That evening, Jing Hong met the founder of a startup company at the Zhili Club near Peking University. Accompanying him were several people, including Zhao Hanqing.

The theme was once again a plea to “get together”—Jing Hong hoped that Fanhai would invest in the other party’s company.

The Zhili Club served Baoding cuisine; the flavor was mediocre, yet the prices were by no means cheap.

After finishing their conversation, Jing Hong bade farewell to the founder, and they walked out together. Unexpectedly, right at the entrance of another private room, he bumped into Zhou Chang.

Zhou Chang was as tall and broad-shouldered as ever, wearing a black dress shirt. Behind him, his assistant held Zhou Chang’s suit jacket with meticulous care—the manner in which the assistant held it was extremely refined: folded once along the spine, with one shoulder inverted inward and the other shoulder nested over it, ensuring the suit remained entirely free of creases so Zhou Chang could wear it whenever he wished.

Zhou Chang’s expression looked slightly weary. Standing opposite him were several executives from “cloud security” companies.

In his heart, Jing Hong made a quiet guess—those few individuals were likely members of the Municipal Network Security Division’s “Expert Demonstration Meeting.” Chief Zheng was applying pressure, while Qinghui was conducting public relations, hoping the other side would issue conclusions favorable to Qinghui.

This negotiation was bound to be far from simple. It required several competitors to pull one back from the edge of a cliff; yet during such a sensitive period, one couldn’t offer promises of financial gain or kickbacks for fear of inviting suspicions of bribery.

The cards Zhou Chang and Qinghui could play right now were exceedingly few—or perhaps nonexistent altogether.

Jing Hong thought: Zhou Chang is such a proud, arrogant person; he must deeply despise doing something like this. But he has no other choice. He must protect Qinghui, protect his subordinates, and protect himself as well.

Jing Hong thought further: Could the company that framed Qinghui be among them?

Jing Hong believed that the perpetrator was definitely one of the competitors with a direct conflict of interest. Perhaps it was Xingyuan or Weilai from the “Big Four,” or perhaps medium-to-small companies specializing in “cloud security.”

Yet Zhou Chang had no way to discern it; he was not omnipotent.

Jing Hong knew that Zhou Chang had never come to ask him for help.

No phone calls, no messages, nothing at all.

Jing Hong wasn’t sure either—was this simply because any place where Fanhai and Qinghui met was bound to be a gunpowder-filled field of competition? Or was it the exceptionally deliberate avoidance of suspicion following the end of that forum?

Crossing paths with Jing Hong, Zhou Chang lightly turned his neck and uttered a phrase: “President Jing, what a coincidence.”

Jing Hong also smiled faintly: “President Zhou, it is indeed quite a coincidence.”

Polite smiles hovered at the corners of both men’s lips, yet those smiles were devoid of any real warmth or meaning.

Seeing that they had run into Fanhai Group, several executives beside Zhou Chang immediately remembered that Fanhai’s Jason was also a member of the “demonstration meeting.” They waited for Zhou Chang to exchange greetings and small talk with Jing Hong, or even bring up the main topic directly.

Unexpectedly, Zhou Chang merely gave a slight nod, turned his neck back, lifted his legs, and walked straight toward the main entrance without ever looking back.

“…” The representatives from several small-and-medium cloud security companies had rarely witnessed such a scene, thinking to themselves: In rumors across the industry, Fanhai’s Jing Hong and Qinghui’s Zhou Chang are like fire and water, kings who never meet—so it really has reached this degree?

Do they despise each other this much? Even at a life-or-death moment like this, all they have for each other is a single ‘President Jing, what a coincidence’ and ‘President Zhou, it is indeed quite a coincidence’ before having nothing left to say?

A young man trailing behind whispered under his breath, “Damn, that’s cold…”

Several people shot him a look, and he instantly shut his mouth.

Jing Hong looked at Zhou Chang’s retreating figure, remaining still for a moment.

He seemed to be waiting for something, yet at the same time, he seemed to be waiting for nothing at all.

In just a short span of time, Zhou Chang had already reached the entrance. Holding the heavy main door with five fingers on his right hand, the Zhili Club waiter opened it gently, saying, “Take care, everyone.”

Zhou Chang walked past, but after stepping across the threshold, he suddenly turned his body around. His pitch-black, clear, and bright eyes quietly gazed at Jing Hong for a fleeting instant. That glance carried no emotion whatsoever—neither joy nor sorrow—yet for some reason, Jing Hong’s heart settled down somewhat.

Stepping out of the Zhili Club, the driver had already arrived. Jing Hong said goodbye to the others and got into the car.

The car immediately darted into the Beijing night like a flying arrow.

Sitting in the back seat, recalling that backward glance from earlier, Jing Hong loosened his tie knot.

