Chapter Two: Before the Trap Closes

Lucent Capital held its investor conference in the tallest hotel in Linhai. At eleven in the morning, eight hundred investors filled the Cloud Hall while a near-perfect yield curve flowed across the enormous screen. Under the stage lights, founder Zhou Qiming announced that their quantum prediction fund had gone seven hundred and twenty consecutive days without a loss. Lin Mo sat in the last row wearing a borrowed suit. “Why would a company claiming to trade with quantum computers hide its servers in an old refrigerated warehouse?” he typed on his lens terminal. “Because it owns no quantum computer,” Zero replied. “The returns are paid from new investors’ principal.” “A Ponzi scheme should not interest three secret organizations.”