Hong Kong variety show: The mastermind behind the scenes is emerging.

In October 1983, the morning light in Hong Kong always carried a thin, lingering salty smell. The mist in Victoria Harbour meandered up the mountainside, eventually gathering around the Luk family manor on the top of the Peak into a dreamlike, milky-white ocean.

Inside the master bedroom of this manor, a symbol of power on Hong Kong Island, the velvet curtains were tightly drawn, isolating him from all outside noise. Lu Chen awoke leisurely from the warmth and softness of the surroundings, the faint scent of various expensive perfumes and cosmetics lingering in the air. The women beside him were still fast asleep, their graceful curves faintly visible beneath the silk blankets, like the most captivating scenery in late autumn.

Lu Chen didn't linger too long in this gentle haven that could extinguish his ambition. He rose gently, his movements restrained and efficient. With the help of his personal maid, he completed his morning washing up.

On the table, a nutritionally balanced and meticulously prepared breakfast is neatly laid out: slices of premium Wagyu beef flown in from Kobe, freshly baked European-style soft bread still carrying the aroma of wheat, and a cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee with a temperature precisely measured to 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

After breakfast, he put down his napkin and walked straight to a huge guest room on the east side of the manor, originally named "Yunxia".

Today, this place has completely changed.

To ensure Ruan Mei had the most comfortable environment to recuperate after childbirth, Lu Chen made a bold move several months ago, mobilizing the best renovation team in Hong Kong Island to transform this guest room into the most luxurious and state-of-the-art "private postpartum room" in Hong Kong and even Asia.

Inside, the air filtration system operates 24 hours a day, maintaining optimal humidity and oxygen levels. The room's decor has changed from its previous cold and hard style to a soft off-white, and all the furniture edges are covered with thick and expensive soft leather.

Lu Chen pushed open the door and immediately saw Ruan Mei lying on a custom-made rehabilitation bed, playing with a child.

The girl who was once as delicate as a newly blossoming plum blossom has gained a gentle and peaceful look in her eyes after becoming a mother. Beside her, the luxurious nursing team, hired from Switzerland and America with annual salaries that would make even senior managers in Central feel ashamed, is dressed in pristine white uniforms, each performing their duties like a precision instrument.

Lu Chen walked to the bedside, took the sterilized hot towel handed to him by the head nurse, wiped his hands, and then carefully picked up the little guy still in swaddling clothes—Lu Qian.

Due to Lu Chen's extremely strong genetic inheritance, little Lu Qian, who was less than a month old, grew up to be a robust and chubby boy. When his big, dark eyes saw Lu Chen, they seemed to recognize his father and even showed a cute and adorable smile.

"This kid is stronger than I imagined." Lu Chen gently tapped his son's delicate cheek with his index finger, his tone revealing an unprecedented tenderness.

"You know what? He's been so restless these past few days. All the nurses and doctors say the little master has much more energy than the average baby." Ruan Mei leaned back against the cushions, watching the father and son with a smile in her eyes, then added with some concern, "Ah Chen, it would be fine if he stayed in the hospital. You've made such a mess of the house; it's too much of a waste..."

Lu Chen laughed heartily, gently placing Lu Qian back into Ruan Mei's arms. His tone was domineering yet indulgent: "In Hong Kong, as long as they are my women and sons, they deserve the best. Hospitals are unpleasant places, with all sorts of people coming and going. I only feel at ease at home. Money is just a number to me; your comfort and our son's health are priceless."

After chatting intimately with Ruan Mei for a while and giving the head nurse a few instructions, Lu Chen glanced at the Patek Philippe on his wrist, his eyes regaining their sharp and calm gaze.

"I'm going out to run some errands. I'll be back this afternoon to have lunch with you."

Lu Chen leaned down and gently kissed Ruan Mei's forehead, then turned and went downstairs.

At the entrance of the manor, five black Rolls-Royces were already running. Tian Yangsheng, dressed in a sharp black suit, stood solemnly beside the car and opened the door when he saw Lu Chen.