He unscrewed a bottle of water, his throat moving up and down as the cool water poured down his esophagus, calming his inner organs.

Extremely secretively, Jing Hong unlocked his phone, opened his photo gallery, paused slightly with his finger, and ultimately swiped gently to open a photo.

It was a small red mark on a neck.

Very faint. Looming indistinctly.

Several days had passed since the forum, and that red mark had completely vanished.

Jing Hong couldn’t explain why, but before everything melted away into thin air, he had taken a photo.

It was as if he wanted to grasp onto one final trace—to tell himself at some point in the future that it wasn’t a grand dream, but that it had truly existed.

Jing Hong turned off his phone and glanced out the window once more.

Outside, it happened to be raining, mixed with flakes of snow. People across the entire street put up their umbrellas, blooming abruptly like flowers in the curtain of rain. Hidden beneath umbrellas and tucked away in the rain, ordinary secret emotions felt much lighter. Hide them, endure them—if one were lucky enough, one could hide them for a lifetime without ever speaking of them to anyone.

Over the next few days, Zhou Chang still made no contact with Jing Hong. Jason’s side endured some pressure, but he stood firm, ultimately writing in the report that his team could not confirm the malware originated from Qinghui.

Qinghui was naturally trying to find solutions as well. Through acquaintances, they reached a certain Deputy Chief at the Network Security Division. Though the other party couldn’t offer much help, when things began turning favorable for Qinghui Group, he quickly came forward to tip Qinghui off and pass along the message, putting on a very enthusiastic front.

On the 33rd floor of Qinghui Group’s headquarters building, Zhou Chang sat behind his executive desk, listening to the cloud computing head report on this week’s situation.

Just like Jing Hong, upon seeing the executive before him, he would think of Jing Hong and recall that “coincidental alignment.”

The President of the Cloud Computing Business Group said to Zhou Chang: “There shouldn’t be any issues this time around. The appraisal opinions of the vast majority of ‘industry experts’ are favorable to Qinghui Group, stating that a causal relationship cannot be established.”

Zhou Chang nodded.

“However,” the other party added, “word has it that… things were once extremely dangerous. Just last week, because of that idiot Chief Zheng, except for Fanhai, several companies had intended to write the report according to his wishes. In any case, it would have been swept under the rug amidst the confusion in the end without holding anyone truly accountable.”

Zhou Chang raised his eyes.

“This time…” The other party paused briefly, saying, “It was Fanhai that pulled us back from the brink. Last Monday, if I recall correctly, the report Fanhai submitted was favorable to Qinghui Group, denying the causal link. Chief Zheng then held a meeting that was structured very much like a denunciation session—claiming that, as a giant enterprise, Fanhai’s technical standards in cloud security were inferior to those of small-and-medium companies, and that this wouldn’t do… But Fanhai’s people stood firm, adopting an attitude of ‘if we can’t see it, we can’t see it; even if you beat us to death, we still can’t see it.'”

Zhou Chang’s fingertips tightened slightly.

“Later, the Network Security Division got in touch with Fanhai Group’s Consort Jiang—”

Zhou Chang asked: “Consort Jiang?”

The other party corrected himself immediately: “Jiang Rengui, Jiang Rengui. Haha, everyone at Fanhai calls him ‘Consort Jiang,’ saying he’s currently in Jing Hong’s high favor.”

“…” Zhou Chang’s expression showed a slight trace of irritation as he asked, “And then?”

“Chief Zheng claimed that Jason’s technical skills were lacking, basically implying that Fanhai should swap in someone who knew how to play ball. But Consort Jiang… er, Jiang Rengui said that Jason was already their best technical expert, a Principal for a certain product, and that others understood even less—insinuating through his words that they refused to make a swap. My guess is that for those two to dare to be so unyielding, they must have had Jing Hong’s explicit authorization.”

Zhou Chang nodded: “…Mm.”

“Fanhai submitted their report directly, and after that,” the other party continued explaining, “once Xingyuan saw it, they copied Fanhai’s report outright. They regretted their initial stance and no longer wanted to go along with Chief Zheng either. The same went for Ya’an and Chiyun—those three submitted together. Actually, saying it that way isn’t entirely accurate; they probably didn’t want to go along with it from the start, but didn’t dare to take the lead or stick their necks out. The other companies were somewhat hesitant, but then on Wednesday night, our side hosted them at Zhili. They probably saw that Fanhai, Xingyuan, Ya’an, and Chiyun didn’t want to get tangled up with Chief Zheng, and that Chief Zheng’s plan might not succeed. If it failed, Chief Zheng wouldn’t give them any benefits anyway, so they figured it was better to do Qinghui a favor and stay in Qinghui’s good graces. Even if Chief Zheng retaliated, it wouldn’t fall on them first—Fanhai, Xingyuan, and Ya’an were ahead of them in line. In any case, the vast majority ultimately changed their reports to reflect things as they actually were. Only Weilai and those two from XX remained thoroughly shameless.”

