Chapter Three: The Golden Bait

The salary was twenty times Lu’s old pay, but the appendix granted Haiyue exclusive rights to wearable-device data, injury predictions, and his digital likeness. If the club’s own model forecast decline, guaranteed money became non-guaranteed. “They use your data to declare you worthless, then use their model to stop paying you.” Lu remembered the Pulse Lab report. The struggling startup owned patents that let athletes retain custody of training data. A founder’s contact details waited on the last page. The system had not handed him a company. It had shown him a door no one else could see. “Why help me?” “Two years ago I represented an injured player Haiyue discarded. My firm took Haiyue as a client and ordered me to drop the case. I refused.