Jin Lei's humiliation made him more dangerous, not less. His attacks ceased to be deniable. He began openly challenging Yun family businesses, using his vast resources to undercut them, poach their clients, and sabotage their supply chains.
The Yun family's strength was in ancient wealth and cultivation, not in modern, cut-throat business warfare. They were starting to bleed money.
Ye Xia needed to fight fire with fire. She needed a modern, aggressive business weapon. And she realized she had one, sitting in a storage crate: the ten cheap, no-name brand MP3 players she had bought on her second day with the system.
They were worthless. But the idea they represented wasn't.
She summoned a team of her most tech-savvy employees, the ones managing Project Mnemosyne. "I want you to take these," she said, pointing to the box of MP3 players. "I want you to use them as the physical base for a device. A secure, portable, dumb-terminal that can access a new, proprietary trading algorithm I'm going to design."
The team was baffled but obeyed. Ye Xia, using her [Basic Financial Analysis] skill enhanced by her heightened intelligence, spent the next 48 hours designing a ruthless, high-frequency trading algorithm. It was designed to identify and exploit microscopic inefficiencies in the market, specifically targeting the commodity trades that were the lifeblood of Jin Lei's operations.
She didn't have the infrastructure to run it herself. So, she used the system's funds to "waste" money by renting time on a supercomputer in Switzerland under a fake name. The algorithm, nicknamed "Viper," began its work.
It was a ghost in the machine. It didn't make large moves; it made thousands of tiny, untraceable ones, skimming fractions of a cent from every trade Jin Lei made. Within a week, the cumulative effect was staggering. Jin Lei's profit margins were evaporating. He was being bled dry by a phantom, and he had no idea how.
The cheap MP3 players, a symbol of her earliest, most desperate wasting, had become the physical key to a devastating digital weapon.