"Boss, everything is ready."

"Let's go." Lu Chen sat in the back seat, looking ahead, his tone calm. "Let's go to No. 8 McDonald Road and meet Zhang Yuliang, the guy who pretends to be a beggar while guarding a gold mine."

……

The convoy drove away from Tai Ping Shan and smoothly headed towards MacDonnell Road, soon arriving at its destination.

This is a five-story building hidden in the greenery halfway up the mountain, completely out of place among the surrounding modern skyscrapers or luxurious European villas. The gray-white terrazzo exterior walls exude an almost deathly oppressive feeling in the thick morning fog.

This is the ancestral home of the Zhang Yuliang family, and also the most mysterious and perplexing wealth black hole in Hong Kong Island.

When Lu Chen's massive convoy of five Rolls-Royces and several black G-Class cars slowly pulled up in front of 8 McDonald Road, the entire building was as quiet as an abandoned tomb. There were no luxury cars parked there, no gardeners bustling about; only the rusty iron gates groaned in the sea breeze.

Lu Chen got out of the car and straightened his dark gray suit jacket. Tian Yangsheng followed silently half a step behind him, his eyes sweeping over the seemingly forgotten building with a sharp gaze.

"Welcome, Mr. Lu. Please forgive us for our humble abode and lack of hospitality." Only Zhang Yuliang and an old butler came to greet him. It wasn't that they were being disrespectful to Lu Chen, but rather that they really didn't have many servants at home.

If other wealthy people are modest when they refer to themselves as "humble abode," then Zhang Yuliang's statement is absolutely apt.

The Zhang Yuliang family is definitely an anomaly when placed within the dazzling array of wealthy Chinese in Hong Kong.

If we only look at the assets on paper, the Zhang family possesses billions of dollars in wealth comparable to that of "Shipping King" Y.K. Pao. With its Jializi Pharmaceutical Company, Zhang's Real Estate, and a trading network spanning Southeast Asia, they are enough to place them among the top conglomerates.

However, life inside the mansion at 8 MacDonnell Road was a suffocating and morbid existence.

The entire five-story building, with a total area of ​​less than 1,000 square meters, was crammed with four households of the Zhang family, several cooks and housekeepers, totaling more than 30 people.

Here, each person has only one bedroom as their private space, and the average living area per person is less than 20 square meters, which is even less than some middle-class families in Sham Shui Po.

The first floor is a cold and solemn ancestral hall, where countless memorial tablets are enshrined year-round, and the strong scent of sandalwood is unsettling. The second floor is where widows and their underage children live, while the fifth floor is a Buddhist shrine set up by Zhang Yuliang's mother, where chanting and the sound of wooden fish drums fill the air day and night, as if the monotonous striking sound could shatter some kind of ever-present sin.

What is most incomprehensible to outsiders is that these Zhang family descendants, who are already billionaires, are required to wear cheap coarse cloth clothes of the same material and even the same color at home.

Every morning, the whole family has to appear at the first-floor dining room at a set time, like prisoners being allowed to go out for a break. They sit around a few greasy round tables and eat the same old "big pot rice" that is uniformly distributed by the family chef.

This kind of life was extremely oppressive.

Tan Ailian, the third daughter-in-law of the Zhang family, came from a family with a long and distinguished lineage in traditional Chinese medicine. Once, when she returned to her parents' home for a visit, she wore a slightly more presentable silk cheongsam. However, during the family gathering, she became the odd one out, the one everyone stared at and ostracized. That judgmental gaze only gradually dissipated the next day when she changed back into her coarse clothes.

Zhang Yulin, the second wife, was usually cautious and timid. Only when he occasionally went back to his wife's parents' home for a meal, and saw the table full of brightly colored and fragrant dishes cooked in a delicate way, would he not be able to help but sigh with an almost desolate feeling: "So, the meat cooked outside really is better than the stew we make at home!"

