The private jet back to China was a necessity now, not a luxury. Ye Xia used the system's funds to charter one, wasting a million RMB in a single transaction but cutting her travel time dramatically. She needed to be on the ground.
En route, she made two phone calls. The first was to the number on the card her mother had left.
A man's voice answered on the first ring. It was deep, gravelly, and spoke with a clipped British accent. "Silas."
"My name is Ye Xia. Lijuan Ye was my mother. She said you could help me if I was in danger."
There was a moment of silence, then a sharp intake of breath. "Little Xiaxia? My God. I wondered if this day would come. What is the situation?"
Ye Xia briefed him on Strickland's move on the villa. "I need security. And I need information on Gavin Strickland and Orion Capital. Everything."
"Consider it done," Silas said without hesitation. "I'll be on the next flight to you. Your mother saved my life. I owe her everything. That debt now passes to you."
The second call was to Mo. He answered immediately.
"Strickland," she said, dispensing with pleasantries.
"I know," Mo replied. "It's a clumsy move. He's panicking. The losses from the NeuraMed manipulation were significant for him. He's lashing out."
"I'm not going to just defend," Ye Xia stated. "I'm going to break him."
"I expected nothing less," Mo said, and she could almost hear the smile in his voice. "Orion Capital is vulnerable. Their flagship fund is heavily invested in Indonesian palm oil plantations. There's a major environmental report due to be published next week by a NGO. It's damning. The stock will plummet."
It was a gift. A weapon.
"Thank you," Ye Xia said.
"Don't thank me," Mo replied. "This is merely me clearing the path for the main event. I want to see what you do with the information."
She landed and went straight to her apartment. Silas was already there, a tall, lean man in his fifties with a military bearing and watchful eyes. He had already set up a secure command center in her living room.
"The villa situation is a legal mess, but manageable," Silas reported. "The loan documents are forgeries, but good ones. It will take time to untangle. More importantly, I've dug into Orion Capital." He pulled up charts on a screen. "Mo is correct. They are over-exposed in palm oil. They're also facing a margin call on another bad bet. A 20% drop in the plantation stocks will trigger a death spiral."
Ye Xia looked at the charts, her mind calculating. She had her personal wealth, the system's daily quota, and now her mother's fortune. She had more than enough capital to engineer a massacre.
"Here's the plan," she said, her voice cold and precise. "We use the system's funds to waste money by shorting the palm oil stocks through multiple shell companies. We'll take a loss on the trade initially to drive the price down. Then, we leak the environmental report early to a major news outlet."
It was market manipulation on a grand scale, the mirror image of what Strickland had tried to do to her. But she had better information and more capital.
"It's aggressive," Silas noted, a hint of admiration in his voice.
"He started this war," Ye Xia said. "I'm going to finish it."
For the next 48 hours, she operated like a general. She executed the short sales, using the system's massive daily quotas to create selling pressure. The palm oil stocks began to dip. Then, as planned, the environmental report was "leaked" to the Financial Times. The story was explosive, detailing massive deforestation and human rights abuses.
The stocks cratered. Orion Capital's losses were catastrophic. News outlets began reporting that the fund was facing collapse. Investors were fleeing.
Ye Xia watched the chaos unfold on multiple screens. This was power. The power to destroy a man from thousands of miles away with the push of a button.
On the third day, she received a message. It was from a number she didn't recognize, but the area code was New York.
[Please. Stop. I'll give you anything. The villa. A public apology. Just stop.]
It was from Gavin Strickland. The shark was begging.
Ye Xia typed a single-word reply and hit send.
[No.]
An hour later, the news broke: Orion Capital had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Gavin Strickland's career was over.
Ye Xia leaned back in her chair. The room was silent. Silas looked at her with a new level of respect.
"The threat is neutralized," he said.
"No," Ye Xia corrected him softly. "This was just a skirmish. The real threat is still out there. The Yun family."
She had drawn blood. And in doing so, she had undoubtedly alerted the dragon she had been warned about. The patriarch may have considered her a "dead branch," but she had just shown she was very much alive, and very, very dangerous.
The dragon would stir. And she needed to be ready.