“Weilai?” Zhou Chang gave a cold sneer. “Still so low-class.”

Through various channels, Zhou Chang was now fairly certain that the instigator was Weilai. He knew that people from Weilai had visited the companies that filed the police reports on multiple occasions. Among the Internet’s “Big Four,” Xingyuan and Weilai had already fallen behind, while emerging companies were taking the top spots.

Xingyuan’s CEO, Peng Zheng, was overly cautious and made too many wrong decisions, constantly centering everything around their founding product. The e-commerce team dominated the company, and all other teams had to defer to them. Fearing that new products would siphon traffic away from the founding product, they didn’t dare do this or that, missing out on numerous trends—such as social networking, local lifestyle services, and so forth.

As for Weilai, Zhou Chang had always looked down on them. They started in social networking, yet tried to dip their toes into everything, crowding into every track. Earlier, when they wanted to build a search engine, they claimed to possess the strongest technology and aimed to compete with Qinghui and bring Qinghui down—only for it to turn out that they were merely scraping Google’s search results, reordering them, and frantically pre-installing the software onto partner computers. Instead of applying their minds where it mattered, they pushed their subordinates endlessly every single day. Previously, a female executive worked five consecutive days and nights without sleep, causing her contact lenses to literally “grow” onto her eyeballs, leading to corneal ulceration and central perforation that blinded one eye. The moment she finished her corneal transplant, she immediately jumped ship elsewhere.

Yet, strangely enough, at this moment, Zhou Chang’s attention was not focused on Weilai, but rather on Fanhai.

“Last Monday, was it…” He pondered for a moment and confirmed that last Monday was before his meeting with Jing Hong at Zhili. Which meant that from the very first day, before they even met, Jing Hong had already instructed his subordinates to handle it that way.

Jing Hong—

Opposite him, the President of Qinghui Group’s Cloud Computing Business Group was still reflecting with emotion: “So, the biggest catalyst this time was actually Fanhai Group. I truly didn’t expect that it would ultimately be Fanhai Group pulling us back from the brink. Though, forget about me—nobody could have guessed it.”

Zhou Chang pulled the corner of his lips up in an extremely shallow smile: “Mm.”

“However, that Jing Hong is quite interesting…” The other party’s tone shifted as he added, “Just yesterday, I heard that Fanhai wants to launch a new cloud education product ahead of us.”

Zhou Chang paused and asked, “What is it called?”

The other party stated a name, and Zhou Chang said, “Fine, I’ll take a look.”

The other party continued: “In order to beat us to the punch, Fanhai directly handed this product to Maurice’s team, having Maurice personally freeze one of the projects they had on hand to jump the line and overtake us. They’ve already been developing it for two months, starting from early December. But our team here had already been assembled long ago.”

“Mm.”

Zhou Chang naturally knew that Maurice’s team was one of the most elite units in the entire Fanhai Group.

Calculating the timeline, it was roughly right after that night that Jing Hong began arranging this matter. Simultaneously, he had immediately partnered with a certain company to jointly block Qinghui’s live-streaming business…

Zhou Chang let out a soft chuckle: “Jing Hong.”

“Also,” the other party added, “just now, Fanhai announced its investment in ‘Workflow,’ dragging the flames of war into the ‘cloud office’ space once again. Their target is also Qinghui Group—they seem determined to secure these two trends in ‘cloud education’ and ‘cloud office,’ fighting fiercely for them, though no one knows why.”

Similar to cloud-based online education, cloud-based online office solutions had also become a battlefield. Cloud office integrated instant messaging, video conferencing, document collaboration, task management, and schedule sharing into one platform, holding immense prospects. In this arena, Fanhai currently held first place, Qinghui was second, Workflow was third, and the rest were mere small fish and shrimp.

Zhou Chang asked: “How did they bypass anti-monopoly regulations? The revenue of these two companies should have reached the minimum threshold.”

He didn’t gloat over any potential mistake by Jing Hong, nor did he ask “doesn’t this involve anti-monopoly regulations?” He trusted Jing Hong’s judgment, and he trusted his own.

In recent years, there had been far too many investments and mergers in the tech industry, yet official entities rarely intervened; even during the previous merger between Kunpeng and Huawei, official presence was nowhere to be seen.

This was primarily because the relevant laws dated back to 2008, and determinations of “concentration of undertakings” relied on precise revenue metrics rather than hard-to-define market share. However, most Chinese domestic internet companies’ services followed an “early free tier” model—their market share might be high and their user base massive, yet their revenue remained low, failing to meet the minimum filing thresholds. Additionally, anti-monopoly evaluations didn’t look solely at current market conditions; whether a move could “eliminate competition” was a key criterion, and entry barriers for internet services were mostly low—it wasn’t a scenario where “if you two merge, no one else can enter.” The “eliminating or restricting competition” clauses were rather loose, applied very leniently over the years, and official attitudes remained ambiguous, rarely leading to intervention.

