146: Chapter 147: A fast food restaurant with a 70% chance of failure, a hidden conduit for swallowing billions in foreign investment.

Late December, 2012.

The biting, damp chill of winter permeated the South.

In the cramped alleyway of the urban village, where sunlight never reached, the air was thick with a cold, harsh mixture of grease and sewage.

An industrial exhaust fan, caked in black grease, roared thunderously from a hole in the wall.

It sucked the heat from the kitchen, instantly condensing it into large, grayish-white clouds of mist in the air.

Old Zhou, a senior field researcher under Young Master Su Chi, sat on a sticky red plastic stool.

He pulled his thick windproof cotton jacket tighter around himself, staring intensely at the two-meat, two-vegetable fast-food meal just served on the table.

The container was made of sturdy, eco-friendly thickened plastic, not the cheap, flimsy foam boxes that crumbled at a touch.

The rice grains were distinct, and the braised pork belly on top was glossy, with no cheap scraps used to make up the weight.

Old Zhou had spent years on the front lines and was an expert at calculating the broader catering market.

In a normal business year without any capital interference.

For an offline restaurant to survive, its gross profit margin must firmly hold at the 50% life-or-death line.

Adding in labor, utilities, and the ever-increasing rent in the urban village.

Only by keeping hardware costs for ingredients and packaging at around 30% could the owner barely make a meager living.

But now, facing the insane spending spree by Alibaba Group to acquire new users on the food delivery front.

This fast-food restaurant, bearing the Meituan brand, in order to maintain its order volume.

Had actually slashed its prices significantly out of its own pocket, even when the platform showed no front-end discounts.

Old Zhou turned over that thick piece of braised pork with a plastic spoon, quickly pulling up a cold financial report in his mind.

Based on the quality of the meal and the current selling price, he worked backward.

The owner had forced their ingredient cost line up to a terrifying 70%.

This meant that for every meal the owner sold, the money earned wasn't even enough to cover the day's gas bill.

In traditional business common sense, this was no longer selling at a low margin for high volume.

It was an irrational, collective financial suicide.

"Boss, you're giving such a generous portion of meat, and you've even lowered the price."

Old Zhou exhaled a puff of white air, nonchalantly probing the shop owner who was tossing the wok:

"You can barely cover your costs, right?"

"If I don't bleed a little to keep the quality up, once that new platform across the street sucks away all my regular customers, I'll be left with nothing but air to eat!"

The owner, wearing a thick, grease-stained apron, struck the iron wok against the roaring fire, creating a loud metallic clanging sound:

"Just consider it paying to get the word out."

As soon as the words left his mouth, a rider wearing the thickened yellow uniform of Meituan burst into the shop like a gust of wind.

He grabbed the packed meal without a word and turned to run towards his dilapidated electric scooter outside.

Old Zhou had obtained clear private account data by bribing the backend interface.

Because the front-end price had been compressed, the delivery fee allocated to the rider for this order had been squeezed to a pitiful one yuan.

Yet, at such an extreme price point—not even enough to buy a cup of hot soy milk in the dead of winter—

the rider's face, frozen red, showed not a hint of complaint.

Instead, he was racing against time with all his might.

These offline snapshots, which completely defied the commercial instinct for profit,

were like poisoned icicles, piercing painfully into Old Zhou's retinas.

Without capital subsidies, everyone was frantically running at a loss.

This eerie tacit understanding

made the old field researcher, who had been immersed in the market for over a decade, feel a visceral chill.

By mid-January, heavy snow in the capital had blocked the roads on the Second Ring Road.

In the study of the courtyard house, with the floor heating on,

Young Master Su Chi held an unlit cigar as he clicked on a highly compressed file package just received in his encrypted email.

The cost of this intelligence was exorbitant.

Dozens of offline investigation teams had spent a whole month.

Like hyenas smelling blood, they had plunged into sinking entities across all major regions of the country.

Using millions in cash to pry open the mouths of merchants in urban villages one by one.

Paying high prices to bribe the private accounts of countless regional stations.

Only then, from the scattered fragments, were they finally able to reverse-engineer this complete underlying financial flow chart.

As the mouse wheel scrolled down extremely slowly, the eerie blue light of the monitor hit Young Master Su Chi's gloomy face.

He stared intensely at the dense capital flow model on the screen.

The masseter muscle on the right side of his jaw bulged uncontrollably.

In that instant,

this mastermind behind the scenes finally understood.

Exactly what kind of machine had swallowed the one billion US dollars he had poured in.

Jiyuan Technology and Meituan had not given up resistance under the crushing weight of billions of US dollars over the past six months.

That young man named Shen Du had simply used a seasoned, almost cruel financial tactic.

To perfectly avoid the regulatory red line of the national anti-monopoly law, which strictly prohibits malicious dumping against C-end users.

In the deep waters where all foreign capital radar could not scan, Shen Du had violently laid a massive, hidden blood-transfusion conduit.

The conclusion in the investigation report hit Young Master Su Chi's retinas like cold pig iron:

Jiyuan Technology and Meituan had directly cut off all front-end user acquisition budgets.

Draining every single cent of the platform's monthly net profit, which reached as high as two billion RMB.

These massive cash flows were not converted into direct subsidy red packets for C-end users.

Instead, under the completely compliant business justification of "full waiver of platform commissions, extreme tiered order-volume rebates, and highest-priority computing power and traffic allocation,"

they were precisely fed into the pockets of millions of low-level food delivery merchants, suppliers, and riders.

This was why that fast-food owner dared to stubbornly shoulder the 70% death cost line and pay out of pocket to lower prices and intercept traffic.

This was why the riders in the dead of winter were still frantically scrambling for one-yuan delivery orders.

Because this was not financial suicide at all.

As long as these low-level merchants lowered prices on the front end,

keeping those bargain-hunting new users from the foreign-capital platform stuck in their shops, and driving order volumes to the threshold set by Jiyuan Technology,

by the end of the month,

that hidden profit conduit Shen Du had buried underwater

would use double the backend cash rebates to completely cover their losses, with interest.

The front end was a "benign price war" spontaneously ignited by millions of merchants for survival.

The back end, however, was an alloy dam built by Jiyuan Technology using its two billion monthly net profit.

In front of this airtight B-end blood transfusion pipeline,

the one billion US dollars in red packets that Young Master Su Chi had thrown at the C-end was like a handful of sand cast into a gale.

Apart from blowing up a false prosperity on the surface, it couldn't touch the true ecological foundation of Jiyuan Technology at all.

Facing this logically perfect underlying financial puzzle, Young Master Su Chi did not feel the epiphany of solving a mystery.

On the contrary,

a deeper, more chilling cognitive black hole suddenly cracked open deep within his brain.