Chapter 105: Fighting a Shady Business Group – Declining Customer Traffic Leads to Bankruptcy

When Ghost handed the investigation report to Lin Ye, the sky outside was just beginning to brighten.

He hadn't slept all night, but his eyes were frighteningly bright.

The laptop screen was densely packed with tables and annotations, with every data node marked in different colors.

He turned the screen toward Lin Ye and Su Qinghan, who were sitting at the conference table, his voice carrying the hoarseness peculiar to someone who had stayed up all night.

"This chain of fresh food supermarkets is called Fresh Direct, and behind it is the Dingsheng Retail Group.

Dingsheng has over 1,400 stores nationwide, covering more than thirty cities, and last year its revenue exceeded twenty billion.

On the surface, it's a legitimate chain enterprise, but in reality, their expansion model is always the same routine—they target old community stores that have been operating for over a decade, open an identical fresh food supermarket across the street or next door, and then use group subsidies to engage in malicious low-price dumping.

They sell eggs cheaper than the cost price and slash prices on fruits and vegetables every day, all with the goal of dragging the old stores to death.

Once the old stores go bankrupt, they restore original prices and monopolize the fresh food supply within a three-kilometer radius."

He clicked to the next table, which listed small supermarkets and community vegetable shops that had been forced to close due to Dingsheng's dumping in the past three years—over two hundred of them had clear industrial and commercial deregistration records.

Behind each store name was the owner's name and contact information, and Ghost had added a remarks column at the end, noting the current status of these owners.

Most were marked as in debt, some as impoverished due to illness, and a few were marked as deceased.

Su Qinghan flipped to the last page, her finger stopping on a name.

It was a sixty-three-year-old shop owner. After his small grocery store, which he had run for over twenty years, was crushed by Dingsheng's dumping tactics, he owed suppliers hundreds of thousands in payments.

His wife was diagnosed with cancer, and three months later, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage on a temporary hospital bed in the corridor.

This case had been filed locally, but ultimately, it couldn't be confirmed as a causal relationship due to insufficient evidence.

She pushed the documents to Lin Ye.

Lin Ye flipped from the first page to the last, turning them very slowly. The morning light shone in through the window and hit his face, revealing no expression.

After finishing, he closed the report, handed it to Fatty Wang, stood up, walked to the window and stood for a while, then turned and asked Ghost: "What is the current hospitalization cost for the mother of the landlady who placed the order with us?"

"One hundred and twenty thousand. Her small supermarket was already squeezed to the point of running out of stock last month.

Suppliers were threatened by Dingsheng and didn't dare to supply her. Her daily turnover is less than three hundred, and she can't even pay the rent."

Lin Ye picked up his phone and made a call.

After the call connected, a middle-aged woman's voice came from the other end, her voice raspy as if she hadn't slept well for days.

Lin Ye pressed the speakerphone so everyone in the conference room could hear.

"Auntie He, this is Lin Ye from Que De Studio.

We have accepted the order you placed, and we will process it according to the deep-tier package.

I'm confirming one thing with you now—your request is for Dingsheng to stop malicious dumping and not continue to harm the next small shop, right?"

The other end of the line was silent for a few seconds, then a sobbing voice came: "Mr. Lin, I went to the hospital to see my mother yesterday.

The first thing she said when she woke up was to tell me to stop running the shop and go back to my hometown to farm.

I'm not reconciled; that shop was something my husband and I started from scratch and saved up for over eighteen years.

I don't want any compensation. I just want those people sitting in offices wearing suits to know that the promotional plan they sign casually is the life of another family."

Lin Ye said "Received" and hung up the phone, sitting back down in his chair.

He projected the data on Ghost's screen onto the conference room's TV wall, enlarging the address of Dingsheng Group's headquarters and the distribution map of all stores nationwide.

1,400 red coordinate points covered the entire map like dense ants.

"Ghost, pull up the Customer Flow Decay from the skill template, the same logic I used on that raid leader in the Korean Server, but replace the Decay target from in-game players to real-world commercial entities.

Set the trigger condition to 'customer enters the store,' set the effect to 'customer feels discomfort within three minutes of entering, voluntarily leaves the store, and does not engage in any consumption behavior,' and set the deactivation method to 'Dingsheng Group formally makes a public apology and stops all malicious low-price dumping behavior.'"

