Chapter Four: Turning Whispers into Evidence

“This is what we can sell,” Lu said. On the whiteboard, he crossed out hearing and wrote hypothesis generator. “Not prophecy. A way to reduce search costs.” With a little over sixty thousand yuan, he rented two rooms above an old printing plant and registered Boundary Tide Data Consulting. Xu Zhi refused equity; a reporter could not join the board of a company she might investigate. Tang took twenty percent in exchange for engineering work, with his salary deferred. They built an audit process for every whisper. Lu sealed its exact words and timestamp. Tang translated the emotion into candidate variables—inventory, financing, order flow, or public attention. A signal could enter a backtest only after two independent public datasets supported it.