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

Tongzhou, Majuqiao Industrial Park.

At three in the morning, this place doesn't look like Beijing; it looks like a mass grave abandoned by the times.

Half of the streetlights were broken, and the other half flickered in the cold wind.

A black Maybach glided across the bumpy road like a ghost, its chassis scraping against gravel with a pitiful thud.

The car stopped in front of a drab three-story building.

A rickety sign hangs at the entrance: Xinfutong Electronic Payment Co., Ltd.

"Mr. Lin, this is it."

Li Wenbo looked out the car window at the rusty iron gate without even a security guard, swallowed hard, and said, "This company used to be a POS machine acquiring company, but it was fined last year for violations, so it's basically an empty shell now. The boss's name is Wang Defa, and they're preparing to liquidate and deregister it."

"An empty shell is good."

Lin Che pushed open the car door, his leather shoes stepping onto a puddle of still-damp dirty water. He didn't even glance at it. "What I want is a clean shell."

Upon entering the office building, a musty smell hits you.

The lobby on the first floor was in such a mess that it looked like it had just been ransacked.

Most of the dozens of workstations were empty, and the remaining employees were stuffing computer towers into cardboard boxes.

The ground was littered with waste paper, broken network cables, and takeout boxes.

This is a company that is dying.

The door to the general manager's office on the second floor was open.

A balding, middle-aged, overweight man was squatting in front of the safe, packing things up.

Hearing footsteps, he turned around warily, still clutching several gold bars tightly in his hand.

Upon seeing Lin Che's impeccably tailored suit, the fat man paused for a moment, then a shrewd glint flashed in his beady eyes.

"Hey, isn't this CEO Lin from Weiguang?"

Wang Defa stuffed the gold bars into his pocket, a greasy smile plastered on his face, but he didn't stand up to greet them. "What wind blew you, such a great Buddha, to my dilapidated temple? You didn't even give me a heads-up beforehand so I could have sent someone to buy some good tea."

He had obviously seen the news.

The news that Weiguang was blacklisted by the four major banks spread faster than a virus within the industry.

Lin Che ignored his polite words and went straight into the house.

It's cold inside; the heating was turned off a long time ago.

"Mr. Wang, name your price." Lin Che stood in front of the desk, his gaze sweeping over the dusty photo frame on the table.

"Huh?" Wang Defa feigned ignorance, slowly standing up and dusting off his pants. "Is President Lin interested in my old computer? Or in all this junk?"

"I've got my eye on that piece of paper."

Lin Che pointed to a file folder peeking out from the safe in the corner of the wall, "A third-party payment license issued by the central bank, a full-service license with internet payment permissions."

Wang Defa's smile froze for a moment, then became even brighter, and even more hypocritical.

"Oh dear, that..." He rubbed his hands together and sighed with a troubled expression. "Mr. Lin, you're too late. I do want to sell that license, but... these things are scarce right now. A P2P boss even came to inquire about it a couple of days ago, and he offered quite a high price."

He is lying.

Since the central bank tightened regulations, no one dared to take over these small licenses, which are even suspected of being illegal. That P2P boss is probably just a fabrication.

He's raising prices on the spot.

Lin Che raised his hand and glanced at his watch.

45:30:00

Two and a half hours have passed since the deadline.

Every minute, Weiguang's capital pool is bleeding.

"Mr. Wang," Lin Che's voice was cold, "I don't have time to play these ghost stories with you, and don't give me that P2P boss nonsense. Right now, in all of Beijing, the only one who dares to take on this hot potato is me."

"A flat price of 50 million RMB."

This price is already a premium acquisition for a company that is on the verge of bankruptcy liquidation and has only an empty license left.

Wang Defa's eyes darted around.

He keenly caught a hint of anxiety in Lin Che's gesture of checking his watch.

That was the prey's weakness.

"Fifty million..." Wang Defa smacked his lips, walked to the worn-out sofa, sat down, crossed his legs, and said, "President Lin, if this were before, this price would indeed be fair, but now... I heard that Weiguang's interface is broken? Are you in a hurry to extend its life?"

He chuckled, revealing a set of yellow teeth. "Life-saving medicine, can you sell it at a discounted price?"

How much do you want?

Wang Defa held up one finger and shook it.

"One hundred million?" Li Wenbo couldn't help but interject. "Are you crazy? Your entire company wouldn't even be worth five million if sold as scrap metal!"

"No, no, no."

Wang Defa shook his finger, his greed practically oozing from his pores. "It's one hundred million... US dollars."

Li Wenbo gasped.

One hundred million US dollars is more than six hundred million RMB.

This is blatant robbery.

"Mr. Lin, with your current wealth, this amount of money is nothing, right?" Wang Defa said confidently. "Besides, you can't buy a license plate anywhere else except from me. Reapply? You'd have to wait in line until the next century."

"If you think it's too expensive, turn left when you leave. Goodbye."

Wang Defa picked up the remaining half of the cold tea on the table, took a sip, and looked at Lin Che with a provocative gaze.

He bet Lin Che couldn't afford to waste the time.

The office fell into dead silence.

