Twenty-Eight Years Later. Autumn, 2025. Hong Kong Science Park.
Leo Li stood before a massive floor-to-ceiling window, overlooking the mirror-calm surface of Tolo Harbour. But his gaze was fixed only on the ghostly green reflections of code shimmering on the glass.
This was Logos Labs, the world he had built. There was no stench of money here, only the eternal, low hum of server fans and the aroma of freshly ground coffee. For him, this was the center of the universe.
He was no longer the helpless boy who watched his father play Go in the dead of night. He had become one of Hong Kong's most sought-after geniuses in artificial intelligence, a "digital fundamentalist" who believed that data and algorithms could explain everything. He despised the financial markets, viewing them as a chaotic system driven by greed and fear—nothing but irrational "noise."
His life's work was a general learning AI named "Odin." His dream was for Odin to solve climate change or predict pandemics, not to waste its processing power on the random fluctuations of a stock chart.
Until the day a dust-covered package arrived from his mother's nursing home.
Inside were his father's effects. A few old clothes, a faded photo album, and, sealed in an anti-static bag, a very old 3.5-inch hard drive.
That night, driven by a complex emotion he couldn't quite name—nostalgia, or perhaps a twenty-eight-year-old unanswered question—he used his lab equipment to carefully read the nearly obsolete drive.
There was no money, no secret documents.
Only a single, heavily encrypted file.
Leo's fingertips danced across the keyboard. Bypassing passwords was as natural to him as breathing. When the final lock clicked open, his screen filled with a series of journal entries, all dated to the summer of 1997.
His father's faded handwriting, now rendered in pixels, reappeared before his eyes.
"July 2nd. The Thai Baht has fallen. The storm is coming. He said this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a redistribution of wealth. He spoke of it so lightly, as if we were discussing a game of Go, not the lives and fortunes of millions."
"August 15th. We've made a lot of money. But for the first time, I felt fear. I saw the excitement on his face. It wasn't the thrill of winning, but… the thrill of destruction. Like a child burning ants with a magnifying glass."
"September 21st. He convinced me to use all the leverage. He said, 'Either we become gods, or we become nothing.' He said it was a zero-sum game."
"October 23rd. The attack on the Hong Kong dollar. Everything is out of control. He said the market needed a 'blood sacrifice.' He said, 'Don't worry, we're not the sacrifice.' Only then did I realize… he never said who was."
The journal ended with a single, trembling line.
"This is not a market. It is a slaughterhouse. And I was the lamb led to the slaughter."
Leo read the final words, his face an emotionless mask. He closed the file. The server hum was the only sound in the room.
He sat in silence for a long time. Then, he opened Odin's developer interface and typed a new line of code, a command he never thought he would give.
`NEW TASK: Initiate financial market analysis module.`
`DATA SOURCE: Import file 'Father_s_Legacy.dat'.`
`CORE DIRECTIVE: Among the noise, find the butcher who slaughtered the lamb twenty-eight years ago.`