145: Chapter 146 The Billion Dollars Hit the "Wall of Sighs"

In Yanjing, inside a Siheyuan with layered gates within the Second Ring Road.

This ancient residence, with over a hundred years of history, was currently being forcibly connected to the global financial settlement network by several thick, military-grade fiber optic cables.

The study was not lit with sandalwood incense used for affectation.

Only several Dell high-frequency monitors arranged in a circle projected large swathes of dim blue light within the dark room.

Young Master Su Chi sat behind the large rosewood desk, his gaze locked tightly onto the screen in the center.

As the last few lines of green code finished dancing across the pitch-black DOS interface, a massive data packet officially completed its transnational physical transmission.

Young Master Su Chi's right index finger, holding the mouse, was slightly arched, and the muscles at the corner of his eye twitched slightly from prolonged concentration.

The first phase of funds cleared: two billion US dollars.

This terrifying sum, enough to buy any medium-sized bank in the country, had already been violently dismantled through offshore trust networks in the Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands into hundreds of unrelated, compliant foreign capital shells.

It then logically smashed into the domestic foreign exchange settlement channel.

Young Master Su Chi scrolled the mouse wheel to pull up another equity penetration summary table that had already been generated.

In the face of such absolute financial crushing power as two billion US dollars, the walls of the domestic internet track appeared fragile.

The table clearly listed the underlying equity change trajectories of the three giants: Pinduoduo, Alibaba Group, and Douyin.

After weeks of covert proxy holding and cross-shareholding, that group of founders and management, who had originally sat high and mighty in their offices, had already been silently hollowed out at a legal level.

Young Master Su Chi's gaze cut down the dense list of items, finally precisely locking onto the final shareholding summary in the bottom right corner of the table.

55%.

This was a figure that allowed for the exercise of absolute veto power and strategic restructuring power within the board of directors.

Young Master Su Chi released the mouse, his body slowly leaning back, his spine pressing tightly against the hard wooden chair back.

With the completion of this 55% equity swap settlement, in this silent Siheyuan, a ten-billion-level transnational strangulation war against Jiyuan Technology and Meituan had completely finished building its position.

After gaining control over the three giants, Young Master Su Chi did not go on to plan any fancy alliances or strategies.

He pulled open the rosewood drawer at his side, took out a transnational online banking U-key, and expressionlessly inserted it into the computer case's USB port.

Accompanied by a faint hardware reading prompt, Young Master Su Chi typed a series of security commands on the keyboard.

He directly cut out a full one billion US dollars in pure cash reserves from the initial two-billion-dollar base position.

There was only one destination for this massive sum of funds: restarting a bottomless, money-burning subsidy war targeting C-end users.

This simple and brutal approach was not because Young Master Su Chi lacked tactical imagination, but rather stemmed from the arrogance that top-tier capital builds upon cold mathematical logic when facing specific commercial tracks.

In his fundamental business cognition, there was only one type of enterprise in the domestic market that could not be forcibly annexed by transnational capital: heavy tech industry enterprises that mastered hard-core physical barriers.

For instance, Intel and Qualcomm, which monopolized the underlying architecture of chips, or Western equipment manufacturers holding core patents for extreme ultraviolet Lithography Machine.

In the face of such absolute technological generation gaps, no matter how much hot money was thrown in, it was just waste paper.

But Jiyuan Technology and Meituan were not.

In the eyes of Young Master Su Chi and the Wall Street tycoons behind him, no matter how exquisite and avant-garde Shen Du's business model was designed, and no matter how high the daily active user data these two platforms had accumulated in the sinking market, they were essentially internet intermediaries that started by relying on traffic circulation and resource matching.

Without hard-core technology as a moat, all user stickiness built on operations was as fragile as paper in the face of pure US dollar dumping.

As long as they used one billion dollars in cash flow to forcibly subsidize a ten-yuan takeout meal down to two yuan, or discount a normal product by 70%, those sinking-market users captured by Jiyuan Technology would immediately turn into bloodthirsty schools of fish with zero loyalty, frantically defecting to the positions built by foreign capital.

This was a commercial law that had been proven by countless short-selling and bloodbaths.

"Click."

Young Master Su Chi pulled out the slightly warm U-key; the metal interface gleamed with a cold, hard light under the monitor's dim blue rays.

Under the crushing weight of capital several times its own, using money to force a takeover was the most efficient and unsolvable strategy.

He only needed to sit here, watching this billion US dollars turn into a torrential rain of red envelopes, smashing Shen Du's pride-and-joy sinking market moat into a pile of mud.

As the billion dollars of offshore funds poured into the sinking market like a bursting flood, the timeline was forcibly stretched during the frantic money-burning war.

Half a year later.

The temperature in Yanjing had dropped to freezing, and a row of sharp icicles had formed under the eaves of the Siheyuan.

Inside the study, the floor heating emitted an extremely dry heat, but as Young Master Su Chi sat before the computer screen, his gaze grew cold bit by bit.

In the center of the monitor was a real-time updated line graph of domestic mobile internet market share.

In the first two months after the initial violent injection of one billion US dollars, the three red lines representing Alibaba Group, Douyin, and Pinduoduo did indeed, as he had expected, pull a steep upward arc on the chart.

Stimulated by crude cash red envelopes, the massive sinking-market user base completed the first wave of mechanical, physical defection.

However, when these three lines climbed upward and touched the 25% mark on the vertical axis, a strange stagnation that completely defied financial common sense appeared.

They did not continue to advance triumphantly, nor did they naturally fall back due to traffic saturation.