This time, however, was somewhat different. Zhou Chang judged that the combined revenue of the two had exceeded the threshold, carrying real risk.

Sure enough, regarding the “monopoly” issue, the other party replied immediately: “Fanhai is only taking a 49% stake—less than 50%—which doesn’t meet the Anti-Monopoly Law’s criteria for concentration of undertakings. However… another minority shareholder, a VC firm, is extremely close to Fanhai. At the same time, Fanhai parachuted in a management team, causing Workflow’s existing management to resign entirely, leaving only the CTO and his core team. The board of directors is the same—all independent directors were nominated by Fanhai. On the 9-member board, between Fanhai itself, executives from the Fanhai faction, and the independent directors, Fanhai holds 6 seats. In reality, Fanhai Group firmly controls Workflow. Fanhai didn’t just invest; they took over the operational helm. No one knows how Fanhai managed to negotiate that deal.”

Zhou Chang paused for a few seconds, then suddenly burst into a light laugh, saying: “Fine. Good job.”

“…Jing Hong is still very formidable,” the cloud computing president added. “It’s only been a few years, and he’s driven ‘cloud office’ to number one. Back when Old President Jing was in charge… they were completely hopeless in this area. Fanhai lacked 2B (business-to-business) resources and historical experience; their founding product and subsequent key products were all 2C (business-to-consumer). Aside from an ‘enterprise email’ service, which was just a small fry unable to take center stage, logic says they shouldn’t have been able to beat us, because we started in search engines and possessed vast 2B resources and experience.”

This president had taken office not long ago, so he could speak freely—after all, “losing to Fanhai” in this segment had nothing to do with him.

Zhou Chang shot him a glance: “Jing Hong is formidable, of course.”

“Mm,” the other party flattered Zhou Chang, which seemed to be his main point: “But in short video and live-streaming, it’s the exact opposite situation. Our advantage lies in 2B rather than 2C, whereas 2C is Fanhai’s stronghold. Yet in just a few short years since 2016, you’ve turned those two sectors into an unrivaled success story, President Zhou.”

Zhou Chang interrupted him with annoyance: “Alright, wrap it up.”

After taking over, when he decisively charged into the “live-streaming” industry, Zhou Chang had acted with extraordinary speed, immediately poaching the most veteran journalists from major media outlets—because those journalists possessed an astonishingly vast network, capable of instantly inviting celebrities and prominent figures across China. Thus, in just a few short months, Qinghui’s live-streaming platform was successfully built up.

When Zhou Chang was left alone in the office once more, he walked over to the floor-to-ceiling glass wall on one side of his desk.

He reflected on the few matters regarding Fanhai he had just heard—pulling Qinghui back from the brink at a critical juncture, only to slyly bypass anti-monopoly laws right after in order to crush Qinghui… ultimately bringing Workflow into their fold as well.

So that night at the Zhili Club, when Jing Hong met with those few people from Workflow, it was to negotiate this very matter.

Zhou Chang realized once again that Jing Hong possessed a rare divinity about him, yet simultaneously carried an equally rare devilish spark; that inner duality where the divine and the demonic intertwined was intensely captivating.

Back in Wuzhen, Jing Hong had said, “Pharmaceuticals are a lifeline industry,” “Without domestic drugs, there is no pricing power,” and “President Zhang may not believe it, but I believe in the ambition and determination of Chinese pharmaceutical companies.” Now, while every other company hit Qinghui while they were down, Jing Hong stood alone under pressure, insisting that “if we can’t see it, we can’t see it,” leading Xingyuan, Ya’an, and the others to save Qinghui.

Yet at the same time, he used the young talent from the AI Research Camp to poach Hong Xu, forced Qinghui to cede the AI company under Med-Ferry, tied Suigou’s new CTO to advance and retreat alongside Fanhai, launched a hostile takeover of Saint Games, poached Qinghui’s current executives right under his nose, and now slyly circumvented anti-monopoly laws…

Jing Hong always made one long to go deeper, to catch a true glimpse of what lay within.

The complex game of Go was already underway. The two of them placed their stones one by one, every move unleashing a storm. Now mid-game, amid the fierce slaughter and dense blood-mist, on one hand he wanted to conquer the other, yet on the other hand he couldn’t help but be conquered by him.

The board remained complex and difficult to decipher, but on a different battlefield altogether, Zhou Chang knew that Jing Hong was continuously laying siege to cities, seizing territory, and expanding his empire.