Ghost opened the backend and began configuring the parameters.

His fingers tapped rapidly on the keyboard, and he said without raising his head: "I've already optimized the Customer Flow Decay template twice.

I previously applied a similar effect to the summoned minions of a dungeon boss in the game, and the crowd control success rate was nearly one hundred percent.

The Decay path for this Reality Synchronization version moves in three directions: lighting color temperature shift, air circulation rate decrease, and product visual attractiveness Decay on shelves.

After the triple superposition, customers entering the store will not suffer any physiological damage, but they will instinctively feel a sense of discomfort.

The specific manifestation is that they don't want to stay and want to turn around and leave."

Lin Ye nodded: "Good, start with the store that is directly competing with Auntie He.

Once the sample test is successful, expand the scope to all stores under Dingsheng.

Don't let the executives' offices at the headquarters off either.

Anyone entering or leaving the Dingsheng headquarters, as long as it's not for law enforcement inspections or necessary official business, will be hit with the same Decay."

Su Qinghan did the final review on the tablet.

She checked each parameter individually, confirmed that the energy consumption was within the safety threshold, and that there was no risk of accidentally harming ordinary passersby or innocent suppliers, then signed it with an electronic signature.

She handed the tablet to Lin Ye, who took a look and clicked the confirm button.

A green prompt box popped up on the screen: "Customer Flow Decay has taken effect. Current number of affected stores: 1,412. Headquarters office building: 1."

Dingsheng Group's first wave of reactions appeared at 10:00 AM that day.

The backend data of the cashier systems in all stores nationwide plummeted almost simultaneously.

Usually, 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM is the tail end of the morning market peak, and the fresh food section should still have quite a few elderly people picking vegetables and young people who just got off the night shift.

But that morning, the data curves of all stores looked like they had been cut in half by scissors, dropping in a straight line.

The first to notice the abnormality was the store manager group in the South China region.

The manager of the Guangzhou Tianhe store sent a message in the group, saying he stood next to the checkout counter for ten minutes, and not a single customer who entered walked to the checkout area.

Everyone stopped when they pushed their shopping carts to the middle of the fresh food section, as if they suddenly remembered something, threw the shopping cart aside, and turned around to leave.

He stopped a middle-aged auntie who had just put down her shopping cart and asked her what was wrong.

The auntie touched her forehead and said nothing was wrong, she just suddenly felt the room was stuffy and wanted to go outside for some air.

Then feedback from the East China region poured in.

The loss prevention officer of the Shanghai Xuhui store found a large number of shopping baskets and carts abandoned by customers near the checkout counters, and the products on the shelves were almost untouched.

He checked the surveillance playback. The surveillance footage showed that the customers entering the store didn't look any different.

Some were on the phone, some were looking at their phones, some stood in front of the shelves for a while, but without exception, they all turned toward the exit in about five minutes, and not a single person completed a scan payment for even one item.

By 2:00 PM, the operations center of Dingsheng headquarters exploded.

The consolidated daily revenue data for over 1,400 stores nationwide pointed uniformly to a shocking number—zero.

It wasn't a drop by a certain percentage; it was zero.

In all 1,400 stores nationwide, not a single customer completed a payment.

The operations director smashed a water cup in his office.

He called the marketing department, technical department, and data analysis group to the conference room for an emergency meeting.

The real-time data curve projected on the conference table was as flat as a straight line on an ECG.

The technical department checked all cashier systems and payment interfaces; everything was normal.

The data analysis group retrieved the store traffic monitoring data and found that the customer flow had not dropped significantly; the number of people entering the store was on par with previous days, but the conversion rate had plummeted from over thirty percent to zero.

The marketing department screened all ongoing promotional activities from beginning to end; there were no abnormalities or violations.

No one could explain why customers just wanted to leave once they entered Dingsheng's stores.

The operations director smoked half a pack of cigarettes in the conference room and finally squeezed out a sentence: "Lower the air conditioning temperature in all stores nationwide by two degrees, turn up the lighting by two levels, and observe again tomorrow."

The lowered air conditioning and brighter lights on the second day didn't bring any changes.

The turnover at stores nationwide remained zero, and due to the extra electricity expenses, the daily loss was even higher than the day before.

