"Yes, that's exactly right. I've already siphoned all the shares back! That naive idiot didn't even notice a thing."
At the entrance of the sprawling iPartment residential complex, a bespectacled man with a distinctly rustic, unpolished appearance was barking arrogantly into his cell phone.
Adrian had originally ventured down to the residential district to inspect his new real estate empire and, incidentally, to scout the prime female livestock currently renting his apartments. He certainly hadn't expected to stumble upon a living goldmine the moment he stepped up to the front gates.
Shanghai was a suffocatingly dense metropolis. Every single day, countless corporate drones paced the sidewalks, barking business logistics into their phones. To the average passerby, this four-eyed loser's boast about 'shares' and 'contracts' was nothing more than background noise. But to Adrian, who possessed the intricate, meta-knowledge of this merged reality, the words were a glaring neon sign.
If his memory served him correctly, this unremarkable rat was named Huang Baoqiang.
The man possessed the painfully generic, forgettable face of a mid-level code monkey. Dressed in a cheap plaid shirt, he looked exactly like one of the thousands of disposable programmers crammed into the city's tech hives. Even the most desperate gold-diggers walking past didn't bother to waste a second glance on him. No one would ever guess that this pathetic-looking man was actually a multi-millionaire.
It was 2011—an era just before the RMB underwent massive, runaway inflation. Ten million yuan was still a staggering, life-changing fortune. The math was simple: prime real estate in the inner and middle rings of Shanghai, like the iPartment and Ode to Joy complexes, hovered around 30,000 yuan per square meter. With Huang's stolen wealth, the unassuming nerd could easily buy three luxury apartments outright, right in the heart of the city. He was a hidden winner in the lottery of life.
"Did you enjoy setting up that little scheme to embezzle the prize money?" Adrian asked, his voice a smooth, sinister purr right beside the programmer's ear.
"Who the hell are you? What nonsense are you spouting?"
Huang flinched, hastily hanging up his phone. He spun around, glaring warily at the towering figure that had materialized behind him.
Adrian stood at an imposing 1.85 meters. Though the original owner of this body had been a reclusive shut-in—leaving his flesh a bit pale, his muscles relatively loose, and his face lacking the chiseled, lethal definition of his previous apocalyptic vessel—his sheer height was intimidating. To Huang, Adrian looked like a typical gamer who hadn't seen the sun in a year; walking up a flight of stairs should have been an extreme sport for him.
Adrian was, naturally, completely unfazed by Huang's dismissive visual assessment. As a former degenerate shut-in, this body simply hadn't had the time or the discipline to forge itself into a weapon yet. But raw muscle mass wasn't everything.
"I heard every word," Adrian smiled, a cold, detached expression settling over his features. He had already calculated the exact timeline of the current television plot. "You swindled Zeng Xiaoxian's winnings right out from under him. You are in bed with the production executives, aren't you?"
The previous year, the local network had launched a sensational game show called Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The gimmick was simple: answer seven increasingly impossible questions in a row, and walk away with a massive five million yuan prize. In this era, five million could buy a premium inner-ring apartment in cash. It was generational wealth.
Of course, these heavily publicized bounty programs were exactly like the lottery—rigged to the core. They were predetermined traps, and ordinary sheep had absolutely zero mathematical chance of ever winning the grand prize. But Zeng Xiaoxian had been struck by an astronomical, freak wave of dumb luck. Even though the corrupt organizers had deliberately rigged the difficulty, the idiot radio host had somehow managed to guess the final answer correctly.
However, corporate capital is ruthlessly cold-blooded. While Zeng Xiaoxian's miraculous win had skyrocketed the network's ratings, the executives were absolutely furious at the prospect of paying out five million in real, liquid cash. So, they deployed a classic corporate execution. They buried the naive host in convoluted contracts and legal jargon, then hired this plain-looking programmer to hijack the winnings through a series of fraudulent corporate maneuvers.
It was a flawless, bloodless robbery. The executives weren't afraid of street thugs; they were afraid of educated, ruthless corporate assassins. Zeng Xiaoxian was a spineless idiot, and his fiery roommate, Hu Yifei, was merely an academic bookworm. How could they possibly comprehend the utter, shameless depravity of modern capitalists? As a result, the five million vanished into the ether without a single ripple.
"Nonsense! You're crazy. I don't know what the hell you're talking about!" A sharp flash of genuine panic crossed Huang's generic face. He immediately turned on his heel to flee.
Admittedly, from a strictly legal standpoint, the corporate theft of Zeng Xiaoxian's bonus was airtight. The fraudulent contracts were seamless. But if Zeng Xiaoxian were to abandon his cowardice and shamelessly drag them into a highly publicized civil court case, or leak the dirty operational secrets to the ruthless Shanghai tabloids, it would be a catastrophic PR nightmare for the thriving network.
"Don't rush off just yet. Let us have a civilized chat," Adrian purred. Seeing the programmer turn to bolt, Adrian fluidly reached out, his hand clamping heavily down onto Huang's shoulder like a steel vice.
"Let go of me!" Huang hissed, unwilling to engage further. As long as he wasn't dragged directly in front of Zeng Xiaoxian and confronted, whatever this pale stranger claimed to have heard was entirely circumstantial.
Relying on his hidden training, Huang immediately reversed his arm, his fingers hooking like talons as he attempted to violently seize the pressure points on Adrian's wrist. The programmer was secretly a former Shaolin disciple; crippling three or four ordinary street thugs was child's play for him.
Unfortunately for him, he was not dealing with an ordinary man.
The very millisecond Adrian felt the shift in Huang's muscle fibers, the dormant instincts of the Sword Saint violently awakened. Before Huang's fingers could even brush his pulse, Adrian's hand blurred. He instantly countered the grapple, his thumb and forefinger clamping down ruthlessly onto Huang's radial nerve with bone-crushing precision.
"Aargh! Fuck! Let go! Let go!" Huang shrieked in absolute agony, his knees buckling under the sudden, paralyzing pain shooting up his arm. He had never expected this pale, flabby gamer to possess the terrifying, instantaneous reflexes of a lethal martial artist.
"Come with me," Adrian ordered coldly. Sensing the questioning, suspicious gazes of the pedestrians passing by the apartment gates, Adrian knew the open street was no place for an extortion. He gripped the screaming man's wrist tighter, dragging him forward.
"I'm not going anywhere with you! Help! Assault!" Huang immediately raised his voice, attempting to draw a crowd. "In today's society, your martial arts are useless! If you don't let go, I'm calling the police right now!"
"Scream all you want," Adrian whispered darkly, leaning his mouth right up against Huang's sweating ear. "But the moment Zeng Xiaoxian walks out of those gates, I am going to march straight to a corporate lawyer and the most vicious gossip tabloids in Shanghai. I think the media vultures will be incredibly interested in a multimillion-yuan television embezzlement scandal. How much prison time do you think the network executives will let you take the fall for?"
The threat was a clean, lethal strike to the jugular. Huang immediately stopped his screaming, the color draining entirely from his face.
"Let me go first," he rasped in a defeated, pleading tone.
"See? Why couldn't we have cooperated like civilized men from the start?" Adrian smiled, relaxing his crushing grip just a fraction.
He steered the trembling programmer away from the bustling gates and toward a cheap, greasy roadside restaurant down the block. While arrogant corporate elites enjoyed discussing illicit business in high-end coffee shops, Adrian knew from lifetimes of experience that a dirty private room in a cheap diner was the absolute safest option. No one with the resources to install hidden listening devices would ever waste their time bugging a filthy dumpling shop.
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