Chapter 33: The Cardinal Sin of Greed – Part Two

Gu Cheng was not one to dwell on things. After reading the news, he was stunned for half an hour, but soon drifted back to sleep.

When he got up, it was just past seven in the morning.

Pan Jieying was still deeply asleep.

Knowing that his cousin had only fallen asleep near dawn, Gu Cheng didn’t wake her. He slipped quietly into the bathroom, closed the door, took a shower, changed his clothes, and went downstairs for breakfast.

After eating, he remembered something and called Chen Shoufu.

“Brother Cheng, what’s up?”

Chen Shoufu, nearly thirty, still called Gu Cheng “Brother Cheng”—a bit peculiar, perhaps a sign of his social awkwardness as a techie, or maybe he was simply awed by Gu Cheng’s commanding presence.

Gu Cheng got straight to the point. “Did you read the news this morning?”

“No, not yet.”

“I’ll give you twenty minutes. Go through the major headlines on The Wall Street Journal and CNN. I’ll call you back at nine sharp.”

“Alright.” Chen Shoufu hung up and dutifully went to check the news.

Twenty minutes later, he called Gu Cheng back himself. Judging from his tone, he was also shaken by the total collapse of the internet bubble.

Gu Cheng didn’t have time for small talk, and asked directly, “Can you find out if ‘Grey Dove’ was done at Zhou Hongyi’s behest?”

Chen Shoufu had been thinking the same thing and answered instantly, “I’d bet it was. After reading the news, I reached out to some folks in the circle—Alan, the guy who wrote ‘Glacier,’ was just recently recruited by Zhou Hongyi.”

Gu Cheng sighed. “So Zhou Hongyi dared to undercut Zhang Long’s price back then because he was banking on ‘Grey Dove’ to rapidly lower the cost of expanding the botnet.”

Chen Shoufu confirmed Gu Cheng’s theory.

Gu Cheng suggested, “Tomorrow morning, let’s make some time to visit Silver Fox Company.”

Chen Shoufu had no objections. “Sure, you call the shots. But isn’t it a bit out of line to just show up and embarrass them…”

Gu Cheng realized his meaning. “Who said I want to embarrass Zhang Long? I just want to check out his company; it doesn’t matter if I see him or not. I just want to know if old Zhou Hongyi has ended up shooting himself in the foot.”

After hanging up, Gu Cheng contacted his last client whose final payment was still outstanding.

No answer.

He kept calling until noon, when he finally got through.

The client’s boss said: the bubble’s burst, investors have pulled out, he’s on the verge of bankruptcy and truly can’t pay.

If Gu Cheng pushed him any harder, he said he’d go down fighting.

Gu Cheng had no choice but to write off the forty thousand as a loss.

That’s business—sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. If you don’t get out before the tide goes out, you pay the price.

And judging from this, many peers must also have large outstanding payments they’ll never recover.

Pan Jieying slept until just before lunch, tidied herself up, and accompanied Gu Cheng out for lunch.

At the table, Gu Cheng told his cousin the bad news about the last client’s unpaid balance, and the two of them went over the accounts.

“In these four months, we made 3.1 million from Huang Yi, 1.1 million from Jinshan’s Lei Jun, 800,000 from Zhou Hongyi. The other four clients were between four and five hundred thousand each—total gross profit of 6.4 million.

“But with Zhang Long, we invested 200,000 up front for a trial run, plus 100,000 for information, but ended up with nothing. The last client’s 400,000 final payment is gone. Total loss is 700,000, leaving a net profit of 5.7 million. Add your original capital of 600,000, deduct 200,000 for buying the house, plus miscellaneous expenses—our entire available cash flow is just over 6 million.”

A business built on data fabrication ended here—that was the limit. The last wild carnival before the internet bubble burst had finally ended.

These six million would be Gu Cheng’s “stored fat” to carry him through the three-year “hibernation” to come.

...

On the afternoon of the 24th, the cousins transferred all their money into safe accounts, exchanged all necessary foreign currency, and booked tickets for a flight to Seoul the next day at noon. Pan Jieying’s passport and visa had also been taken care of during this time.

Early the next morning, Gu Cheng took Pan Jieying to visit Silver Fox Company.

Truth be told, Gu Cheng couldn’t help wanting to see Zhang Long’s misfortune for himself.

After all, if Zhang Long had accepted Gu Cheng’s offer back then and acted swiftly, he could have sold the company and gotten out before the total collapse of the internet bubble.

But no, he got greedy for Zhou Hongyi’s lower price, dragged things out for over a month, and ended up losing everything for the sake of a small gain.

Still, Gu Cheng wasn’t cruel enough to go taunt him in person.

Maybe because he was anxious, Gu Cheng arrived at Zhongguancun a bit too early.

The late August sun was blazing, and even Pan Jieying, shaded under her parasol, couldn’t help complaining, “You’re way too impatient. It’s only quarter past eight. What internet company starts work this early?”

Gu Cheng smiled. “My bad. Let’s get something to drink at the café downstairs.”