Only a stray cat outside the window was howling mournfully in heat.

Lin Che looked at the greasy fat man as if he were a fly that didn't know its own mortality.

He can certainly talk.

If we spend three days finding a few negotiation experts and using some methods to investigate this fat man's background, we can cut the price by at least half.

But he didn't last three days.

It didn't even take three hours.

Problems that can be solved with money are never problems for him.

"Li Wenbo," Lin Che suddenly spoke.

"exist."

"Checkbook".

Li Wenbo was stunned for a moment, then quickly took out an unopened Swiss bank checkbook from his briefcase and handed it over.

Lin Che pulled out his pen and quickly wrote down a string of numbers on the check.

The sound of the pen nib gliding across the paper was exceptionally clear in this dilapidated room.

"Rip—"

A light piece of paper was torn off.

Lin Che held the paper between two fingers and gently placed it on the tea-stained table in front of Wang Defa.

Wang Defa glanced down at it casually.

The next second, he sprang up as if he had been electrocuted, and the teacup in his hand shattered with a "crack".

The number above is not 100 million.

It's 1.5 million.

Unit: USD.

"One...one and a half..." Wang Defa stammered, his eyes almost popping out of their sockets.

"The extra 50 million will be used to buy your efficiency."

Lin Che slammed his pen on the table, his voice as cold as a verdict, "No due diligence, no auditing, no asset inventory. Within ten minutes, I want to see the company seal, the key, and the signature on the change of legal representative. The money is yours."

"If it takes more than ten minutes..." Lin Che glanced at his watch, "I'll use this money to buy your life."

Wang Defa's Adam's apple bobbed violently.

Enormous greed and immense fear simultaneously breached his psychological defenses.

He didn't even hear Lin Che's last threat; all that remained in his mind was that dizzying string of zeros.

"Sign! I'll sign! I'll sign right now!"

Wang Defa rushed towards the safe like a madman, pulling out all the official seals, licenses, and key disks and piling them on the table.

Then he grabbed the pen Lin Che had thrown there, his hand trembling like a Parkinson's patient, and frantically signed the transfer agreement.

All talk of price gouging and business maneuvering crumbles to dust in the face of absolute cash blows.

Five minutes later.

The formalities are complete.

Wang Defa clutched the check like it was his own father, fearing Lin Che might change his mind, and ran away as fast as he could.

In the huge office, only Lin Che, Li Wenbo, and trash remained.

"President Lin... that's 10 billion RMB..." Li Wenbo's face twitched with heartache. "Just to buy this broken shell?"

"Cheap."

Lin Che picked up the official seal stained with red ink from the table and weighed it in his hand. "This is the admission ticket. With it, we will no longer be 'merchants' who are at the mercy of the bank, but 'institutions' that are on equal footing with them."

He threw the company seal at Li Wenbo.

"Go check where the server is. As long as we can connect to the network, we've already won half the battle tonight."

The two walked out of the office.

As Lin Che passed by the open office area, he suddenly stopped.

In the corner, there was a workstation with a light on.

That was the only screen still lit up on the entire second floor.

A young man with bird's nest-like hair and a pilling hoodie was huddled in a chair, his fingers flying across the keyboard.

The noise of his colleagues moving out seemed to have nothing to do with him; his world consisted only of code.

The table was piled high with Red Bull cans and leftover instant noodle cups. Next to the monitor was a sticky note with a line of scribbled writing:

System.exit(0); // This world sucks.

Lin Che walked over and stood behind him for a while.

On the screen is an extremely sophisticated underlying payment routing algorithm. Although it is a patchwork of an old architecture, the core logic is as beautiful as a work of art.

"Did you write this code?" Lin Che suddenly asked.

The young man was startled and abruptly took off his headphones, revealing a pale face covered with dark circles under his eyes.

"Huh? Uh... I just wrote it for fun." The young man's eyes darted around, a reaction typical of someone with chronic social anxiety. "Anyway, the company went bankrupt, so nobody's going to use it."

Li Wenbo leaned closer for a look, his eyes widening instantly: "This is... a multi-threaded concurrency lock? Running this kind of algorithm on this crappy hardware? Are you trying to burn out the server?"

"It won't burn out." The young man muttered softly, "I rewrote the memory allocation mechanism and squeezed out 30% of the redundant performance. As long as it doesn't... overload, it can run."

Lin Che looked at him.

That look in his eyes was like finding an unpolished diamond in a garbage dump.

"What's your name?"

"Xie Yu".

"Xie Yu," Lin Che repeated the name, his gaze sweeping over the line of suicidal code comments on the table. "Does he think this world is utterly rotten?"

Xie Yu paused for a moment, then remained silent, simply looking down and fiddling with the Enter key on his keyboard.

I think so too.

Lin Che took out a business card from his pocket and placed it on the sticky note.

"So I'm planning to rewrite the rules of this world. Do you want to lend a hand?"

Xie Yu raised his head, a hint of confusion in his eyes.

"The company has been sold to me, and I can keep whichever items I want."

Lin Che pointed to the old monitor, then to Xie Yu.

"This computer is mine now."

"You belong to me now."