175: Chapter 176 Merged Profits Plunge Two Billion! The Fatal Showdown in the Old House

Pushing open that dark red security door.

Shen Du stood in the living room of the old house, which he had paid to renovate two years ago.

He smelled the familiar scent in the air, a mixture of mothballs and old wooden furniture.

A strong sense of being in another lifetime welled up in his heart.

Two years ago, he had just saved up a little capital and was barely managing to gain a foothold in the exclusionary Shanghai capital circle.

And now, the domestic commercial foundation had been completely shattered.

Having gone through two capital strangulations with no bottom line, he could no longer see any opponents at the table who dared to look him in the eye.

Those local capital sharks who had originally occupied major provinces and cities, holding heavy funds and attempting to enter the fray during the chaos...

After witnessing Shen Du's slaughter-style tactics of smashing the table directly and leaving no survivors...

They collectively fell into a death-like silence, not daring to make any probing moves again.

What suppressed them was not some ethereal reputation, but the suffocatingly cold string of numbers on the balance sheet.

In 2013, a special time node when the internet was just moving toward the mobile end...

After Jiyuan Technology and Meituan completed their strategic encirclement, their combined net profit for last month had violently smashed through the two-billion mark.

A full two billion in real money and silver as pure profit, achieved in just thirty days.

Facing this kind of extremely profitable monetization capability, like a giant pump...

Even Tencent, which was at the height of its power in the social field at this moment and held absolute traffic hegemony...

After their think tank conducted rigorous financial calculations, they could only silently choose to back off.

Shen Du loosened the Windsor knot at his neck with one hand.

He tossed his suit jacket onto the back of the fabric sofa and cast his gaze toward the coffee table.

Compared to that eye-catching two-billion single-month profit on the books...

The real reason he had absolute confidence when facing secret probes from domestic and foreign giants was another heavy industry trump card held tightly in his palm: the Cold Etching Chip Foundry.

In 2013, a time node when the domestic semiconductor industry was still constrained by others everywhere...

Capital's number games could collapse at any time.

The only thing that could truly nail competitors to the table was an absolute hardware barrier.

Shen Du pulled that heavy black ThinkPad T430 laptop from his briefcase.

The screen lit up, and the cold white light reflected in his calm eyes.

The screen displayed the latest core production logs of the foundry.

Relying on the exclusively monopolized "Magnetic Confinement Cold Etching Technology."

This foundry, hidden in the shadows, had completely surpassed the physical shackles of traditional Lithography Machines.

Just a few days ago, a batch of finished products, converted based on the top-tier I7 server chip architecture currently on the market, had just come off the production line.

Shen Du clicked on the data stream of the test spectrum.

The silicon wafers re-engraved through Magnetic Confinement Cold Etching Technology not only perfectly mastered the original complex logic gates...

But while boosting extreme performance, the heat and energy consumption indicators were actually forced down by an order of magnitude.

He was very clear about the current industrial status in China.

There was still a huge gap in the upstream and downstream supporting cutting-edge scientific research materials and the photoresist system.

A complete ecological closed loop could not be formed in the short term.

But this gap could not hide a terrifying fact: in the pure wafer foundry and engraving link...

Once the machines in that clean room of Jiyuan Technology ran at full load...

Its manufacturing precision, at this absolutely silent manufacturing end, had already completely tied with ASML, the semiconductor hegemon on the other side of the ocean.

With a soft "pop," Shen Du closed the computer screen, the hinge emitting a faint sound of friction.

He raised his gaze to look at the slightly hunched figure walking out from the kitchen, lifting the cloth curtain.

The kettle emitted a low whistling sound on the old wooden coffee table, the scalding steam making the lid jump slightly.

Shen Du rolled up the cuffs of his high-end shirt and pinched a pinch of tea leaves from a faded, coarse ceramic jar nearby.

With skilled movements, he scalded the cups, washed the tea, and personally brewed two cups.

Although her son was now wealthy, the living habits of his mother, Wang Hanmei, had not changed.

She did not buy the top-grade Mother Tree Dahongpao tea that cost tens of thousands per tael on the market.

What was in the coarse ceramic jar was all wild tea flowers she had collected bit by bit from the surrounding mountains in late autumn and dried by hand.

As the boiling water poured in, a scent of grass and trees with a hint of earthy bitterness permeated the slightly cramped living room.

Wang Hanmei sat down on the other side of the sofa.

Her fingers, covered in the rough lines of time, held up the scalding glass teacup, but her gaze, through the rising steam, fixed steadily on her son, who was now full of sharp aura and had transformed in a way that made her feel vaguely frightened.

"Du'er, you are now... no longer just a small boss running a shop on the street."

She did not ask about the astronomical numbers on the books of Shen Du's company.

