By June 2009, AR International was no longer a joke. It wasn't a titan, not even a major player, but in the alleys of Jakarta, the corners of Nairobi, the outskirts of Damascus, the subsidized districts of Birmingham and the streetside stalls in Tashkent—you could find a soap packet, a snack, a phone, a pen, a box of candy. Something blue and white, branded AR. It wasn't power, but it was presence.
It was just enough.
The AR3050, the plastic-bodied, keypad phone styled after a future iPhone that hadn't even been imagined yet, had become a quiet favourite of old men who couldn't see well and broke students who needed battery life over aesthetics. It had no apps, no snake, but it worked for days on a single charge. And most importantly, it was respected. Not because of ads or celebrities. Because it had come from Pakistan. From a mysterious company that never overpromised but always delivered. That was enough for now.
Arslan stopped.
No more flooding new countries. No more gifts. No more pushing shipments like a crazed merchant on fire. He knew better. Spending more would backfire. The soil had been seeded. And anything beyond this would rot the roots before the tree could grow.
So he left the countries to themselves.
Each local branch of AR International was now run by native-born, seventh-generation citizens, tightly bound by non-negotiable contracts, supervised quarterly by his Pakistani legal teams—disguised as consultants and auditors. Each branch could sell, grow slowly, or die. That was up to them.
He had done enough. The seeds were in the ground. He had left 30 shadows of himself in 30 nations.
---
Arslan returned to Pakistan with a leaner posture and a colder stare. Two years of global travel had turned the boyish gleam into a calculating calm. He didn't return to applause. He returned to inventory audits, budget sheets, and field reports. He dived straight in.
2009's remaining months were spent like a surgeon opening up his own child. He cut deep into the veins of Al Riyaz. Not to fix—it was not broken—but to optimize.
He wrote a manual—not just for Malik Riyaz, but for every layer of leadership in the system.
"How to Run a National Monopoly," it began. Simple title. Brutal honesty.
A 300-page blueprint divided into:
Public Image Maintenance
Soft Power and Bribe Architecture
Internal Surveillance and Loyalty Engineering
Resource Flow vs Surplus Management
Crisis Absorption without Affecting Morale
Gold Loan Insurance and Collection Ethics
How to Turn Sermons into Currency
Hiring Profiles That Avoid Future Disruption
Press Control and Myth Making
The structure didn't need fuel anymore. It needed wisdom.
---
Al Riyaz was once again optimized to run on minimal injections of divinity.
Card collections were now strictly seasonal—limited release, higher demand, artificially designed to vanish from the market to create trading desperation.
Prayer product branding (miswaks, caps, tasbihs) carried subtle du'as that turned religious accessories into emotional talismans—each product promised peace, patience, or provision.
Fruits and vegetables grown on the empire's land had now reached the point of surplus and were being sold across Pakistan's vegetable mandis.
The banking and remittance system finally introduced a 1% fee—justified easily by "handling cost." Nobody complained. It was still faster and safer than any state system.
Gold loans remained untouchable. Zero interest. Zero pressure. But every detail was meticulously logged, weighed, photographed, and cross-stamped.
The factories were visited one by one. Waste cut. Processes improved. Workers questioned. Any unnecessary department removed. Unused buildings turned into wedding halls or storage. Nothing idle remained.
And the surplus, the river of gold and cash flowing through Al Riyaz like Allah's own generosity—it was untouched. It had its own ledgers now. Own vaults.
Arslan's strict final order:
> "Do not touch the surplus unless the system bleeds. Not cries. Not coughs. Bleeds."
Even Riyaz, once the lion general of this empire, now bowed silently before the unseen hands of his grandson. He handled the ceremonial, bureaucratic, tactical side. But the strategy, the entire soul of the empire, lay in Arslan's pulse.
He was twenty-one. And already, his name could ruin governments if whispered in the right room.
Al Riyaz was stable. Stronger than it had ever been.
And now—it was time for Act Two.
