Chapter 65: Tremendous Potential

"Everyone back in my hometown knows about it."

"My parents even came over a few days ago to stage a scene of 'Mother instructs her son,' and I just sent them back this afternoon."

Liu Mingxuan recounted the melancholy in his heart. He knew the old saying about not eating grass near the burrow, but that girl looked so much like his first love.

"Do you understand what a first love is? Heroes have a hard time passing the beauty's test, and a beauty doesn't necessarily have to be stunning; the crucial thing is that she touches your soul."

Liu Mingxuan spoke with great conviction, his words eloquent and pompous. Lu Liang's face darkened. "You're no hero. You're just thinking with your lower body, yet you make it sound so high and mighty."

"You don't understand, and I don't blame you."

Liu Mingxuan shook his head, raised his glass in a toast to the bright moon, and sighed, "Ah, my youth... is coming to an end after all."

"Is there anything I can help with?" Lu Liang drank his wine, suppressing the urge to slap him across the face.

"Accompany me to get dead drunk tonight."

Although Liu Mingxuan had an apartment but no car, his old man was about to cough up some gold coins to buy him a compact car worth around two hundred thousand.

As for the bride price, back in their hometown, it was more symbolic than practical; tens of thousands were enough, and he still had some savings of his own.

His only regret was probably Lu Liang. He had finally waited for his buddy to strike it rich, only to find out he wouldn't be able to gallop across the horizon with him anymore.

"Liang, buddy, you're the one I worry about the most."

Half a dozen beers down, Liu Mingxuan was getting a bit tipsy.

Lu Liang couldn't help laughing. "You really are a good guy, aren't you?"

"That goes without saying. True brothers are always in each other's hearts."

Liu Mingxuan thumped his chest so hard it echoed. Carried away by the moment, he rushed onto the stage, snatched the microphone from the singer, and belted out Alan Tam's "Friends."

*Stars drift by, walking the road with you*

*Total strangers, hearts drawing close*

*Silently treating others with sincerity...*

*It's truly you~~*

Down in the audience, Lu Liang smiled and raised his glass in a silent toast. "I wish you happiness."

His own marriage had been unhappy, but Liu Mingxuan was his dear friend, and he wanted to believe that happy marriages still existed in this world.

That night, the two of them polished off two dozen bottles until the late hours of the morning.

Lu Liang was in high spirits; with a grand wave of his hand, he treated everyone in the venue to celebrate his friend's impending entry into the halls of matrimony.

...

Monday, July 21st.

The first trading day of the new week.

Seemingly unfazed by the net outflow of 128 million yuan over the past three trading days, Teli A opened strong and quickly hit the daily limit.

Li and Wu used their left hands to sell to their right hands, generating massive trading volume and continuing to project an image of a scorching hot market.

At the same time, they kept their eyes glued to the market, terrified that Lu Liang might suddenly ambush them from out of nowhere—if that happened, they would truly be left without a burial site.

Meanwhile, a luxury yacht slowly pulled out of the Jinsha Pier, located directly south of Shanghai, and headed south toward Mingzhou.

Lu Liang had no desire to get entangled with Li and Wu. To avoid any suspicion, he planned to take a few days off and completely distance himself from the chaos.

When Meng Changkun learned of this, he casually invited Wu Tianzheng along, bringing along his company's team of models—three men and six women setting sail into the breeze.

...

"Can you really bear to let it go?"

Meng Changkun sprawled out on the deck, soaking up the sun.

In front of him lay a tablet displaying the day's market performance for Teli A, locked at its upper limit of 37.75 yuan.

He knew Lu Liang still held twenty thousand lots, and he had also heard that Jianlin Li had approached Lu Liang, offering to help lift his sedan chair.

It was precisely because of this that Meng Changkun was willing to accompany Lu Liang on this cruise; otherwise, he could have just let Wu Tianzheng keep him company.

"Some money can be made, and some money cannot."

Wearing sunglasses and lying on a deck chair, Lu Liang had two tall, sexy women in bikinis applying sunscreen for him.

Inevitably, a physical reaction occurred, quietly pitching a small tent and causing the two tall beauties to cover their mouths and giggle softly.

Meng Changkun had helped him out on many occasions, but their cooperation outweighed their personal friendship. Lu Liang was not going to change his mind simply because of Meng Changkun's remarks.

He had access to future information; there was no need to break the law and risk losing far more than he could ever gain for such meager profits.

Meng Changkun wanted to say more, but sensing that Lu Liang had strong principles, he gave up trying to persuade him. "I'm off to dip in the ocean."

Suddenly scooping up the beauty beside him, he slid down the yacht's inflatable slide into the open sea amidst peals of laughter.

At this sight, the corners of Lu Liang's lips curled upward.

Although Meng Changkun was willing to help him, he was always plotting to advance further and seize more control of the narrative.

If nothing went wrong, after this trip, Meng Changkun would never harbor such thoughts again.

Lu Liang turned his head to look at the butterfly knot on the back of the beauty beside him, suddenly gave it a sharp tug, and a pair of snowy white rabbits instantly popped out.