She just stared at the shriveled tea flowers slowly floating and sinking in the cup, her voice low, but carrying a weight that brooked no interruption.

"Two years ago, you came back and said you had made a little money and had just gained a foothold in Shanghai. There was something I wanted to mention to you then, but you didn't take it seriously and didn't let me continue."

Wang Hanmei paused and looked up; those eyes that usually always showed gentleness and forbearance now flickered with a clear sharpness.

"But now, two years have passed in the blink of an eye, and you have become a big boss that the whole country is watching. There are some truths I must tell you all today."

Shen Du's hand holding the teacup paused slightly in mid-air, ripples forming on the surface of the tea.

"No matter what you think, and no matter how you hide," Wang Hanmei looked at him and said word by word, "As long as your business continues to roll up in this big plate, you will definitely meet them in the future."

Shen Du picked up the coarse ceramic teacup and swallowed the mouthful of tea with the astringent taste of grass and trees.

"Mom, I brought enough cash and an engineering team this time. The original plan was to flatten and rebuild the land around the village, along with the road network, and incidentally take you back to Shanghai to settle down permanently."

He leaned back against the slightly old fabric sofa, the dark gray suit fabric gleaming with a cold texture in the dim light, appearing out of place with the old environment around him.

But the expression on his face was a calmness of someone who believed they had mastered everything after experiencing several Shura fields.

"I have completely taken root by the Huangpu River. With the current scale and moat of Jiyuan Technology, no matter who that group of people you mentioned is, or how heaven-reaching their hands and eyes are, they cannot forcibly overturn my plate on the table. So, who they are, whether I know or not, actually really doesn't matter to me."

Faced with this kind of composure derived from capital strength in her son, Wang Hanmei did not remain silent or compromise this time as she had in the past.

She did not touch the teacup on the table, but folded her calloused hands on her knees, her slightly hunched spine straightening up in an instant.

It was a kind of strict aristocratic demeanor that had not appeared in this rural woman for many years.

"No, Du'er. You must know, and you must acknowledge this family lineage!"

Wang Hanmei's voice was not loud, but it carried a toughness that left no room for maneuver.

She indeed did not understand what financial reporting valuation was, nor did she understand the competition for traffic on the internet. But having been influenced by ears and eyes since childhood in that huge powerful clan, she knew the most real power ecology on this land better than anyone else.

"Do you think that by holding two billion in monthly profits in your hands, you can build a windbreak by yourself? No matter how big the capital is, if there is no family gate above to shield you from the wind and rain, in this game of chess, you will always be meat fattened up and waiting to be slaughtered on someone else's chopping board! Your business is rolling bigger and bigger, but you have always been alone, running naked on the water without any background. This is the biggest crisis!"

Shen Du did not refute, but picked up the slightly bitter wild tea again and took a sip unhurriedly.

Having lived two lifetimes, plus now holding a trump card capable of prying open hundreds of billions of capital, his nerves had long been tempered like pig iron by those cold financial numbers.

In his cognition, there was no so-called "earth-shattering secret" in this world that could truly shake his rational judgment at this moment.

Just then, Wang Hanmei looked at him and slowly opened her mouth: "Actually, my surname is not Wang."

Shen Du's hand holding the teacup paused extremely slightly in mid-air.

"My surname is Shen." Wang Hanmei's voice smashed a sense of weight into the cramped, old living room that was completely disconnected from the surrounding environment: "Shen Che is my eldest brother, and Secretary Shen Hai is my second brother. I am the third daughter in that family."

"Click." The edge of the coarse ceramic teacup made a faint sound of friction.

The knuckles of Shen Du, holding the cup wall, turned a sickly pale color due to the instantaneous exertion of force.

From deep within his eardrums, a sharp, physiological roar suddenly came.

Shen Du's eyes, which had always been bottomless, saw his pupils contract violently at this moment.

Secretary Shen Hai. Shen Che. These two names, who respectively guarded the north and south and held the top power of Huaxia.

Accompanied by the secret and dangerous probes and confrontations on the poker table before, they instantly replayed crazily in his brain.

Countless details that had been forcibly suppressed by his reason were violently engaged and reorganized like misaligned gears at this moment.

The inexplicable sense of familiarity when he first met Secretary Shen Hai, and the contour of Shen Che's face, which had an astonishing resemblance to his own bone structure.

That ancient genetic law, the most cliché yet iron-blooded one circulating in the countryside, was like a cold steel nail, nailing through all the logical blind spots he had smugly held.

"A nephew never leaves his uncle's house."

The shriveled wild tea flowers floating on the water were fully saturated, sinking straight to the bottom of the cup.

The yellowish tea water reflected Shen Du's face, which had no expression due to the tension of his muscles.

In the living room of the old house, only the "tick-tock" sound of the second hand of the old wall clock remained.