In the past four full months of high-intensity money-burning, these three lines, having gorged on US dollar foreign exchange, were like something that had slammed headfirst into a "Wall of Sighs" cast from invisible pig iron.

No matter how Young Master Su Chi modified the ground promotion algorithms in the backend, or how he increased the acquisition red envelope amounts for new C-end users, or even forcibly subsidized daily necessities costing a few yuan down to a dime...

the market share of these three giants was always firmly suppressed at the 25% red line by a powerful underlying force.

The lines on the screen could only oscillate up and down within a narrow range of 5%, between 20% and 25%, trapped in a meaningless death loop like being stuck in a quagmire.

Every tiny uptick in data would be quickly erased a few days later.

One billion US dollars in real money, equivalent to over six billion RMB, had been burned into a pile of ashes in the past half year.

But what was exchanged back was a dead end, welded shut, with no possibility of breakthrough.

Young Master Su Chi's pupils contracted slightly.

His gaze locked tightly onto the screen, onto that line moving horizontally like a flatline on an ECG.

The masseter muscle on his right side bulged visibly from clenching his teeth, and the muscles of his forearm, wrapped in his high-end custom suit, suddenly tensed.

"Bang!"

His large palm slammed heavily onto the hard rosewood tabletop.

The immense force caused the precious Jian ware teacup at the corner of the table to jump violently, emitting a crisp and jarring sound of porcelain colliding.

This operator, who had always believed in "capital suppression," felt a tremor.

It wasn't just that one billion US dollars had been burned to ashes this winter.

What truly tore through his cognitive defenses was another competitor monitoring report that had just been delivered to his desk from the intelligence department.

The conclusion in the report was so absurd it was suffocating:

during this long, brutal six-month bloody battle, Jiyuan Technology and Meituan's backend financial systems had not released a single cent of follow-up subsidies to C-end users.

This completely violated the physical common sense of the capital market.

In Young Master Su Chi's original deduction, facing the foreign capital's ten-billion-yuan red envelope rain, Shen Du would have no choice but to bite the bullet and start a two-way money-burning mode, using the same scale of net profit to fill the users' greed until one side completely went into shock from endless blood loss.

But in the face of the extremely cold and objective data of reality, Shen Du not only did not hedge by bleeding, he didn't even adopt a defensive posture.

With the opponent in a state of complete "silence," the one billion US dollars of real money he had thrown in not only failed to trigger the devastating avalanche he had expected in the sinking market, but instead seemed to have plunged into an abyssal black hole filled with sound-dampening foam.

The terrifying volume of over six billion RMB was poured in, but apart from creating a false prosperity stuck firmly at 25%, it didn't even splash a single drop that could truly shake the fundamental base of Jiyuan Technology.

The Old Butler standing beside the rosewood desk instinctively slowed his breathing by half a beat.

He looked at Young Master Su Chi's side profile, which was gloomy to the extreme due to bewilderment, and lowered his head slightly.

His gaze was fixed tightly on the thick Persian rug beneath his feet.

"One billion US dollars, over six billion RMB in pure cash flow."

Young Master Su Chi's voice was very low, but every word carried an extremely strong physical sense of oppression:

"Jiyuan Technology did not distribute a single cent of red envelopes to the C-end.

Our money not only failed to overwhelm them, but instead, it was like crashing into an invisible black hole.

You bunch of data analysts drawing top salaries on Wall Street have been watching the market for half a year.

Now tell me, you don't even know where the opponent built their fortifications?"

Facing this question that struck directly at his weak point, the Old Butler's back muscles stiffened like iron, and he could only report the objective facts dryly:

"Young Master Su, the data team has penetrated all their front-end interfaces and user payment chains around the clock.

In terms of objective data on the C-end, Shen Du is indeed in a completely undefended state.

This is also the reason why the entire team... has been unable to build a financial analysis model to this day.

That wall blocking this billion dollars simply does not exist on our monitoring radar."

This was the most fatal blind spot for offshore capital that operated solely on financial reports when facing the complex domestic sinking market.

Their set of algorithmic radars brought from Wall Street stared fixedly at the pockets of C-end users and front-end traffic conversion rates, yet they were completely unable to scan the undercurrents of interest buried deep within B-end takeout merchants, platform suppliers, and the delivery boxes of countless grassroots riders.

Young Master Su Chi closed his eyes, his chest heaving deeply.

He forcibly suppressed the violent emotions that arose from falling into an unknown information black box.

When he opened his eyes again, only the coldness and determination of a top-tier operator remained in the depths of his pupils.

"Go withdraw ten million in cash from the account; it must be ready before sunset today."

Young Master Su Chi reached up and loosened the expensive silk tie around his neck.

He grabbed the useless competitor monitoring report from the table and stuffed it directly into the silent shredder beside his feet.

Young Master Su Chi's temperatureless command rang out in the dimly lit study:

"From today on, cut off all unnecessary effort targeting online data.

Take this money and go hire people outside; immediately form dozens of independent ground investigation teams for me, and deploy them all to offline entities in major regions across the country.

Go dig into the delivery riders' backend settlement statements, go flip through the commission contracts of those street stall merchants!"

Young Master Su Chi's hands pressed heavily onto the desktop, his gaze like an extremely cold ice blade:

"Even if you have to scrape a layer off the ground in the sinking market, you must investigate it clearly offline.

What kind of massive net has Shen Du laid underwater?

To be able to swallow my billion US dollars alive without leaving even a bone fragment behind."

The Old Butler did not waste any words, straightened up decisively, turned around, and strode toward the study door.

As the heavy solid wood door was pulled open, the offline investigation team plunged headfirst into the deep water area of Jiyuan Technology's ecosystem, which was already filled with poison pills.