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

The damp chill of Hangzhou seeped up my trouser legs.

In the large lecture hall of Building 1 in Binjiang Park, the air conditioning was set to 30 degrees Celsius, but the heat couldn't drown out the noise.

Hundreds of people were crammed into the lecture hall, the air thick with the smell of sweat and cheap instant coffee.

The large screen contained no data charts, only a sea of ​​red.

Red background, black text, six bold Song typeface characters: Kill them in Antarctica, leave no grass alive.

The penguin icon is covered by a red cross.

The audience was filled with people wearing orange logo T-shirts, waving inflatable sticks, and the overhead lights made hundreds of faces glow red.

On the stage, Lao Xiao, the head of the wireless business unit, had his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, gripping the microphone tightly, his knuckles turning white.

"WeChat has a gun to its head!"

"Without social networks, Alibaba's traffic is stagnant! What we need to do is not defend, but attack! We need to set fire to Antarctica!"

The speakers shrieked sharply, but no one covered their ears.

"Victory is certain! Victory is certain!"

The HR team in the front row was the first to shout, followed by the operations department and the marketing department. The sounds echoed against the soundproofing panels.

Lin Che sat in the last row, in the corner. He looked down at his phone: 14:05 PM.

2013 October.

He didn't shout any slogans, but instead unscrewed the cap of a mineral water bottle and took a sip.

The bottle was warm, and a corner of the plastic wrapping was curled up. He reached out and pressed it flat.

The room was filled with fervor, and he felt like an outsider who had wandered in by mistake.

.......................

The meeting lasted two hours.

The higher-ups left, leaving behind a strict order: each person must have 300 external friends.

Hard metrics.

Whether you're a P5 programmer or a P9 senior engineer, as long as you're paid by Alibaba, you must bring in 300 real-name users for "Laiwang" within a month.

Even the head chefs in the cafeteria were assigned 50 jobs.

The air pressure in the office area is extremely low.

"Three hundred? I only have one hundred and twenty people in my contacts, including my ex-girlfriends."

Da Liu, who works at the next station, slammed his employee badge on the table and grabbed his already thinning hair.

"What do we do? Go to the train station and recruit people?"

"Old Xiao just said," the operations girl on the other end of the line said, her voice trembling as she scrolled through her contacts, "that if we don't meet our targets, we'll lose performance bonuses and get a public reprimand. I've sent out mass messages to every relative I know, and I've only managed to get less than ten people on board."

Some people hid in the stairwell to make phone calls, while others searched for "zombie powder" on Taobao.

Lin Che opened his laptop.

He didn't look through his contacts, but opened the internal network's administrative documents section.

A "Laiwang" All-Employee Promotion Incentive Plan was released ten minutes ago.

Lin Che scrolled directly to the bottom to see "Budget Support".

The cursor hovers over a line of small text:

"For innovative promotional channels that can bring in high-quality users, there is no budget cap, and special arrangements will be made on a case-by-case basis."

Not capped.

Lin Che pushed up his glasses.

Others saw hard labor, but he saw blank checks.

Playing by the rules is like a battery; using the rules to your advantage is what makes a trader.

He closed the document and created a new folder: Project_M.

"Lin Che, how much is it?"

Da Liu leaned over and glanced at the blank screen.

"Still haven't started? Hurry up, the group next door is already hiring students to go door-to-door in the university town, five yuan per registration."

"Five dollars?" Lin Che turned his head. "Too expensive."

"Expensive? That's the market price." Liu sighed. "I have to spend this much for my year-end bonus. I'm planning to set up a stall by West Lake this weekend to give away balloons."

"Physical labor."

Lin Che typed a few keys and brought up the code editing window.

"Social networking is difficult, but it's easy to do if you want something cheap."

Da Liu didn't understand, so he turned around and sent a WeChat message to his elementary school homeroom teacher asking for attention.

Lin Che pulled a plain black business card from the drawer: Weiguang Media.

The offshore shell company was registered two months ago, and the legal representative is my cousin from my hometown.

He dialed the number.

.........................

At 9 p.m., the park was still brightly lit.

Lin Che sat in the empty conference room, his laptop connected to the projector.

The screen displays a rudimentary prototype of an app interface.

This is not "Laiwang" (来往), but a plugin tool that relies on the "Laiwang" interface—a price comparison assistant for the entire network.

In this era, Taobao and JD.com are locked in a fierce battle, with price wars raging fiercely.

The biggest pain point for users is not having nowhere to chat, but not knowing where to buy things at the cheapest price.

"The principle is very simple."

Lin Che spoke into the phone, his tone as if discussing tomorrow's weather, "We'll package this price comparison robot into a public account on 'Laiwang.' Users just need to follow it, send the product link, and it will automatically find the lowest price across the entire internet, and... give them a rebate."

A series of loud keystrokes came from the other end of the phone, followed by a young man's voice: "Brother Che, the technology is fine, but this is burning through real money. Who's going to pay the rebate?"

"Mr. Ma, please step forward."

Lin Che looked out the window.

On the glass curtain wall of the building across the street, a promotional video for "Laiwang" is playing on a loop.

The orange logo was particularly glaring in the night.

"The company's current performance indicator is 'number of active users.' As long as a user interacts on 'Laiwang,' they are considered a high-quality user."

Lin Che picked up the pen on the table and wrote a formula on the whiteboard:

ROI = (User Subsidies / Promotion Budget) x ∞

"We use the company's promotion budget to send red envelopes to users. In order to get red envelopes and rebates, users will frantically register for 'Laiwang'. As the data goes up, the budget will be approved for more. It's a perfect closed loop."

There was a few seconds of silence on the other end of the phone, as if the person was stumped by this logic.

"This...this is fake order placement, isn't it?"

"No."

Lin Che snapped the pen cap back on with a crisp "click".

"According to the auditing standards, this is called 'strategic subsidies for cultivating user habits.' As long as the process is compliant, every penny has an invoice, and every user is a real person operating the system, then it is legal."

He paused, then added, "As for whether these users are here for social interaction or to take advantage of deals, that's a problem for the product manager to worry about, not for us."

The phone hangs up.

Lin Che closed his laptop.

He stood up and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window.

The riverside avenue beneath my feet is bustling with traffic, and the red taillights form a silent river.

300 friends?

Let Da Liu and the others do that kind of elementary school homework.

What he had to do was, when this giant ship turned, connect the fuel tank containing tens of millions of dollars to a pipe leading to his backyard.

This is the level of granularity that a P7 should have.

Lin Che turned and walked out of the conference room, turning off the lights as he did so.

In the darkness, only the laptop's power indicator light blinked like breathing, like a lurking eye waiting for its chance.

...........................................