Several Dingsheng stores located in large shopping malls synced the situation with the mall management. The management sent people to check and discovered that customers walked normally until they reached the Dingsheng entrance, but the moment they crossed the threshold, it was as if they were blocked by something; their steps slowed down, and after hesitating for a few seconds, they would turn and walk to the neighboring shops.

The shops not affiliated with Dingsheng had normal daily turnover, and their foot traffic even increased slightly because the overall flow of people in the shopping mall hadn't decreased.

By the third day, Dingsheng's stock price began to plummet.

Financial media noticed the anomaly at this retail giant and published a report with a very direct headline: "Dingsheng Retail's national stores have had zero sales for two consecutive days, reason remains a mystery."

After the report was released, Dingsheng's stock price dove by over thirty percent that afternoon, and its market value evaporated by nearly ten billion.

An emergency board meeting was held overnight.

More than twenty regional managers from across the country filled the grid on the video conference screen, each of their expressions looking as if they had just crawled out of a nightmare.

The group president, whose surname was Fan, sat at the head of the long conference table in a suit and tie, with a stack of operational reports and a page of financial news circled in red ink spread out in front of him.

He pointed at the report and asked everyone present: "Three working days, zero revenue. Can any of you give me a reasonable explanation?"

The conference room was silent for half a minute. Finally, the general manager in charge of the East China region stood up. He placed a printout on the table with a grave expression; it was a business introduction and pricing list downloaded from the official WeChat account of Que De Studio.

Attached to it was a distribution map of customers for nationwide rights protection orders, with a red-marked point on it, which was the exact location coordinate of the street where Auntie He lived.

"President Fan, I have found something. On the day of the incident, the landlady of a small supermarket opposite one of our stores placed a rights protection order online with an agency called Que De Studio. That studio monitored the operational data of all our stores through technical means on the night before our nationwide store revenue hit zero. This matter is inextricably linked to them."

President Fan sneered and slammed the printout onto the table: "A middle-aged woman running a small supermarket, a third-rate studio registered in a residential building—what kind of means could they possibly have? Tell me, what virus did they use? What hacking technology? Where is the legal team? Call the police immediately and say that someone is maliciously sabotaging our business system. Demand that the police open an investigation."

The legal director said quietly from the end of the conference table: "President Fan, we already contacted the public security organs yesterday. The reply from the Economic Crime Investigation Detachment is that the other party's operation did not touch any legal red lines, did not invade our internal systems, did not tamper with our data, and did not use any prohibited software. The public security organs will not open a case."

President Fan's expression changed. He was silent for a long time, and finally squeezed a sentence through his teeth: "Since the law can't handle it, use commercial means. Contact all our suppliers and tell them that whoever supplies that small supermarket again will no longer work with Dingsheng. Then, have the media and public relations department investigate the background of this studio, dig up all negative information, and push it to major self-media platforms."

That afternoon, Auntie He received a call from her supplier. The other party stuttered and said they couldn't deliver goods to her anymore; Dingsheng had put the word out that anyone who delivered would be blacklisted.

Auntie He sat behind the cash register holding the phone for a long time. Half the shelves in the store were empty. The last few cans nearing their expiration date were neatly stacked in the discount area, labeled with a price fifty cents lower than the cost price.

She sent a message to Que De Studio: "Mr. Lin, Dingsheng has notified all suppliers not to deliver goods to me. I'm running out of things to sell in my shop."

After reading the message, Lin Ye turned the phone to show Ghost. Ghost expressionlessly opened another monitoring page, which displayed real-time monitoring data of the internal network activity of the Dingsheng Group headquarters office building.

He precisely captured several encrypted communication records from the data stream. After decryption, they showed cooperation requests sent by the Dingsheng legal department to several media PR companies, accompanied by an anonymous negative dossier about Que De Studio, which was filled with a large number of unverified, malicious accusations.

"They've started a public opinion war, and they've also cut off Auntie He's supply chain." Ghost organized the chain of evidence into a file package. "Should we turn up the intensity of the foot traffic Decay?"

Lin Ye shook his head: "No need to change the foot traffic Decay. I have other ways to handle Auntie He's supply problem."

He called Fatty Wang: "Fatty, that factory manager you met in the game who runs a food processing plant—can his real-life factory supply fresh produce?"

