152: Chapter 153: Tearing apart the proud, humble backgrounds of Wall Street elites!

For the first time, a trace of deep dread emerged uncontrollably in Su Qu's tone.

He looked at the pale Young Master Su Chi and dissected Shen Du's defensive counterattack—a strategy of leveraging force against force—with exquisite precision:

"Shen Du poured all of his book profits back into high-quality merchants.

The merchants gained absolute financial confidence at the grassroots level.

So, while cutting prices to capture market share, they firmly maintained the quality of their products and meals!"

"Those grassroots users who were thoroughly disgusted by your 'trash products'—

—turned to Jiyuan Technology instead. They spent the same amount of money, but received genuine, high-quality goods.

This extreme contrast of 'low price, high quality'

triggered a level of user stickiness and a word-of-mouth explosion in the lower-tier markets that grew exponentially!"

Young Master Su Chi collapsed listlessly onto the leather sofa, as if his very spine had been drained away.

Until this very moment.

The closed loop that had utterly strangled his 1.3 billion USD finally pieced itself together in his mind.

"The mastermind who could set up such a chain of killing traps is definitely not just some blind cat stumbling upon a dead mouse."

Su Qu narrowed his eyes slightly, the depths of his pupils flashing with a mixture of trepidation and awe for a monster of his own kind.

He gave this opponent, whom he had never met, a definition that ranked among the highest in the history of financial warfare:

"To be able to execute a defensive counterattack of this caliber in a static business environment, devoid of any outside capital intervention—

—requires the mastermind to have at least a decade of hands-on, cutthroat experience in the bloodiest arenas of the financial world!"

Su Qu took a sharp step forward, looming over Young Master Su Chi with immense pressure, his voice crashing down like thunder:

"Before you arrogantly launched this 1.3 billion USD subsidy war,

the 'expert' on the other side was already looking down from the clouds, seeing the trajectory of the entire chessboard with perfect clarity!

He had already precisely placed a fatal black piece right at the throat of your white pieces!"

"And you?!

You couldn't even see the black and white pieces on the board clearly, yet you recklessly threw money into the quagmire.

If you can't even see through the opponent's scheme,

then in this battle, you are destined to be nothing more than a puppet, completely controlled by your opponent and drained of your very last drop of blood!"

Upon hearing this chilling logic behind the defensive counterattack, Young Master Su Chi's cognitive world suffered a severe fracture.

His pride as a golden child

made it impossible for him to accept that he had been pinned to the ground and bled dry by a young man in his early twenties, completely unable to resist.

Instinctively clutching at the last straw, he jerked his head up, his eyes filled with a trace of morbid paranoia and desperate hope:

"Father, do you mean... there must be a hidden expert behind Shen Du guiding the situation?!

Is it Shen Che? Secretary Shen Hai? Or that old fossil in the Shen Family who retired behind the scenes?!"

Facing his son's feeble attempt to escape reality, a flicker of disappointment crossed Su Qu's eyes.

Without a word, he pulled a thick, sealed kraft paper file from his encrypted briefcase.

"Thud!" Su Qu slammed the heavy file onto the rosewood desk, which was covered in dirt and shards of broken porcelain.

"There is no expert behind him."

Su Qu loomed over his son, who had completely lost his composure. In the coldest, most cruel tone, he shattered Young Master Su Chi's final psychological defenses:

"Once you read these documents, you will understand. That young man, who hasn't even graduated from university—he himself... is the terrifying monster capable of toying with our entire Wall Street actuarial team in the palm of his hand!"

Young Master Su Chi's breathing ceased completely. With trembling, almost spasming hands, he snatched the file and violently tore open the seal.

As the pages were flipped through quickly and violently, Young Master Su Chi's eyes widened, the blood vessels in his eyes engorging like spiderwebs.

The heavy file slipped from his limp, powerless fingertips, scattering across the chaotic floor with a clatter.

He collapsed listlessly back into the depths of the leather sofa. The proud worldview he had constructed from Western financial theories was, in this moment, ground into dust.

He stared fixedly at the ceiling, muttering to himself, "This is impossible... How could this be possible..."

The study was deathly silent, save for the faint hum of cold air from the central air conditioning vent.

Young Master Su Chi remained slumped in the depths of the wide leather sofa, his gaze tracking down to his trembling fingertips.

Scattered across the natural marble floor—which had been dented by the impact—lay the file that had utterly shattered his arrogance.

The resume on the top page appeared stark and glaring under the eerie blue reflection of the study's screens.

The beginning of the file contained no mention of prominent family backing, nor of tens of millions in startup capital.

In black and white, it chronicled the raw, authentic struggle of a destitute student from the bottom of society:

Before being admitted to Huahai University of Finance and Economics, Shen Du came from an incredibly ordinary single-parent family.

He had no offshore trusts, no Ivy League elite halo.

Even his very first tuition payment to enter the university campus had barely been scraped together with the help of a special poverty subsidy issued by the school.

Yet, in the pages that followed, this impoverished student—who had once lived on government welfare—displayed a financial instinct that would make top Wall Street actuaries shudder.

The file detailed the bloody process of Shen Du's initial capital accumulation.

Instead of following the conventional path of work-study, he took a small, meager sum of money he had obtained by chance and,

like a calm, lone wolf, dove straight into the turbulent undercurrents of the low-end stock market.

With zero margin for error, he pulled a lever in the precious metals market so extreme it could crush anyone to dust.

He had forcibly clawed his first pot of gold from the most brutal financial meat grinder.

As his gaze moved further down, a massive, hidden scheme that had once shocked the entire domestic financial circle—like peeling back bloody scales—revealed its most terrifying face upon Young Master Su Chi's retina.

It was the "zhengzhou cotton futures demon stock" bloodbath, an incident that had strangled countless hot money investors and retail traders, driving countless people to bankruptcy and suicide.

Before this, financial media and the surface-level financial circles had always firmly believed that the legendary winner of that bloodbath was someone else.

But this document, unearthed by a top-tier intelligence network, used the coldest data to point to a suffocating truth.

Shen Du and the woman named Red Phoenix were the true masterminds hiding in the deep waters!

They were like two cunning deep-sea crocodiles, perfectly utilizing front-facing puppets to divert the attention of all regulators and capital,

while they themselves lurked at the very bottom of the market. In one fell swoop, from the midst of that devastating stock market storm, they had ripped away over 400 million in pure cash!

No background, no base capital. A freshman still receiving special poverty subsidies from his university had, in this way, single-handedly forged his first primitive throne made of gold bricks within the slaughterhouse of a zero-sum game.