Arslan stood on British soil in a pair of plain black joggers and a soft wool sweater stitched by hand from his Bahawalpur estate. The grey skies of Kent carried no ambition. The land was not trembling under his name. No one turned their heads as he walked past. And for the first time in twenty-four years, he welcomed that silence.
He hadn't come to the UK to conquer.
He had done that already—across oceans, deserts, nations.
He had bent time itself.
Now he wanted to breathe.
No Cambridge. No Oxford. Too many whispers. Too much light.
Just a government-run college tucked into a quieter part of Kent.
It wasn't about the degree. It was about the illusion of normalcy. The theatre of being young.
He had read every curriculum beforehand. Economics, Sociology, Political Science. Boring. Repetitive. Flawed.
But he still sat in the lecture halls. Still flipped pages. Still joined the cafeteria lines.
Not for knowledge—but for the feeling.
The campus was modest—two redbrick buildings, a library with a leaking roof, and a football field that was more mud than grass.
Students were pale and half-awake.
No one knew that the brown-skinned boy in the corner sipping hot chocolate from a thermos he brought from Pakistan was a man with a gold reserve larger than several African governments combined.
---
His estate in Pakistan ran without him now. Like a machine.
Forty thousand permanent employees. Hundreds of thousands more seasonal or freelance.
AR International humming steadily in 30 countries, their phones now rebranded under local names but still born from Arslan's blueprints.
The sermons, the factories, the mosques, the banks—they flowed like rivers, needing only gentle nudges from afar.
And so in Kent, he walked.
He read poetry again. Rumi. Faiz. Neruda.
He ate toast and eggs without calculating the ROI of the chickens that laid them.
He watched birds land on chimneys and wondered what life would've been like had he been born here. Would he still have rebuilt the world?
He knew the answer. He would've tried. Maybe slower. Maybe quieter.
But it was in his blood now. The architecture of ambition.
He had lived poverty.
He had lived despair.
And now he was living choice.
---
Even here, in the modest corners of England, there were AR phones being used by immigrant uncles and Pakistani cab drivers.
Even here, Al Riyaz shoes were sold under discount bins in obscure South London outlets.
He didn't flaunt it. He didn't even acknowledge it.
But he felt it—like the soft, ever-present hum of a god he had built.
And so the 24-year-old billionaire sat in the back row of his lecture hall in Kent, eating a peanut butter sandwich while the professor spoke about capitalism's failures.
He smiled.
It had already begun.
The house on the corner of Willow Lane was nothing remarkable. Weatherworn bricks. An uncut hedge. A crooked mailbox with peeling paint. Just another house in Kent. Quiet, unseen, unbothered.
But inside—it was poetry.
He hadn't let a single thing be out of place. The floors were oakwood, imported from Bosnia. The lights—custom-wired, warm, no flickers, never too bright. Every window double-glazed to mute the outside world. The furniture—minimal, elegant, handpicked from estates and auctions. An upright piano, untouched by fingers but tuned each month. An old fireplace with no ashes, only soft sandalwood scent from a hidden diffuser. Walls painted in muted earth tones. Not to impress. But to breathe.
He hadn't lifted a single brick.
He had sent blueprints through his UK legal shell.
He had arranged permits and gifted the old British couple two tickets to Greece.
They wept with joy, believing he was just a polite foreign investor.
They kept living in it while the renovations happened in phases.
Neighbours waved at them like always.
No one suspected a thing.
Then one day they moved. Quietly. And a nameless young man moved in.
---
Arslan didn't go to the mosque. Not the Pakistani one, at least. He didn't eat at the desi shops, or linger when aunties waved while walking their toddlers.
He knew their minds too well.
Knew what they whispered.
He wasn't curious.
He sat by the window, behind sheer linen curtains. Sometimes just watching rain bead down the glass.
Kent was always raining.
He liked it that way.
Twenty-four.
And yet so much older.
He had been dying at twenty-four once before—drowning in loans, shame, resentment, hunger.
