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

Ding.

The phone screen lights up.

It was a text message from China Merchants Bank Hong Kong Branch indicating an incoming payment.

[China Merchants Bank] Your account ending in 8848 received a remittance of USD 5,000,000.00 at 14:30.

Postscript/Summary: Tencent Technology Payment.

There were no flowers, no signing ceremony, and no champagne.

Only cold, hard numbers.

Five million US dollars.

This was not a well-intentioned angel investment, but a "hush money" payment filled with hostility.

Martin was very efficient, or rather, his fears were very real.

Lin Che stared at the string of numbers, his face devoid of any joy at securing funding. He knew this money was money he had stolen by holding a gun to Tencent's head.

From that moment on, his feud with the Penguin Empire was officially sealed.

But so what?

Primitive accumulation always comes with a bloody stench. Since we can't be friends, let's become its most troublesome enemy.

"call……"

Lin Che exhaled a breath of stale air and dialed that familiar number.

beep - beep -

The call was answered almost instantly.

"Che...Brother Che?"

The receiver carried the trembling voice of Fatty Wang (Wang Defa). The background noise was loud, like it was coming from a cheap internet cafe or a roadside food stall.

"Where?" Lin Che asked.

"At...at our old hideout in the west of the city." Fatty Wang swallowed hard. "Brother Che, that...the group-buying server is about to crash. It just crashed again, and the customer complaint hotline is ringing off the hook. And..."

He hesitated.

"And what?"

"And we're out of money," Fatty Wang said, his voice trembling with tears. "We still owe Alibaba Cloud 50,000 yuan, and they say they'll cut off our service if we don't renew. Brother Che, should we just give up? This thing burns through money too fast..."

Lin Che smiled.

He could picture Fatty Wang looking miserable and wretched.

"Fatty."

Lin Che interrupted him, "Go wash your face."

"what?"

"Go wash your face, then open your online banking account." Lin Che's voice was terrifyingly calm. "The money has arrived."

"Wh...what money?"

"The seed money," Lin Che said calmly, "five million US dollars has already been transferred to Weiguang Media's offshore account. At the current exchange rate, that's about thirty million RMB."

There was a deathly silence on the other end of the phone.

There was only the sound of heavy breathing, like a bellows being pulled.

A full ten seconds passed.

"Holy...holy shit?!"

Wang Pangzi let out a heart-wrenching scream, so loud that Lin Che had to hold his phone away. "Brother Che, are you kidding me? Thirty million?! Did you rob a bank?!"

"More or less."

Lin Che looked at the pedestrians hurrying by on the roadside, his eyes dark, "I stole a penguin."

Listen up, fat man.

Lin Che's voice turned cold, carrying an undeniable air of authority, "This money isn't for you to squander. I need you to complete three tasks within three days."

"Brother Che, just give the order! We'll go through fire and water..."

"First, renew the Alibaba Cloud server subscription and buy the top-of-the-line DDoS protected cluster, the kind that can handle tens of millions of concurrent users."

"Secondly, we need to recruit. We'll poach talent from Alibaba and NetEase; as long as they have top-notch skills, we'll offer double the salary. We need to transform from a makeshift operation into a professional team."

"third……"

Lin Che paused, a cold smile playing on his lips, "Put all the remaining money into subsidies."

"A subsidy...?" Fatty Wang was stunned.

"Yes. Nine yuan and ninety cents with free shipping is too slow." Lin Che's eyes gleamed with madness. "I want you to launch 'One Yuan Purchase'. One yuan for a box of apples, one yuan for a pack of tissues. Burn through this thirty million, burn it until all the bargain hunters in China are calling us daddy."

"Now that Tencent has given us this 'whitelist' weapon, wouldn't it be a waste of Martin's generosity if we didn't make a big splash?"

Although Fatty Wang on the other end of the phone didn't quite understand the deeper meaning, he did understand the words "burning money".

That's the smell of money burning.

It also has the smell of power.

"Understood!" Fatty Wang's voice, no longer trembling, now carried a bloodthirsty excitement. "Brother Che, are we... going to rebel?"

"No."

Lin Che hung up the phone.

He looked up at the towering Tencent building behind him, then glanced at the still peaceful Hangzhou in the distance.

"We are going to build a new empire."