He and his cousin went into the Startup Café and ordered iced coffee to cool off.

They polished off a big pot of coffee in over half an hour. Just as Gu Cheng was checking his watch, preparing to go upstairs, a noisy commotion erupted outside.

“Something’s wrong! Someone’s going to jump! Quick, look!”

Gu Cheng and Pan Jieying exchanged glances, grabbed their bags, and hurried out.

“Sir, you haven’t paid yet!” The café waiter, thinking Gu Cheng was trying to skip the bill, grabbed his sleeve.

Gu Cheng pulled out a few hundred-yuan notes, stuffed them into the waiter’s hand, and shook him off.

But that brief delay meant he missed the moment itself.

A loud crash sounded behind him as something plummeted from above, smashing a parked car at the base of the office building.

The car alarm wailed, shards of glass and blood and brains sprayed everywhere.

The café waiter was left stunned, following Gu Cheng and Pan Jieying out the door—after all, they were the only customers there that early.

A crowd gathered instantly around the wrecked car, pointing and gossiping.

“I heard it was the boss of an internet company. Someone offered him over ten million dollars to buy his company, but he refused, thought it wasn’t enough. Wanted to hold out for a higher price.”

“But then Nasdaq crashed yesterday, dropped over a thousand points, and today it dropped another thousand. The buyer pulled out, says the company’s worth at most three million now, not a penny more.”

“Greed knows no bounds. Over ten million dollars and he still thought it was too little? If someone offered me that, I’d sell my own mother! That’s a hundred million yuan, enough to last several lifetimes.”

“Exactly! And even if it dropped to only three million, that’s still enough to live it up for the rest of your life. To jump like that—what a fool.”

“People can’t be compared like that! He got used to the idea of having ten million, and it would have been his with a single signature. Then overnight, eighty percent of it was gone—anyone would break under that. Still, it was an impulsive mistake.”

“Impulsiveness is the devil! Greed is an even greater devil!”

“That’s enough, let the dead rest. Move along.”

Gu Cheng and Pan Jieying listened to the crowd’s every word and, as the throng dispersed, saw the mangled, bloody remains on the ground.

Pan Jieying was deathly pale, lips pressed tight, legs giving way as she collapsed into her brother’s arms.

Caught off guard, Gu Cheng could only help his cousin back to the café and sit her down.

“This industry is too cruel. Brother, promise me you won’t do this kind of business again? Please, or I’ll never sleep well.”

“I’m not like them, don’t worry so much.”

That’s what Gu Cheng said, but inside, he was just as shaken as she was.

The world is unpredictable, fortunes rise and fall in a blink.

The history of the internet world is fragile indeed.

Because the people in this industry are the quickest to react on earth.

A small shift, a new profit signal, and, guided by “big data,” millions flock to chase the trend.

That’s why, in the internet world, the amplification of the butterfly effect is terrifyingly high—at least a hundred or a thousand times greater than in traditional industries.

Any time-traveler who relies on rote-learned “historical knowledge” could be swallowed whole by the internet’s backlash at any moment.

Take Peter Thiel, whom Gu Cheng had used as a positive example to persuade Ding Sanshi a few months ago—if his luck had been just a little worse, he might have ended up like Zhang Long today.

If Thiel hadn’t scraped together the funds before March 8th, but just after the crash on the 13th—he might have been that corpse on the ground.

And then, five years later, when Zuckerberg went looking for venture capital, he might never have found Thiel. Maybe Zuckerberg would have run out of money and faded into obscurity.

There’s too much chance in the internet age. The difference between success and failure may be just a matter of timing, a stroke of luck.

Only a fool among the reborn of this era would believe that rote conclusions guarantee success.

...

Gu Cheng helped his cousin back to the café, found a private room for her to rest, and ordered a pot of chamomile tea to calm her nerves.

Then, swallowing his own nausea, Gu Cheng went upstairs to seek out Silver Fox company staff for information.

The place was in chaos, leaderless. After much difficulty, Gu Cheng managed to catch someone in finance, slipped her a few thousand yuan, and pried out some details.

It was indeed Zhou Hongyi who had negotiated the low-cost, open-BOM model “Grey Dove” botnet data-faking deal with Zhang Long. Zhou had only just started the project, less than half a month in, and Zhang Long hadn’t even paid a single installment before today’s disaster struck.

“So Old Zhou really did accelerate the demise of this gray industry. Too bad he wasted his investment and didn’t even get paid,” Gu Cheng thought.

Who knew what path Zhou’s future would take now? To have invented Grey Dove with no place to use it—knowing Zhou’s temperament, he’d be most displeased.

Would that rogue software king now turn into the world’s biggest professional account thief? That, too, could be a way to deploy massive botnets.

Cops and robbers, antivirus and malware—the skills needed are always the same. If you reach the tier of Corleone as a protection racketeer, you can wash clean and become a respected godfather in the legitimate world; otherwise, you keep mixing it with the mafia.

“Let’s just hope that when I run my own Legend in the future, he doesn’t cause me trouble. If he does, I’ll settle all the old and new scores together.”