The richest man started taking advantage of loopholes after joining Alibaba.

Friday. 5 PM.

The sky over Hangzhou was like a rag soaked in ink, so heavy it was hard to breathe.

Boom!

A muffled rumble of thunder rolled over West Lake.

Heavy rain.

This wasn't ordinary rain; it was the kind of torrential downpour that could break windshield wipers.

On the Yan'an Road overpass, red taillights formed a stagnant river of blood.

Old Zhang slammed his fist on the steering wheel in frustration.

The six-year-old Jetta taxi was filled with a damp, musty smell and the odor of cheap tobacco.

There were two cell phones in front of him.

Didi is on the left, and Kuaidi is on the right.

At this moment, the screens of both phones were spinning wildly.

[System busy, please try again later].

"Oh shit."

Old Zhang slammed his fingernails against the screen, making a screeching sound as they scratched the glass.

"It failed at the crucial moment! The server crashed due to the flood of orders in the rain?"

This was the norm in 2014.

While tech giants have the money, their technical architecture can't withstand the surge in concurrency caused by sudden extreme weather events.

Just as Lao Zhang was about to turn off the engine and have a smoke.

Ding dong.

The personal cell phone on the passenger seat lit up.

That was the "WePinTuan" app he usually used to help his wife snag eggs for 9.9 yuan.

A purple pop-up window aggressively occupied the lock screen:

[Heavy Rain Warning: Weiguang Mobility Launches! First Ride Free! 0% Driver Commission! Cash Payment for Every Ride!]

Old Zhang was stunned for a moment.

0% commission?

Cash payment?

He almost instinctively reached out and swiped away the notification.

The interface redirects.

There was no complicated registration process; the account system from WePinTuan was directly adopted.

[Click to accept order].

The huge purple button is breathing.

Old Zhang swallowed hard.

I pressed it tentatively.

"Ding!"

Seconds.

It's 50 meters away, at the entrance of the office building, towards Binjiang.

What shocked him even more was the estimated income displayed on the interface:

35 yuan (including rainstorm subsidy).

Didi usually only pays 25 yuan for this order, and they take 5 yuan from it.

Old Zhang's hands were shaking.

He abruptly shifted gears, released the handbrake, and floored the accelerator.

The Jetta roared and plunged into the rain.

Screw Didi.

Tonight, he is a beacon of light.

……

The Microlight Building. The Situation Room.

There is no rain here.

But it's even more violent here than outside.

The entire wall of data screens had now turned into a boiling red lava field.

"It exploded!"

The technical director roared, his voice cracking with extreme excitement.

"Didi and Kuaidi's servers have completely crashed! All the overflow traffic has flooded in!"

"Ten thousand orders per minute!"

"Twenty thousand orders!"

"Server load 90%...95%!"

Fatty Wang stood in front of the screen, his hand almost crushing the walkie-talkie.

"Capacity! There's not enough capacity!"

He turned to look at Lin Che, who was sitting in the shadows, his face full of anxiety.

"Brother, there aren't enough licensed taxis! There are too many orders, and they're all lined up!"

The rain was too heavy.

The number of people taking taxis is three times the usual amount.

Those few thousand defecting taxis alone are simply not enough to fill this enormous black hole.

Lin Che sat in the boss's chair.

He was holding a cup of iced coffee.

Water droplets slid down the glass and dripped onto the back of his hand, icy cold.

He didn't look at the screen.

Instead, he turned to look out the window.

The torrential rain pounded wildly against the French windows, as if countless ghostly hands were trying to tear the glass apart.

"Who said we have to rely on taxis?"

Lin Che put down his cup.

The glass struck the tabletop with a crisp sound.

He stood up.

Walk to the console.

He reached out and uncovered the red button that had been sealed with tape.

That's the physical switch for [Aggregation Mode].

"Fatty."

Lin Che's voice was eerily calm.

"Do you know how many unlicensed taxis there are in this city?"

"How many private cars drive by on their way home from get off work and want to earn some extra money for gas?"

