skipped those, already knew what they thought from the group chat Sierra didn't know he could access. Perks of being the invisible guy turned invisible god.

Teachers discussing his "sudden improvement" in social participation—code for "how is the charity case suddenly more popular than my tenure?" A maintenance worker complaining about having to fix the locker room door that someone had apparently ripped off its hinges.

Oops. That was probably me.

Worth it.

Phei leaned back in the chair, fingers steepled, watching the academy's dirty laundry parade across his screens like a fashion show for hypocrites.

The Spider's Web.

His web.

Then he found what he was actually looking for.

Danton. Yesterday afternoon. The locker room.

His cousin was on the phone, pacing like a caged peacock with daddy issues, voice low and angry—the kind of angry that came from realizing your favorite punching bag had grown teeth and was now smiling at you with them.

"—I don't care what it costs. I want to know where he goes when he leaves. Who he talks to. What he's doing."

A pause. Listening to whoever was on the other end—probably some poor private dick who thought tailing a high school kid would be easy money.

"No, are you a fucking idiot, you idiot, of course I can't just ask him, that's what I pay you for, pussie. He's been weird as fuck lately. Mom's acting strange around him. Something's going on and I want to know what."

Another pause.

"Fine. Whatever. Just get it done. And don't let him see you following him."

The clip ended.

Phei sat back in his chair, a slow smile spreading across his face.

So, Danton's hiring someone to tail me. Interesting.

Cute, even. Like watching a toddler try to hide cookies behind his back while chocolate is smeared all over his lying little face.

He'd have to deal with that. But later. Right now, he had more important work to do—the kind that made hired goons look like playground bullies.

The bag he'd brought was heavier than usual.

Inside: equipment that hadn't existed in his arsenal a week ago. Equipment that would make his old setup look like a child's science project—the kind where the volcano is made of baking soda and the eruption is just vinegar fizzing pathetically.

But first—context.

Because this bag was only half the operation.

Back at Sovereign Tower, his condo had transformed. The second bedroom—originally meant for guests who would never come, because who the hell would visit him if not his women?—was now a command center.

Three curved monitors mounted on an adjustable arm, each one a 49-inch ultrawide with 5K resolution—because why settle for one screen when you can have a panoramic view of everyone's dirty laundry? Beneath them sat a custom workstation he'd set up himself: dual Intel Xeon processors, 256GB of RAM, NVIDIA RTX 4090 graphics cards in SLI configuration, and 48 terabytes of enterprise-grade SSD storage in a RAID array.

Overkill for gaming. Perfect for processing surveillance data from forty cameras simultaneously—and making the NSA jealous on a budget.

Next to the workstation: a dedicated server rack. Four units tall, containing redundant backup drives, a UPS system that could keep everything running for six hours during a blackout—long enough to watch the world burn and still have time for porn and anime porn—and a network switch capable of handling gigabit speeds across multiple encrypted channels.

The walls were lined with acoustic foam—not for sound quality, but for signal isolation. A Faraday cage built into the room's structure, preventing any wireless signals from leaking out. Anyone trying to detect his setup from outside would find nothing but dead air—the kind of dead air that comes right before the trap snaps shut.

Total cost: somewhere north of eighty thousand dollars.

Melissa's card had taken a beating this week—poor thing probably needed therapy after all the "miscellaneous" charges.

The condo setup was the brain. What he carried in this bag was the nervous system—the sensory organs that would feed that brain information from across Paradise.

Signal boosters—plural. Military-grade units according to the dark web seller who'd probably never seen a battlefield but knew how to charge like he had.

Each one capable of punching through concrete and steel, extending wireless range far beyond what civilian tech could manage—because nothing says "privacy" like spying on people through three feet of reinforced concrete.

He'd bought six.

Micro-cameras. Not the cheap shit from before—these were NSA-like-grade hardware, each one smaller than a fingernail, with 4K resolution, infrared night vision, and battery life measured in days rather than hours.

Virtually undetectable even with professional sweeping equipment—unless the sweeper was looking for something the size of a dust mote with a PhD in hiding.

He'd bought forty.

Audio bugs rated for government surveillance operations—so small they could hide inside a screw head, so sensitive they could pick up whispered conversations from thirty feet away. Twenty of those—enough to turn the entire academy into a confessional booth with him as the priest.

Signal interceptors—IMSI catchers, technically illegal in forty-seven states—that could clone phone data from anyone within fifty feet. Two of them, military surplus from a contact who didn't ask questions—probably because he was too busy counting the cash.

And a portable hard drive containing the custom software he'd spent seventy-two hours coding—a program that would turn this room from a local monitoring station into a relay hub, permanently streaming everything to his Sovereign Tower setup without ever needing him to return.

All of it paid for with Melissa's card.

Poor card. It had gone from spa days to spy gear without so much as a safe word.

Phei got to work.

This was the last time he'd ever need to come here.

The old system—weekly visits, manual downloads, hoping he hadn't missed anything important—that was dead. Buried.

What he was building now was permanent. Autonomous. A spider's web that would feed him information forever without him ever touching the silk again.

First: the relay node.

He pulled open the server rack and found the sweet spot—a junction where the academy's internal network met its external uplink.

The school's own infrastructure, hijacked. He hardwired in a custom router no bigger than a cigarette pack, its firmware modified to create an invisible tunnel through the firewall.

Everything the school's cameras and his own cameras saw, everything the microphones heard, would now duplicate itself and stream through this tunnel to some private server farm he'd been using for years, then bounce through three more servers in three countries before landing in his condo's system.

Untraceable. Undetectable. Permanent.

Second: the boosters.

He'd planted them strategically later—one in this room, one he'd hide in the ceiling tiles of the main hallway later, others spread across campus to ensure complete coverage. They'd mesh together into a network, each one extending the others' range, creating a blanket of signal that would reach every corner of Ashford Elite and half a mile beyond—like a digital STD that no amount of protection could stop.

Third: the new cameras.

The old ones—his cheap, desperate purchases from when he had nothing—those would stay. Decoys now, in case anyone ever found one. But the new cameras, the real ones, went into places no one would ever think to look. Inside the tiny holes of air vents. Embedded in the texture of acoustic ceiling tiles. Slipped into the gaps between bricks in the older wings.

Forty new eyes. Watching everything at the academy plus the old ones and the academy surveillance. Forever.

Also the school's own cameras he'd be able to control remotely—because why build your own when you can steal the house's?

Fourth: the software.

His fingers flew across the keyboard as he uploaded the final piece. An AI-assisted analysis system that would run 24/7, flagging conversations based on keywords, facial recognition, behavioral patterns. It would categorize and timestamp and transcribe automatically, feeding him summaries instead of raw footage, alerting him to anything important in real-time.

I won't need to watch a thousand hours of nothing. The system will watch for me and categorize and summarize.

And when something mattered—when Brett and his boys made their move, when Danton's hired tail got too close, when anyone in Paradise whispered his name with ill intent—his new phone would buzz, and he'd know.

The spider doesn't sit in the web waiting for vibrations.

The spider builds the web and lets it hunt for him.

Phei leaned back, watching the progress bars fill.

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