Time passed almost without notice for Tyler.
Days blended into one another like brushstrokes on a canvas. On some days, he was deep in thought, mapping out ideas and fine-tuning his plans.
On other days, he was downstairs helping Devin with homework, cooking breakfast with his mom, or just sitting in the backyard, watching the light shift across the sky like it used to before life became complicated.
He made time for all of it.
Because Tyler understood something most people never grasped until it was too late: life isn't just about building empires. It's also about living inside the moments you're building for.
Yes, his head was filled with plans—strategies for financial domination, political maneuvering, and technological superiority—but it was also filled with memories he was making in real time.
Laughing with Devin as they tried to assemble Lego bricks and played puzzles.
Watching his mom hum softly as she organized the kitchen cabinets is their new place, with a calm she hadn't known in years finally settling across her shoulders.
These things mattered to him.
And after buying the house and cars, Helena made a decision that Tyler had hoped for—but never pressured.
She resigned from her job.
It happened the very next day. She handed in her notice with grace and a small, almost embarrassed smile.
"It's time I focused on my boys," she said softly that morning, over coffee. "I've been working nonstop for most of my life, Tyler. I think I finally earned the right to just… be a mom again."
Tyler didn't say much in response. He simply walked around the table and hugged her, quietly appreciating her.
She didn't know it yet, but he had already begun making arrangements.
The first was hiring a personal trainer—someone discreet, professional, and capable of working around her pace and energy levels.
The second was finding a family doctor who would make house calls and conduct comprehensive monthly health screenings.
But none of this would begin until they moved into their new place.
There was a reason for the timing. Tyler wasn't just being generous—he was being careful.
The reason for this was the illness.
The one that was quietly lurking in Helena's biology. The one Tyler had come back in time to fight against. It wasn't spreading fast—yet. But it would. And when it did, it would strip her muscles, drain her strength, and leave her bedridden by the time Devin graduated high school.
Unless Tyler stopped it.
The cure wasn't ready. He needed more time,m to put the necessary infrastructures in place, and more leverage in the right places. But that didn't mean he would sit back and wait.
Muscle degradation—slow but relentless—was one of the illness's most insidious signs. That's why he had to act now. Controlled physical activity wasn't just a distraction or lifestyle upgrade—it was strategic resistance.
Helena didn't need to run marathons. She just needed to preserve her strength. Keep her body alive long enough for Tyler to rewrite the future.
She wouldn't understand the full reasoning and Tyler won't tell her, but he'd explain enough for her to agree. All he just want her to do are gentle strength trainings—daily stretches and bit of swimming once they move to their new place.
It would be framed as self-care but Tyler knew better. It wasn't self-care, it was survival.
But exercise was only half of the battle. The other half was far more complicated.
And that was nutrition.
Yes, food.
After his mom died, Tyler spent some time diving into America's food system—not the way people see it from supermarket aisles, but from behind the curtain.
And what he found disgusted him.
America didn't have a food system. It had a death pipeline wrapped in marketing.
Everything, from breakfast cereal to 'healthy' salad dressings, was saturated with chemical preservatives, synthetic hormones, processed oils, and sugar disguised under thirty names.
Children were being raised on toxic sludge. Adults were surviving on engineered cravings. And the worst part?
And all these wasn't an accident. It never was. It was all by careful design.
Ultra-processed meals pumped with addictive chemicals. Mass-market crops doused in glyphosate and pesticides. Meat pumped full of antibiotics and growth hormones. Milk tainted with chemicals that nobody tested long-term.
The entire population was eating poison in legally approved doses.
You didn't have to look hard to see the effects.
Twelve-year-olds with early-onset diabetes. Teens with autoimmune diseases that used to appear in the elderly. Adults in their forties collapsing from strokes after years of chasing "low-fat" processed diets.
America was a pharmaceutical farm.
The food system made people sick. The healthcare system profited from the sickness. And Big Pharma cashed in on both ends—selling dopamine instead of nutrients, then selling pills once bodies broke down.
The system wasn't broken. It was functioning exactly how the architects intended it to.
Tyler had seen what it did to his generation in the future. He'd seen gym rats drop dead from organ failure. He'd seen models diagnosed with cancer despite clean diets. He'd seen healthy, middle-class parents lose everything over medical bills caused by "trace levels" of chemicals that built up silently for years.
He had seen someone who lived healthy all their life suddenly get diagnosed with a terminal illness, and being told it was genetic.
But he wouldn't let that happen to his family.
Which is why one of the first things he planned to do—once Gumua was under his umbrella—was to establish a private agricultural estate.
He will grow organic food, in an isolated and self-sustaining space. And him and his family would no longer have to eat the fake organic labels sold in stores.
There will no pesticides, no hormone injections, no gene-edited grains. Just soil, water, and sunlight.
Food the way nature intended.
In America, this kind of purity was almost impossible to guarantee. The FDA's "safe" limits were a joke.
Even high-end stores sold foods with loopholes in the labeling. Trace elements added up. Tyler knew that. He had the medical archives from the future to prove it.
But in Gumua?
He could build from scratch, control every step of the chain. From seed to plate.
That was the plan. Two or three months from now, once VaultPay went live and the NGO had gained full influence, he would quietly move his family overseas.
And finally, they will finally gain freedom from a poisoned system. Freedom from inflation traps and healthcare rackets. Freedom to raise Devin in a world where he wouldn't grow up with fake food and real diseases.
Tyler had what people called "fuck you money" now. And that changed everything.
No more financial anxiety for them, as they no longer need to survive on paycheck-to-paycheck. No more tradeoffs between health and convenience.
And for the first time, the system will have no hold on him.
Tyler couldn't help but smile as he thought about the future he's going to build for himself and his family.
But the smile wasn't of satisfaction, but because he knew that this was just the beginning.
The foundation had been laid. The house was secured. His family was stabilized. His mother was finally breathing easier. His younger brother—Devin will be changing to a private school soon.
Though Devin was still too young to understand what was coming, but he would grow up in a different world.