To maintain these rules, Zhang Yuliang even established an extremely strict "curfew": once it was past 10 p.m., no one was allowed to move around in the entire building, and no one was allowed to knock on doors or make any noise. Violators would not only have their monthly family trust living expenses deducted, but would also be forced to kneel in the ancestral hall as punishment.

They were like a group of prisoners guarding a gold mine, building themselves an isolated island of self-torture in Hong Kong, a glittering world known as the Bund, full of desires and uncertainties.

This extreme modesty and morbid frugality are by no means the traditional virtues of diligence and thrift. They stem from a deep-seated fear that has persisted for thirty years.

This little-known past gradually came to light with the commencement of negotiations between mainland China and the Japanese Empire in the 1980s—it was thirty years ago, about the founding war fought in the snow and ice on the mainland, about the wounded soldiers of the Chinese People's Volunteer Army, and about the sins of that batch of blood-stained penicillin.

When the Korean War broke out, the Western world, led by the United States, imposed the most severe comprehensive embargo on the mainland in order to achieve victory. As a result, on that extremely cold battlefield, infected wounds became the biggest killer of soldiers. At that time, a small anti-inflammatory drug became more valuable than gold on the black market, and even became the hope for survival for countless soldiers.

At that time, the Zhang family was not yet the real estate tycoon they are today, but they had already amassed a considerable fortune through the trade of medicinal herbs. More importantly, they held a firm grip on the exclusive distribution rights for the Ribu Imperial Jializi Pharmaceutical Company in the Far East.

Zhang Yujie, the eldest brother of the Zhang family, had a keen sense of smell. In the stench of sulfur and blood, he detected a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for immense profits for the Zhang family. Driven by greed, the Zhang family established a secret maritime route connecting the mainland and the front lines through various clandestine channels, specifically for smuggling medicines.

In those years when tuberculosis was rampant and war was raging, the Zhang family's business was both clever and ruthless.

They broke down the original 35-ounce imported medicine into 1-ounce vials, labeled them with their own custom-made "Money Brand" label, and then sold them "cheaply" in these smaller vials. This resale instantly increased their profits by 3.5 times.

But this was merely the beginning of madness. Marx once said that with a 20% profit, capital will stir; with a 50% profit, capital will take risks; with a 100% profit, capital will dare to risk the gallows; with a 300% profit, capital will dare to trample on all human laws. And in the face of tens of millions of dollars, conscience was utterly abandoned by the Zhang family.

In an attempt to squeeze out the last bit of profit, the Zhang family even began mixing penicillin that had become ineffective or even expired due to improper storage into the shipping containers and transporting it north in bulk.

This isn't selling medicine; this is clearly selling lives.

On the frigid shores of Changjin Lake, in the smoke-filled trenches, countless wounded Chinese People's Volunteer Army soldiers, covered in blood, lay in makeshift field hospitals, enduring excruciating pain as they awaited the "lifesaving medicine" that could stop the infection and allow them to pick up their guns again.

But what was ultimately injected into their bodies was expired liquid with no medicinal effect, or even spoiled medicine that had become toxic and could worsen their sepsis.

Those wounds that could have been healed with a simple anti-inflammatory treatment turned into deadly gangrene; those young lives that could have recovered and returned home to see their parents ended up dying in despair because of these counterfeit "money-branded" drugs.

After three years of fighting, the Zhang family earned tens of millions of dollars from this one business alone.

That was tens of millions of dollars in the 1950s!

This windfall, soaked in the blood of young people and lamented by countless wronged souls, became the first pot of gold for the Zhang family empire to later acquire land in Hong Kong's real estate sector and engage in frenzied mergers and acquisitions in the shipping industry.

But it was precisely this pot of gold that became a curse that haunted Zhang's descendants day and night. Like a haunting ghost, it stared intently at Zhang Yuliang in the steam of the communal meals, in the lingering sandalwood incense of the Buddhist hall, and in the deathly silence after ten o'clock.

