Underhanded Tactics

"We can't let him keep growing unchecked! We need to think of something!"

Just three days after the GD Racing Tournament ended, everyone's lives had returned to normal.

But in the island nation, the official Mini 4WD company, which had been closely monitoring the market, was on the verge of a breakdown.

In just three days, their sales in the Huaxia market had plummeted, and they expected them to keep falling.

They had actually been researching chips as well, even buying quite a few GD Racers to take apart and study.

They had recently produced a finished product. It was definitely nowhere near as good as the GD Chip and could only be considered an inferior version, yet its cost was anything but low.

After some rough calculations, unless they could reclaim their original market share, even a price of 998 would not bring in the profits they had before.

Who could accept that?

They had been making money while lying down for so long, but now they had to spend money on promotion and research, only for their profits to decrease instead.

No one would be happy about that!

"Liang Xing Toys Factory had been on the verge of bankruptcy before. Our people found that it was only after that man returned home following graduation that GD Racers appeared."

"I've already made arrangements. We'll teach them a small lesson first."

"We could consider the overseas market. Raising the price should work, right?"

"Yūjirō! You're running away!"

"The Huaxia people are expanding at an unimaginable speed. Do you think he'll spare the overseas market?"

"The Huaxia people have money. We can't pull out of the Huaxia market!"

"...Then I'll pull out." After a moment of silence, Yūjirō still stood by his choice.

The conference room fell silent at once.

"Yūjirō? Have you thought this through?"

Although the company's profits had dropped sharply because of GD Racers, a drop in profits did not mean there were no profits at all.

And if their plan succeeded, the company could return to its former position, perhaps even rise to greater heights!

"I've thought it through."

Yūjirō nodded. His instincts told him that withdrawing from the Huaxia market was the only way out.

To that end, he had studied Liang Xing Toys Factory's expansion route, and he had personally handled the procurement of the GD Racers the company studied.

That had led him to an unexpected discovery: Liang Xing Toys Factory had a severe shortage of supply.

Before the tournament, Liang Xing Toys Factory's sales focus had gradually shifted toward parts, so the supply issue with the basic GD Racers had not been particularly obvious.

But after the tournament's promotion, GD Chips had briefly become impossible to keep in stock.

Basic GD Racers in physical stores could basically be sold as soon as they arrived. Now, most orders were placed online, while physical stores served more as venues for races and selecting parts.

But that was on a nationwide scale. When narrowed down to individual cities, there actually were not that many racers.

Baisha City was the sole exception.

As the birthplace of GD Racers, it also had long-established physical stores that gave racers a place to gather.

Furthermore, A Lie had inspired many local racers to build tracks of their own.

The vast majority of those had once been Mini 4WD tracks.

Many racers from other places would drive over during holidays to arrange races.

Add Baishi Mountain's track in Baisha County, and even more racers came in search of its reputation.

They were both Mini Four-Wheel Drive Cars. Everyone understood the principle that when one rose, the other fell.

After the tournament's publicity, Mini 4WD could barely even hold on to parents' wallets anymore. No wonder they were driven to desperate measures.

This was no longer their childhood. People had all kinds of choices now.

Even Mini 4WD was more about running tracks than off-road racing.

Off-road racing was a niche within a niche.

But GD Racers needed sufficiently long tracks to be fun, and voice control meant racers were destined to run alongside them.

And having to run alongside them meant this toy was destined not to appeal to too many people.

In the internet age, how many people were willing to go outside and run around like crazy?

Yūjirō understood very clearly that his company's competitiveness was far inferior to the other side's.

The only way out was probably to take advantage of the other side's insufficient production capacity and establish an overseas presence early. Perhaps they could recover their costs and make a fortune!

But he could not convince the company's other shareholders with intuition alone, nor could he guarantee that Liang Xing Toys Factory would not expand overseas.

Even if its production capacity was insufficient now, how much money had Liang Xing Toys Factory made from the GD Racing Tournament?

With money, what was there to fear about insufficient production capacity?

Although the truth was that even with money, production capacity was still insufficient—after all, there was only one Liang Xing—Yūjirō did not dare gamble on it.

So after hesitating again and again, he still proposed selling his shares.

"Then I'll take them."

Miyatashi Teru, who had arranged to teach Liang Xing Toys Factory a lesson, broke the silence.

"Thank you, President."

"I need you to guarantee that you will not reveal a single word of what you heard today." Miyatashi Teru had no need for incompetent people to share in the company's rebirth, and he spoke with a cold expression.

"Yes! Please rest assured, President!"

Selling his shares would definitely cost him dearly, but Yūjirō believed it was necessary to cut his losses.

His wife had only recently become pregnant. If the company went bankrupt, he would struggle to support his family's expenses.

Compared with the other shareholders, he trusted his instincts more.

"Michiko is pregnant, right? Then the two of you should rest properly at home for a while. Everyone will prepare a gift for you as well."

"...Yes!"

Michiko was Yūjirō's wife. Naturally, Yūjirō knew what Miyatashi Teru was worried about.

Until the company and Liang Xing Toys Factory settled their contest, there would probably be no shortage of surveillance around his home.

Fortunately, he had never considered leaking information. He simply wanted to cut his losses.

Huaxia, Baisha City.

"Boss! The official website is down again!" Zhou Shuya frowned. She had already lost count of how many times the official website had crashed over the past few days.

At first, with so many orders coming in, she had thought the website crashes were a server issue. After reporting it, they quickly upgraded the server's bandwidth, hardware specifications, and other configurations.

Yet before long, the official website crashed again.

That was when she realized someone was probably causing trouble deliberately, so she hurriedly contacted Liang Xing.

Liang Xing Toys Factory's official website actually had fairly strict protection.

Although Liang Xing had coded the firewall casually, he had figured that ordinary attacks would not be able to break through it, and it had performed rather well.

After all, My Pondering Power could not create something from nothing. It merely turned assumptions into reality and still followed the laws of physics in principle.

High-end cybersecurity required correspondingly more complex algorithms and code, so Liang Xing, who did not have much time, chose a simpler approach and threw together something ordinary to make do for now.

Of course, his idea of making do already surpassed the vast majority of firewalls on the market.

Whenever the official website crashed over the past few days, Zhou Shuya immediately went to Liang Xing to solve the problem.

To some extent, that instead helped Liang Xing settle on an idea for his next toy.

He was still quite short of the money needed to send a satellite into space, but using equipment to achieve Holographic Projection was not difficult for Liang Xing.

Trying to play underhanded tricks with me?

Then I'll make sure to play along properly!

Liang Xing was not troubled in the slightest by the other side's dirty tactics. On the contrary, he had to thank them for helping him decide on his next toy.

He only hoped they had not spent too much money on this move.

Otherwise, if they got broken too quickly, it would be no fun at all~

Of course, Liang Xing also needed to prepare some means of protecting himself.

He was still somewhat afraid that the other side, unable to beat him, would simply challenge him to a real-life fight offline.

Although Zhang Long and Zhao Hu were constantly protecting him, at certain times, relying on himself was still more dependable.