Chapter Two: Everyone Expected It to Soar

Blaze screamed all night. Lu closed the chart, unplugged his router, and buried his head beneath a pillow. The trapped boy kept repeating, “The door is locked.” At seven, Lu wrote on his whiteboard: A warning is not a decline. Then: Find the door. On-chain data showed three new wallets had borrowed $1.2 billion in stablecoins, bought Blaze, pledged it as collateral, borrowed more, and repeated the cycle. It was a tower built by pledging the same bricks again and again. The door might be redemption liquidity. The issuer, Furnace Pool, claimed full Treasury backing, yet its audit relied on counterparty confirmation rather than bank custody records. Its cloud vendor was VaultCloud's Overseas Zone Three.