System Reboot

On the day Yahoo went public, Chu Hang sat in his cheap apartment like any ordinary stock investor, staring at the computer screen. The Nasdaq index leaped wildly across the display, each flicker signaling astronomical sums of wealth changing hands. He remained calm, neither excited nor nervous. To him, this had never been a gamble. It was merely a math problem whose answer he had known all along.

When the stock price climbed to the peak he remembered, he lightly pressed the Enter key.

Sell.

The transaction was complete. The familiar six-digit figure in his brokerage account became a brand-new eight-digit number. Twelve million dollars. That sum would have driven any ordinary person mad, but Chu Hang merely shut down the computer and went into the kitchen to pour himself a glass of cold water. Money had always been nothing more than a tool to him—a tool that would allow him to more freely accomplish something else.

He did not move, nor did he buy a sports car. He still lived in that run-down apartment where he could hear his neighbors arguing. He split the money into several portions and quietly invested it in a few fledgling internet companies still operating out of their garages. One was called Amazon, and another was called Google. He knew exactly what towering trees these inconspicuous seeds would grow into in the future, becoming figures so vast that he could not be bothered to calculate them. But that no longer mattered.

What he needed was something else. Hunting season had arrived.

His first stop was New York. Rather than heading to the glittering streets of Manhattan, he rented an inconspicuous Ford and drove straight north to Westchester County. Deep within the vast forests there, he found the legendary Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. He