The beauty blushed in embarrassment and annoyance, glaring at him with a coquettish pout.

Laughter and joy instantly filled the deck, peaceful and harmonious.

For several consecutive days, Teli A frequently made the Dragon and Tiger List—it was either hitting the upper limit or on its way there.

During trading sessions, it repeatedly performed wild swings between the daily limit and the floor, highlighting its erratic, demonic nature.

The stock price soared all the way, repeatedly breaking historical highs and attracting a massive wave of retail investors rushing to buy in.

Following days of explosive surges, the China Securities Regulatory Commission issued a routine warning, reminding investors of the underlying risks.

However, the broader market was in a slow, grinding decline, having broken below 3,700 points, and public resentment across the market was gradually boiling over.

"Old Xiao, your mom is calling you home for dinner, stop bouncing around out there."

"You never issued any warnings when the market was crashing, but the moment it goes up, you show up."

"I'll be damned if I believe you!"

Retail investors simply refused to buy it. The more the CSRC warned them, the more determined they were to buy.

Demonic stocks fluctuated wildly and offered high profits; even if they were ultimately trapped and buried at the peak, at least they would die standing.

Looking at the blue-chip and large-cap stocks instead, which crept up by one or two points every day only to plunge by four or five points, it felt like a dull knife cutting flesh—pure torture. Playing with those for too long made life feel meaningless.

Furthermore, no CSRC warning was even necessary because retail investors knew crystal clear that a demonic stock would inevitably have its curtain call someday.

Once a demonic stock's curtain call arrived, having its price slashed in half and then halved again was a common occurrence.

Yet they clung to wishful thinking: why would today be the day? Couldn't it be tomorrow, or the day after?

The financial market was nothing more than a game of passing the parcel; everyone believed they wouldn't be the one left holding the bag at the very end.

In the blink of an eye, the final trading day of the week arrived, and Teli A acted up once more, staging a wild plunge to the floor during the session.

This tactic had played out several times before on this particular stock, and each time, it would eventually break out of the floor and rally back up.

Much like the story of the boy who cried wolf, retail investors might have panicked and bailed out the first or second time.

But once it happened enough times, they not only stopped seeing it as a risk—they saw it as an opportunity.

A plunge to the floor meant today's downside was capped, but any subsequent rebound offered a 20 percent profit margin.

Retail investors scrambled to buy in.

Thirty million... fifty million...

One hundred million... two hundred million......

A massive amount of funds flowed in frantically.

"Cashing out at the floor—you guys really know how to play."

Having spent a few days out at sea, Lu Liang returned to the company, keeping a close eye on the stock's movements.

At 48.25 yuan, this should be the absolute peak of this wave of market activity.

Having laid their groundwork for over a month, Li and Wu had finally reached the day to harvest their gains, and they were currently offloading massive amounts of shares.

It was entirely predictable that an endless streak of limit-down sessions would follow, lasting until they recovered their principal and rebuilt their positions.

Chen Jinchun knocked on the door and walked in, handing over a folder. "Director Lu, these are the half-month data reports for Mengmengda Media."

Mengmengda Media was Li Manli's studio. At first, Lu Liang hadn't thought much of it, viewing it merely as an expendable investment.

That was until the studio was officially established and launched across the entire internet, accumulating over two million followers and drawing multi-million-yuan sponsorship offers from various platforms.

Among them was Panda TV, founded just last month by the son of the nation's richest man with a registered capital of only ten million yuan, which threw down six million yuan for an exclusive three-year live-streaming contract.

While the sponsorship fees were small change, this industry caught Lu Liang's attention, and soon the YouTube business model came into view.

With an 80 billion dollar valuation and 240 million dollars in annual profit, YouTube seemed to have no equivalent competitor domestically yet.

YouTube targeted a global audience, but the current global registered user base was only 780 million, whereas China alone had a population of 1.4 billion.

Moreover, in recent years, 4G signals and affordable, high-performance smartphones had emerged in succession.

Domestic internet users were growing exponentially; as of June this year, the number of netizens had already exceeded 600 million.

Nowadays, online shopping was gradually replacing offline shopping. Would online entertainment one day replace offline entertainment as well?

Being able to admire scenery from all over the country without stepping outside your door—much like how Lu Liang had once analyzed the reason behind Li Manli's explosive popularity.

She was pretty, had a great figure, loved wearing cosplay costumes, and her cooking skills were secondary. The crucial element was the wealthy lifestyle she unintentionally flaunted and exposed.

For thousands of years, ordinary citizens' imaginations of the ruling and wealthy classes had been stuck on eating with golden chopsticks and farming the land with golden hoes—assuming everyone had just one head and two eyes.

They simply lacked a concrete concept of genuine wealth until Li Manli's videos pulled back that mysterious corner of the curtain.

Viewers absorbed this new knowledge like sponges, greedily drinking it in while yearning for that kind of lifestyle.

"Video platforms hold immense potential!"

After deep consideration, Lu Liang arrived at this conclusion, and a vague, budding concept began to take shape in his mind.