This is why Zhang Yuliang is so eager to sell his shares in Wheelock and even at a loss.

It's not just because of the overall recession in the global shipping industry.

What he feared even more was that once Hong Kong Island was returned to China, he would be taken to court. Although the statute of limitations for legal accountability was already blurred, that bloody history and the will behind the tens of thousands of volunteers would never let him off easily. He knew all too well that some blood debts could not be washed away by donating a few schools or building a few Buddhist temples.

He knew that this land was no longer a safe haven for sinners like them.

Therefore, Zhang Yuliang plans to sell this crucial 40% stake and immigrate to the University of Massachusetts with his entire family. He wants to take that enormous fortune, which has been laundered and inflated hundreds of times, to that distant, cold, and legally "friendly" Western country, to continue his "miserly" life under the maple trees of Vancouver.

Zhang Yuliang was a smart man. He knew Lu Chen's unfathomable connections across mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and he also knew about ATV, which Lu Chen controlled and could influence public opinion.

In order to play it safe and to get Lu Chen, the "richest man in Lu," to give him permission, Zhang Yuliang proactively offered a price that was 10% lower than the market valuation before the negotiations even began.

He was currying favor with Lu Chen, using the hundreds of millions of Hong Kong dollars in concessions to buy a lucky charm for a quick escape from trial.

Lu Chen sat upright in a side hall next to the ancestral hall.

The chairs here are all made of heavy black rosewood, and they feel cold to sit on. Looking at Zhang Yuliang, who was dressed in a coarse cloth shirt and cheap cloth shoes, yet whose words revealed both shrewdness and humility, he felt a wave of nausea.

In fact, at that time, there were quite a few people like the Zhang family in Hong Kong.

By serving as lackeys to foreigners during the colonial era, by exploiting the suffering of their compatriots, and by oppressing the working-class Chinese, they accumulated their most primitive and despicable wealth in this city. Now, with the red flag fast approaching and the wheels of history about to roll in, do these people really think they can just take the blood and flesh they've sucked and the flesh they've plundered in Hong Kong and go off to Europe and America to live a carefree life?

They've committed atrocities on this land for decades, and now that their power is waning, they think they can just walk away? Not so easy!

In Lu Chen's plan, even if these "bananas" (people who are culturally Westernized) and unscrupulous businessmen can leave, he will still make them suffer greatly. Canada? That is indeed a good place, but it will also be another "ultimate harvesting ground" that Lu Chen has reserved for them.

However, now is not the time for a complete reckoning, and he needs to plan carefully. Right now, the most important thing is for Golden Harvest International to successfully acquire Wheelock, which requires that transoceanic shipping sovereignty.

Lu Chen brought a team of professional lawyers, consisting of more than ten top commercial law experts. Under the dim light of that incandescent bulb, they and the Zhang family's legal advisors meticulously reviewed the complex terms of the agreement.

The rustling sound of each page turning was exceptionally clear in the deathly silence of 8 McDonald Road, like an auction of souls.

Finally, after three hours of verification, Zhang Yuliang signed his strong yet slightly trembling name on the thick equity transfer document.

The reason why he didn't choose the Wheelock's CEO office, which overlooks Victoria Harbour, but instead chose this cold and gloomy ancestral home, can be seen as Zhang Yuliang's last bit of morbid obsession with the starting point of his life's sins.

After signing the papers, Zhang Yuliang slumped into his chair as if completely exhausted. He nervously rubbed his hands together, then looked up at Lu Chen, his voice hoarse, and asked, "Mr. Lu, there's something I've never understood. Wheelock is basically a mess in a cesspool. The shipping deficit is growing bigger every day. That old devil John Madden has even mortgaged his headquarters office to fill that bottomless pit of shipping. I really don't understand why, with your wisdom, you would take on such a losing business at this critical juncture, at such a high cost?"