"How many reckless drivers are chased all over the streets by traffic control officers?"

Fatty Wang was stunned.

"This...it's impossible to count, it's all underground."

"Now."

Lin Che's palm rested on that button.

You can feel the resistance of the spring in your palm.

"Let them surface."

Click.

The switch is pressed.

The current is connected.

A command was instantly sent along the fiber optic cable to the mobile phones of hundreds of thousands of users in Hangzhou who had installed "WePinTuan".

[Recruitment Notice for Car Owners: If you have a car, you can be a "WeSing" driver tonight! Register now and get a 200 RMB gas card! No review required during heavy rain!]

boom!

This is the real nuclear bomb.

on the big screen.

The originally sparse green dots suddenly lit up wildly, as if sprinkled with fluorescent powder.

Densely packed.

A single spark started a prairie fire.

A private car parked on the side of the road lit up.

A black car that was taking shelter from the rain lit up.

Even a Jinbei van used for delivery lit up.

These "irregular forces" that had been rejected by Didi were all recruited by Lin Che at this moment.

He became a mercenary for the Glimmering Empire.

The once incredibly popular queue of orders began to be fulfilled at a visible rate.

"Caught it..."

The CTO slumped in his chair, watching the curve representing the "order success rate" soar from 20% to 85%.

"Amazing!"

"This mobilizes all the cars in the city."

Fatty Wang wiped the sweat from his face and looked at Lin Che as if he were a monster.

"Brother, that's too ruthless."

"Didi crashed, but we managed to catch it."

"After tonight, everyone in Hangzhou will know about Weiguang Mobility."

Lin Che walked to the window.

Looking down at the still congested street below, countless vehicles were already rushing to fulfill Weiguang's orders.

It's still raining.

But in his eyes, it wasn't raining.

It's a gold coin.

"Didi is too arrogant."

Lin Che reached out and drew an umbrella on the fogged glass.

"They thought that monopolizing taxi companies meant monopolizing transportation capacity."

Little did they know...

"The real transportation capacity lies in the people."

He turned around, leaning against the glass wall that had been battered by the torrential rain.

Lightning flashed across the night sky.

His shadow stretched long, casting a dark, demonic figure on the floor of the command center.

"Because of the opponent's arrogance."

Lin Che straightened his collar, a cold smile playing on his lips.

"We don't even need cover."

……

Beijing. Shangdi.

Didi's headquarters building.

Cheng Wei was frantically directing the technical team to repair the server.

"How much longer?!"

He slammed his hand on the table, his usual refined and easygoing demeanor completely gone.

"Every minute of downtime means we lose hundreds of thousands of orders! More importantly, it's about user experience!"

"Almost there! Five more minutes until the reboot is complete!"

The CTO was sweating profusely as he typed away at the keyboard.

Just then.

The operations director stumbled in, holding an iPad in his hand.

His face was deathly pale.

It was like seeing a ghost in a downpour.

"President Cheng...something has happened."

"What's wrong? Wasn't the server almost ready?" Cheng Wei frowned.

"Not a server."

The director handed over the iPad, his fingers trembling.

"Look at the data for Hangzhou."

Cheng Wei took it.

I glanced at it.

His pupils suddenly contracted to the size of needles.

Although Didi's servers crashed, the background monitoring was still working.

Data shows that during the half hour that Didi was down, the demand for ride-hailing services in Hangzhou did not disappear.

Instead, it was "transferred".

They moved to a platform they'd never heard of before.

[Weiguang Mobility: Daily orders exceed 50].

That purple logo looks like an eye mocking him in the darkness.

"A faint light?"

Cheng Wei stared intently at those two words, feeling as if a fishbone was stuck in his throat.

"Where did this come from?"

"How could so much transportation capacity suddenly appear overnight?"

No one can answer that.

It's raining outside in Beijing too.

Cheng Wei felt an unprecedented chill.

He realized it.

This was originally thought to be just a two-person act between him and Kuai.

Suddenly, a third party carrying a knife barged in.

and.

This third party has no sense of martial ethics.