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

11:50.

Beijing, BAT Joint Command Center.

This command center was temporarily set up on the fourth floor of Alibaba's Beijing headquarters. It was an open hall that had been transformed into a wartime operations room—with a giant screen wall in the middle, Alibaba's data team on the left, and operations personnel transferred from Tencent and Baidu on the right, totaling about seventy or eighty people.

A set of numbers was flashing on the large screen, the largest of which was displayed in gold font:

Total pre-sale deposits: 217 billion.

21.7 billion.

This number has increased by 4.3 billion in the past hour and is still rising.

The meaning of each deposit is very clear—the user has paid money, linked the product, and must pay the balance after midnight.

Not paying?

Deposits are non-refundable.

This is the old rule of Singles' Day: a deposit system for major promotions, which is essentially a customer lock-in tool. The moment a user pays the deposit, their money no longer belongs to them.

The 21.7 billion yuan in deposits locks in the spending power of hundreds of millions of users for the next month.

These users will pay their deposit tonight and the balance tomorrow, and their monthly salary will be almost gone.

Next month's salary will be used to pay off Alipay's Huabei and JD.com's Baitiao.

They didn't have any extra money.

Sun Zheng stood in front of the big screen, holding a bottle of champagne in his hand.

It's not a wine glass anymore, it's a whole bottle, Dom Pérignon, 2008 vintage, with condensation still clinging to the bottle.

The ice bucket was placed on a small table next to it, and on the table was a row of transparent wine glasses that shimmered under the light.

"Two hundred and seven billion," Sun Zheng shook the bottle, his voice trembling slightly with excitement, "It's a record-breaking achievement. Last year's Double Eleven pre-order peak was 16.8 billion, and this year it's been surpassed before midnight."

Qian Minghui sat in the back row, his laptop open, displaying Tencent's own data panel on the screen.

He heard Sun Zheng's voice, looked up briefly, showed no expression, and then looked down again.

Zhou Guoping is not here.

He was in his office at Baidu when he connected to the command center's large screen via video link.

In the video, he is sitting in a black office chair with three screens in front of him. His expression is not very clear, but he is holding a pen in his hand, which he keeps twirling.

"What about Weiguang?" Sun Zheng turned to ask the data manager next to him.

The data manager glanced at the tablet in front of him: "Latest DAU... 530,000."

530,000.

There were still over four million on the platform this afternoon, but now there are only 530,000.

Sun Zheng smiled.

That kind of laughter wasn't a happy laugh; it was something more primal—the feeling of winning, the feeling of crushing someone.

"Five hundred and thirty thousand," he repeated the number, as if savoring its flavor, "that's about right. If we push it again at midnight, we won't even have fifty thousand left by tomorrow morning."

He picked up a wine glass and started opening the champagne.

He tore off the foil from the bottle cap, revealing the wire mesh, twisted it a few times, pressed his thumb against the cork, and pushed hard—

boom.

The cork bounced off the ceiling, then bounced back and rolled twice on the carpet.

White foam gushed from the bottle opening, flowing down the bottle and dripping onto his hands and the carpet.

He poured himself a glass and held it up.

"Thank you for your hard work, everyone."

The people around applauded a few times, and someone went to get a cup.

Qian Minghui didn't move.

His gaze shifted from Sun Zheng back to the screen, and he swiped his finger across the touchpad to open a new page—the public data of the gray-scale test of Weiguang Credit Purchase.

There is very little data.

There are over 17,000 registered users, but the average number of transactions per day is less than 3,000.

It certainly seems insignificant.

But for some reason, he always felt that something was missing.

I thought about it for a while, but couldn't figure it out, so I closed the page.

.........

At the same time.

11:50.

Hangzhou, Weiguang headquarters, 17th floor storage room.

The lights are off.

Lin Che pushed open the door and went in. He didn't turn on the main light, but only pressed the switch for the fill light. The 49.9 yuan LED emitted a pale white light, shining on the green screen and dividing the entire room in two—the front of the green screen was bright, and the back was dark.

He changed his clothes today.

It was the same batch of hoodies brought back from the Yangtze River Delta region. They were gray, with no logo on the chest, and a loose thread around the neckline that felt a bit prickly to the touch.

Nine yuan and ninety cents.

He stood in front of the camera and reached out to adjust the angle of the microphone.

The microphone cost 28 yuan, and there's a crack on the base. It was damaged when I was testing it yesterday.

In the shadows behind me, a screen lit up.

It wasn't the live broadcast screen in front of the green screen, but a 42-inch monitoring monitor placed against the wall behind it. The screen was divided into twelve sections, each corresponding to a node in the Ark Cloud Warehouse.

Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Wuhan, Xi'an, Zhengzhou, Shenyang, Changsha, Kunming, Fuzhou.

Twelve scenes, twelve warehouses.

Every scene depicts the same scenario: conveyor belts are turning, robotic arms are moving, and rows of neatly stacked parcel boxes are being loaded onto trucks.

The lights were incandescent, illuminating the warehouse brightly. The floor was spotless, and not a single cardboard box was placed crookedly.

These express boxes contain the first batch of 11 million items in stock—3 million 9.9 yuan hoodies, which have already been shipped from six factories, entered the cloud warehouse system, completed sorting and pre-packaging, and are just waiting for one instruction to be released.

Three million pieces.

Earn two yuan per item.

But making money is not the goal.

Lin Che glanced at the twelve screens, then turned to face the camera.

Xie Yu was standing at the door of the storage room.

I don't know when he arrived; he was just standing by the door frame and didn't come in.

The buttons on his collar were still undone, and his tie wasn't fastened, but the expression on his face was different from when he was in the office an hour ago.

It's not anger anymore.

It's not that I'm desperate.

It was a strange calm, like someone who had reached a dead end suddenly stopping their struggle—not giving up, but deciding to gamble.

"The streaming system is ready," he said, his voice hoarse, probably from being exposed to the wind in the stairwell. "We can start broadcasting anytime."

Lin Che nodded.

"Where is the credit purchase backend?"

"Abyss is online and fully operational. The risk control model has already undergone three stress tests and can handle up to 800,000 transactions per second at maximum concurrency."

"That's enough."

Xie Yu stood at the door, watching Lin Che adjust his headset under the stark white fill light.

This scene is like two completely different worlds compared to the DAU plummeting curve on the big screen three hours ago.

Over there, the numbers are collapsing; over here, a person is in a 15-square-meter storage room, facing a crumpled green screen and a 28-yuan microphone.

He suddenly felt a tightness in his throat.

It's not sadness.

It's something that's hard to describe.

"What about the time?" Lin Che asked.

Xie Yu glanced at his phone.

"23:59:10."

Lin Che put on the headset, tugged on the cable to make sure it wasn't loose.

He stood facing the camera.

The fill light cast his shadow on the green screen; it was long and dark, like another person.

"Fifty seconds," Xie Yu announced the time from the doorway, his voice very low.

Lin Che looked at the camera.

The camera is a 720P webcam that comes with the laptop. The image quality is average, but you can still see his face clearly.

There was no smile on that face.

I wasn't nervous.

There was nothing there.

"Thirty seconds."

"Twenty seconds."

"Ten seconds."

Lin Che's lips twitched.

He spoke into the camera, his voice not loud, but every word carried a chilling quality:

"Countdown—"

"Ten seconds."