Lu Chen straightened his collar, a calm smile appearing on his face, but his tone was very humble: "Mr. Zhang, I prefer to take unconventional approaches in business, and I've always favored contrarian strategies. Moreover, if Jiahe International wants to truly go global, diversified hard asset allocation is an essential path."

Zhang Yuliang smiled awkwardly and repeatedly praised Lu Chen for his discerning eye.

Of course, Lu Chen wouldn't tell him that in that memory that transcends time and space, 1983 was the last and deepest bottoming out for the global shipping industry in nearly half a century.

The aftershocks of the oil crisis of the late 1970s are fading, and the global economic recession of the early 1980s is about to rebound. With the complete take-off of the "Four Asian Tigers" and the global unification of container shipping standards, the oceans of the future will no longer be black holes that devour wealth, but rather veins flowing with gold.

More importantly, Lu Chen had his eye on the awakening of that future Eastern giant.

When the 21st century arrives and China officially joins the WTO, global trade will experience an unprecedented explosive growth in human history. At that time, the demand for ocean shipping of bulk commodities, energy resources, and massive quantities of manufactured goods will reach an outrageous level. Early investment in shipping is also to better capitalize on these future benefits.

Moreover, there is another very important reason for the acquisition of Wheelock: the current Golden Harvest International owns DragonTech, one of the world's most advanced technology companies.

With the global market dominance of Longteng mobile phones, Longteng PCs, and communication equipment, the annual cost of internal cross-sea logistics alone is astronomical.

With his own ocean-going fleet and the deep-water ports under Wheelock, Lu Chen will no longer be subject to others and will be able to control the most core logistics pricing power in the global industrial chain.

Of course, Wheelock's real estate and construction businesses are also very strong, and with Lu Chen's business empire, it can go even further.

All procedures have been completed.

Lu Chen stood up and looked out the window at the gradually dissipating thick fog. Sunlight streamed through the mottled glass into the side hall, illuminating the cold memorial tablets in the ancestral hall.

"It's a pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Zhang. I hope you get a good night's sleep in the maple forests of MIT."

Lu Chen's words were barbed, carrying a chilling sarcasm.

Zhang Yuliang didn't realize this; he was still immersed in the pleasure of "getting rid of the burden" and obsequiously saw Lu Chen out.

Once seated in the back of the Rolls-Royce, the dominatrix whispered to her, "Boss, we've secured forty percent. As for the remaining portion, John Madden might not be so easy to negotiate."

Lu Chen closed his eyes, taking in the panoramic view of Victoria Harbour rushing past the car window, his tone calm and profound: "John Madden sees Wheelock as the family's glory, but in the face of absolute real-world pressure, no one can remain arrogant forever. Moreover, now Youde has helped us open the door to his heart."

"Give the order that all of Jiahe International's available financial leverage be put on standby in the secondary market."

"Next, at the banquet at the Governor's Palace, I will personally tear down the Wheelock sign that has been hanging there for a hundred years."

After Lu Chen's convoy completely left McDonald Road, the cold, five-story building returned to its usual deathly silence.

Standing in the Buddhist hall on the fifth floor, Zhang Yuliang looked at the document in his hand that had been converted into an astronomical amount of wealth, and breathed a long sigh of relief. He thought he had finally shaken off that bloody curse.

Unbeknownst to him, as Lu Chen left, he whispered to a shadowy figure behind him: "Go and inform the winery. Tell the brothers in Vancouver that since Mr. Zhang prefers quiet and frugality, once he arrives at MIT, we'll help him thoroughly 'purify' that excess, bloodstained wealth."

In the autumn of 1983, the word "forgiveness" never existed in Boss Lu's dictionary.

The sins of the old era will eventually be refined in the fires of the new era, becoming the most solid foundation for the expansion of the Jiahe Empire.

The wind rises again from the tip of a blade of grass, and this time, the twilight of Wheelock is irreversible.

The Zhang family's history has turned a new page, while Lu Chen's journey has only just begun, stepping onto the crest of the ocean.