A boy with dead parents and a gambling debt so thick it had knotted around his throat.
Now he had nations under his name.
He had never even felt poor anymore.
But the memory remained.
The loneliness wasn't real now—he had power, employees, a country running on his products—but the scars of the past life had carved their shapes deep in the soul.
He still sometimes woke up expecting a rent notice on the door.
Still sometimes paused before buying a bus ticket out of habit.
---
He poured the pomegranate juice himself.
No staff. No house help.
Just himself in a cream sweater, barefoot on warm wood.
The glass sweat in his hand.
And through the speakers—low, humming, barely there—Jim Croce sang:
"If I could save time in a bottle…"
Arslan leaned back against the sofa.
Eyes closed.
So much had changed.
So much had been built.
And yet… somehow, he still felt like the boy who had nothing.
But he wasn't that boy anymore.
Now, he owned the bottle.
And he was filling it with time. Carefully. Deliberately.
Every second. Every breath.
For the life he had earned—
For the self he had yet to become.
He didn't talk about it.
No one asked, either.
In Kent, the quiet was complete. The breeze didn't whisper in Urdu. The birds didn't chirp ayat. No one here asked when he'd marry. No aunt hovered with rishtay. No molvi's gaze lingered on his walk.
Arslan was finally... free.
But freedom, for men like him, came with echoes.
He had been born where prayers were politics, where faith was law, and where love—his kind of love—was a crime not just in courts, but in the gaze of mothers and the silence of fathers. It was a land where men like him never existed. Not officially. Not respectfully. And certainly not with joy.
And yet, he had survived.
He had survived the fire.
He had survived the system.
He had survived himself.
And now he stood here—rich beyond reason, respected beyond reach, and still unsure if he deserved a touch on the wrist, a look that lingered, a bed that wasn't cold.
---
He didn't go out much.
He was handsome, sure. But not loud.
His face, sculpted by time and some very expensive Pakistani dermatologists, had grown into something striking.
High cheekbones, a clean jaw, not a single trace of the sunburned poverty he was once born into.
He looked like someone who read quietly. Who cooked slowly.
Who could ruin you with a compliment.
And then disappear for weeks.
He had trained his body over years with no vanity. Just ritual.
It gave him form, but not pride.
He still flinched when someone stared too long.
He walked past mirrors like they were threats.
---
In 2010, the world hadn't yet gone mad.
There was no Instagram yet. No filters. No endless loop of artificial faces.
Beauty still had texture. Still had breath.
But Arslan had seen the future.
He knew that by 2025, no face would be real, and no boy would be enough.
He knew the hunger would swallow everyone—the girls, the gays, the soft boys who didn't know how to scream.
He knew they would all die trying to look like gods, only to end up hating themselves more with each picture that got more likes than love.
He knew.
And yet, he couldn't help but look in the mirror and wonder: "Am I already too late?"
---
He wasn't.
Not by their standards.
He was tall, fair, built like a swimmer from the Eastern bloc.
But inside, he was still the boy from a house full of unpaid bills, a hunger so raw it became religion.
And now, with everything—money, power, privacy, safety—he found himself... lost.
Not because he didn't know what to do.
But because, for the first time, he was allowed to feel.
---
The speakers played "Say You Love Me" by Jessie Ware.
He didn't know when he downloaded it.
Maybe on a rainy night.
Maybe while thinking of someone he'd never meet.
He was curled on his couch, one hand holding a warm mug, the other wrapped around his own shoulder.
He wasn't crying.
But he was listening.
Listening like it hurt.
Listening like he had waited two lifetimes to feel something that didn't come with guilt.
And as the night deepened outside his little Kent house, Arslan whispered into the quiet:
"I don't want to be alone this time."
Just the words. Just the wish.
No plans. No plots.
For once, not the Messiah.
Not the mascot.
Not the shadow king of a nation.
Just a 24-year-old gay man,
wondering if life could be more than just survival.