Four days passed in silence.
Yang Tiancheng's assistant and bodyguards were still living it up in the docklands, marveling at the extravagance of the rich.
They had no idea that their boss had already become meat on the chopping board, at Li Qingye's mercy.
Inside a specially modified underground interrogation room.
A soldier and a female manager were grilling Yang Tiancheng, digging every last memory out of his mind.
Beyond the one-way glass, Li Qingye sat in an ergonomic chair, flipping through the freshly compiled interrogation transcript. Some of the names on the pages were expected, while others had been buried very deep.
"Heh..." He chuckled darkly, leaning back in his chair and muttering to himself:
"Father, so these are your good brothers, your good partners."
He left the basement and stepped onto the villa's open-air balcony.
He let out a long breath, and the fury in his chest finally began to subside. Stars dotted the night sky. As he gazed out over the pitch-black wilderness, he felt profoundly lonely and heartbroken.
He pulled a harmonica from his pocket, and memories came flooding back.
A clear, haunting harmonica melody slowly echoed across the mountaintop.
"I close my eyes, my heart filled with confusion."
"I raise my head in sorrow; my gaze reflects only grief."
"Only one road leads into the wilderness."
"Where can I find the way forward?"
"Ah... scattered stars adorn the night sky, guiding destiny."
"This was your favorite song, Father. Your life's journey has reached its final note. Now I'll use my own life to compose the second movement of fate."
Li Qingye stopped playing. His heart was utterly calm, but that calm also reflected how resolute he was at that very moment.
He returned to the villa's study.
He opened the Biological Computer he carried with him and brought up the intelligence on the Yang family, New Nanyang Company, and Xin Xin Group.
Killing those people would be easy for him now. Even in a country like China, with its strict border controls, his soldiers could still carry certain things across the border.
After all, one of the defining traits of biotechnology was its ability to remain concealed.
Whether it was the Biological Computer or the Gu insect series, both could be hidden inside a soldier's body and pass through security checks safely.
But that wasn't the kind of revenge he wanted.
If those pieces of trash got to die so easily, they'd be getting off far too lightly.
Besides, he intended to appear openly and honorably as Li Qingye, and take back Xin Xin Group in its entirety. He would strip those parasites of everything, crushing them bit by bit and keeping them in a state of constant fear.
What would be the point of revenge through assassination?
He wanted everyone to know that he, Li Qingye, was behind it all, while they could do nothing to stop him and could only rage in helpless fury.
It's time to establish a second branch, he thought.
He pulled up the list of all Spiderweb members from the Biological Computer's web database. Spiderweb currently had 121 managers.
Of these, 24 were inside Homo sapiens Company; 8 were in the Fernando family; 5 were in the Lopez family; and 6 were in other families in Luzon.
Of the remaining 78 managers, 3 were in the Blood Blade Special Forces, 24 in the Security Department, and 51 in the Internal Affairs Department.
Only a small number of the managers in the Blood Blade Special Forces, Security Department, and Internal Affairs Department had official positions inside Homo sapiens Company. The vast majority remained inactive under assumed identities.
The Internal Affairs Department in particular had far more managers than it needed, with 51. But they were all reserve personnel, ready to be placed inside Homo sapiens Company or wherever else they were needed.
For the second branch, Li Qingye planned to select some of these people and assign them to its ranks.
First, he chose a manager whose height and features somewhat resembled his own, and had him appear under the name Li Qingye.
The second branch would operate publicly as Qingye Group.
After all, Li Qingye hadn't been declared dead—he was missing. Until four years had passed, his identity still carried civil rights.
He had gone missing in June 2017. Only in June 2021 could anyone apply to the court to have Li Qingye, the natural person, declared dead.
It was only February 2019.
In other words, the shares in Xin Xin Group owned by Li Qingye were still in his name.
As soon as Li Qingye appeared again, the parasites and rats inside Xin Xin Group would inevitably react.
Qingye Group would serve as a target, drawing those people's attention. Meanwhile, Homo sapiens Company would revolve around the identity of "Zhang Jack." The two companies could handle matters the other couldn't through a combination of overt and covert operations.
Besides that, he needed to find some profitable industries for Qingye Group.
Since Qingye Group and Homo sapiens Company were to be publicly separated, the two couldn't have overly direct financial or industrial ties.
Qingye Group's initial funding would be around 150 million US dollars. That was the money he had obtained from his mother's secret account back then.
As for industries, he looked through his list of research results. It contained dozens of biotechnologies, large and small.
But the Biological Computer technology definitely couldn't be given to Qingye Group, and some of the more sensitive technologies weren't suitable either.
After weighing his options, he picked two technologies that he thought would make suitable starter industries for Qingye Group.
They were low-temperature glass manufacturing technology and coral cement technology.
Many people knew that glass was made by melting materials at high temperatures. This was the technological foundation of the modern glass industry.
But nature had a glass-making technology that defied common sense: low-temperature glass manufacturing technology.
This technology came from a type of algae called diatoms.
Diatoms could synthesize glass-like products at room temperature. Their exoskeleton cell walls were made of silica and resembled opaque glass.
Diatoms used silica in the water to build their protective shells through an extremely simple chemical reaction:
They removed the water molecules between silica particles. Next came what chemists called "condensation polymerization"—atoms linked together with the help of oxygen atoms, and the silica particles formed tiny silica beads. These beads became the material that made up the cell walls.
Different species of diatoms arranged their silica beads and silica cell walls in different ways.
Although humans had been imitating diatoms and developing the "sol-gel" process since the 1980s, it was still less precise than the diatoms' own method.
Li Qingye had studied the genes and characteristics of diatoms while researching the Biological Computer.
He had originally planned to give low-temperature glass manufacturing technology to Coral Building Materials, but he'd changed his mind and decided to give it to Qingye Group instead.
The advantage of low-temperature glass manufacturing technology was its low energy consumption. Li Qingye had tested it in the lab: producing the same one-square-meter sheet of flat glass took only about one-eightieth as much energy with low-temperature glass as with high-temperature glass.
Cost was a huge advantage. What was more, using genetically modified diatoms as a glass-growing medium had another major benefit: production could be halted at any time.
Try shutting down a high-temperature glass Production Line and see what happens. At best, the Production Line would be damaged; at worst, it would be ruined outright.
That was one of the biggest pain points for glass factories today. Once a Production Line was started, it couldn't be shut down easily.
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