"Sure can. His factory just got its fresh food cold chain qualification last year; the daily output is enough to cover the small and medium-sized supermarkets in the entire urban area. Plus, his wife was the owner of a community grocery store that was crushed by Dingsheng, and she's been looking for a chance to get back at them."

"Have him supply Auntie He at sixty percent of the market price, and we'll cover the difference from our studio's public welfare fund. From now on, for every supplier Dingsheng threatens, we'll help Auntie He connect with three new ones."

Fatty Wang said he would get it done immediately.

After hanging up the phone, Lin Ye stood up, walked to Ghost's computer, and opened the internal organizational chart of Dingsheng Group.

He tapped his finger on the name of President Fan and said to Ghost: "Pull out all of this person's associated assets, stock holdings, and companies controlled by relatives. Cutting off all supply channels for an ordinary small shop within a single day is not an operation that can be completed on a whim; they must have used the same tactics on the other two hundred or so stores that went bankrupt. Gather the evidence and package it for the Anti-Monopoly Bureau and the CSRC. At the same time, place a Financial Fortune Decay on all his personal capital accounts, with the trigger conditions synchronized with the group's foot traffic Decay. If he wants to play dirty, I'll make him go bankrupt first."

The sound of Ghost's keyboard lasted for most of the night. The next morning, the anti-monopoly report materials and the chain of evidence for market manipulation against Dingsheng Group were already silently sitting in the electronic inboxes of the National Anti-Monopoly Bureau and the local CSRC.

That same morning, when President Fan tried to transfer a sum of money from his personal account to an overseas account, the payment failed. The bank notified him that the account had been temporarily frozen due to suspected market manipulation. He tried several different cards, but every one of them popped up the same notification. He called his private banking manager, who told him the freezing order came from the regulatory level and they had no authority to lift it.

A week later, Dingsheng Group's stores nationwide were still bearing the drain of zero turnover every day. Rent, labor, utilities, and procurement costs were squeezing the remaining cash flow from the group's accounts every day like a juicer, while not a single cent of new income was coming in.

After four consecutive days of hitting the limit down, the stock was suspended by the exchange, and its market value had evaporated by over seventy percent from its peak. Internal divisions began to appear on the board of directors; several major shareholders joined forces to pressure President Fan to resign, and distributors and suppliers began to file lawsuits one after another because payments for goods could not be settled.

After holding on for another week, President Fan appeared in the first-floor lobby of the Unscrupulous Business Center with Dingsheng Group's core executive team. He was wearing a wrinkled white shirt, his tie was half-loose, and there were dark circles under his eyes, as if he had been holding meetings in the conference room for who knew how many consecutive all-nighters. He found Que De Studio, and upon entering, he saw Lin Ye leaning against the honor wall covered in banners and thank-you letters, slowly drinking a bowl of soy milk.

President Fan walked up to him and bent down; his voice was as heavy as if it were being pulled out of concrete: "Mr. Lin, Dingsheng Group is willing to publicly apologize to Ms. He and all the small shop owners who have been harmed by our malicious dumping practices. We promise to stop all malicious low-price dumping starting today, remove all unreasonable restrictive clauses on suppliers, and set up a ten-million-dollar compensation fund specifically to compensate small shop operators who have suffered losses due to our unfair competition practices over the past three years. All terms will be written into a formal contract and be subject to social supervision."

Lin Ye finished the last sip of soy milk, put the bowl on the coffee table, and glanced at the settlement agreement that Ghost had prepared long ago. The agreement was ten pages long, and every item was a hard term: a public apology to be played on the display screens of all stores for thirty consecutive days, the ten-million-dollar compensation fund to be distributed on time by a third-party supervisor, and all promotional plans for Dingsheng stores must be publicly posted in advance and subject to random inspections by market regulatory departments.

President Fan picked it up, read it from beginning to end, and signed it after a moment of silence. As he pushed the agreement back, he asked: "So, can you remove the effect where customers turn around as soon as they enter the store now?"

Lin Ye took the agreement, picked up his phone, and tapped confirm to close it in the backend: "It's been lifted. In the future, just make sure the Dingsheng store opposite Auntie He's shop doesn't sell to her customers. Fair competition; you sell yours, and she sells hers."