73: Chapter 73: A Twelve-Character Invitation Shatters the Panic in Shanghai!

The black Mercedes G55, like a rampaging beast of steel, tore through the night sky of the Magic City.

Finally, with a sharp screech of brakes, it came to a steady halt in the exclusive underground garage of the IFC International Finance Centre.

Shen Du strode into the elevator, heading straight for the CEO office on the 55th floor.

He didn't even bother to take off his suit jacket, which still carried the chill of the night air, before diving headlong behind his massive desk.

At this moment, time felt like the most expensive luxury; he didn't pause for a single second.

On the desk, the intelligence on the commercial rumors that Red Phoenix and Chen Fei had scrambled to piece together using their underground network was piled into a thick stack of top-secret documents.

Shen Du didn't even drink a sip of water. He immediately spread out all the complex information on the desk and began a meticulous, dispassionate analysis.

As he outlined and connected the hidden flows of capital with a red pen in his hand, a terrifying cloud capable of shrouding the entire Chinese internet gradually took shape before Shen Du's eyes.

"One hundred billion dollars..."

Looking at the massive figure finally deduced on the paper—a number so large it felt almost unreal—even with Shen Du's unfathomable composure, the corner of his eye couldn't help but twitch slightly.

This wasn't some petty business skirmish involving a few hundred million or a few billion RMB; this was a staggering tidal wave of one hundred billion dollars!

The documents showed in black and white that this breathtakingly massive amount of overseas capital was not concentrated on any single specific sector. Instead, it was precisely and evenly injected into four major platforms: Tencent, Alibaba, Pinduoduo, and the newly emerging Douyin!

Four warlords, splitting one hundred billion dollars!

Facing such a carpet-bombing of capital nuclear weapons, Shen Du's heart sank completely. His sharp business intuition told him that the situation had undergone a fundamental, qualitative change.

At this moment, it was no longer a question of whether Xinghuo, Meituan, and JD.com could join forces to "live well" or "capture more market share".

Facing this irresistible, hundred-billion-dollar tidal wave of capital, in the unprecedented meat grinder that was about to follow, these three major platforms would face a life-or-death moment of survival—whether they could even hold on to a single breath.

Shen Du stared fixedly at the core data circled on the paper, his eyes filled with unprecedented gravity.

"The timing is too ruthless..."

He muttered in a hoarse voice, his fingertips subconsciously stroking the cold desk surface.

For Shen Du, if this hundred-billion-dollar capital storm had occurred two or three years later, by which time Xinghuo and Meituan would have fully grown into towering trees and established unshakable consumer habits and industry barriers nationwide, then no matter how much money the opponent threw in, he would have countless ways to ensure that this hot money never returned.

But as it happened, the current situation was completely different. Xinghuo was still in the user habit cultivation period, and its e-commerce ecosystem had just emerged from the incubation stage. Although Meituan had captured first-tier cities, it was still in a growth phase that required expansion to reduce marginal costs.

At such a fragile juncture where the foundations had not yet been deeply rooted, the opponent's unannounced hundred-billion-dollar market dump was absolutely, without a doubt, an "open conspiracy" that constituted a dimensional strike.

Shen Du knew very well. In the face of capital volume at this level, any so-called heaven-defying tactics, marketing, or exquisite algorithms would instantly appear pale and powerless.

Because what the opponent was playing was an "open conspiracy" that completely distorted business logic.

"These lunatics have no intention of making money at this stage."

Shen Du looked at the records of the latest changes regarding Alibaba and Tencent on the documents, a cold sneer tugging at the corner of his mouth.

A normal business model involves the platform providing traffic and services, with merchants paying cooperation fees, thereby forming a positive profit cycle. But now, the holders of this massive overseas capital were playing "thuggishly".

They could directly take out sixty percent, or even more, of this one hundred billion dollars and dump it straight into the market as subsidies!

They didn't need merchants to pay money; instead, they reversed the flow, giving money and injecting capital into the merchants and streamers who joined their platform.

For grassroots users, they would go to whichever platform had cheaper goods and more subsidies. For merchants and streamers, they would move their entire operations to whichever platform not only didn't take a cut but also provided subsidies.

Under this unreasonable "money-sprinkling" subsidy war, no matter how high Xinghuo's profit margin was, no matter how refined Meituan's services were, their core user and merchant foundations would be forcibly dragged away by this massive amount of subsidy capital, like being sucked up by a giant pump.

This was no longer a competition of who was smarter, but a competition of who had more blood and who could burn money faster.

In the face of absolute wealth, all business laws seemed to have been forcibly bent by this violent, massive force.

Shen Du stared coldly at everything he had deduced, his deep gaze seemingly piercing through those strings of cold numbers to see a bloody butcher's knife already hanging over the entire Chinese internet.

This was a classic and cold-blooded "kill first, slaughter later" capital harvesting game.

Shen Du knew better than anyone the ultimate scheme of these top-tier capital tycoons. They were currently putting on the facade of "great philanthropists", throwing money around everywhere. It looked like they were suffering crazy losses, even willing to lose this one hundred billion dollars, but this was not charity at all; it was a desperate gamble to buy control over the entire era!

Their goal was only one: to use the most brutal money-burning tactics to forcefully exhaust Meituan, JD.com, and Xinghuo to death!

Once these giants who dared to resist collapsed in the long-term blood loss, those platforms holding overseas capital would immediately achieve absolute market monopoly.

At that time, the fangs of capital would be completely exposed. All subsidies would stop overnight. The previously conceded profit margins would be instantly clawed back. Replacing them would be crazy commission rates and overbearing terms several times higher than before.

They would not only recoup the one hundred billion dollars they had dumped in today with interest, but they would also cling to this hundred-billion, trillion-level market for generations, sucking blood endlessly.

"In the face of absolute power, all techniques are futile."

Shen Du tossed the red pen in his hand onto the desk, making a crisp sound. He understood business too well. Precisely because he understood, he felt a trace of deep helplessness.

Facing this massive capital strike, no matter how many era-surpassing, heaven-defying marketing tactics or exquisite business models were in Shen Du's mind, they were all useless at this moment. Because this capital nuclear bomb had precisely and fatally struck the absolute weakness of human nature.