While Zhuang Hua Mao traveled the globe, on another hemisphere of Jiang Ye Star, a 20-year-old named Liu He Yu had just stumbled into a pyramid scheme.
Liu He Yu, a man with a feminine name and a delicate, effeminate appearance, had once been exclaimed by a fortune teller as "born with noble destiny." Like Zhuang Hua Mao, Liu He Yu had only a junior high school education. He was an orphan raised in a welfare institution, and after dropping out of school, he supported himself by working odd jobs.
Upon realizing he had entered a pyramid scheme, Liu He Yu remained calm and collected. He knew that if he tried to escape by force, he would be captured, beaten, held captive, or even killed. Liu He Yu planned to spend a month getting to know the "brothers and sisters" in the organization. However, he possessed an innate talent for winning people over. In just ten days, he had gained the complete trust of others in the organization, who even came to admire his charisma and became his followers.
Liu He Yu decisively rallied his followers, overthrew the pyramid scheme leader, "Manager York," and handed him over to the police.
The local police were shocked after hearing the account, considering Liu He Yu a talented individual. Most people who stumbled into such organizations would be severely harmed, yet Liu He Yu managed to fight back. They deemed him suitable for undercover work.
Thus, the police department offered Liu He Yu a secret position with a monthly salary of fifty thousand, assigning him to infiltrate various pyramid schemes to gather intelligence and evidence. Through repeated undercover operations, Liu He Yu's ability to "rebel" from within became increasingly refined, eventually leading to the dismantling of one pyramid scheme group every week.
Liu He Yu's reputation spread throughout the police system, and police departments in many cities "borrowed" him, this "god of internal conflict," to assist in solving cases.
The news reached the Commander-in-Chief, and soon Liu He Yu was personally summoned by Jiang Ye. After conversing with Jiang Ye, Liu He Yu's status changed. He became a training instructor for the police, imparting his experiences, and simultaneously developed an app called "Don't Be Fooled," which shared various cases and exposed fraudulent tactics.
While similar apps existed, Liu He Yu's "Don't Be Fooled" contained exceptionally engaging content, with many cases written like novels, drawing countless readers.
Jiang Ye Star quickly promoted "Don't Be Fooled." Within a year, its download count exceeded 2.5 billion. Subsequently, Liu He Yu established a network company and diligently developed several overseas versions of the "Don't Be Fooled" app, continuously innovating its content and features. Within two years, it achieved tens of billions of downloads with 800 million daily active users.
Through app advertising revenue, Liu He Yu rapidly accumulated over a billion funds. Coinciding with a prolonged economic crisis that severely impacted the network industry across various planets, Liu He Yu seized the opportunity to aggressively acquire struggling network companies at low prices.
He claimed, "The industry's decline is only temporary; the demand is there. Once the economic crisis ends, these network companies will all revive." He also stated, "These companies are like gold bars that have temporarily fallen into excrement. Foolish people will shy away from the dirt, but I am the kind of intelligent person who can lick the dirt clean to obtain the gold."
Liu He Yu's predictions proved remarkably accurate. He soon became a titan of the network industry. The now-famous Liu He Yu Group's businesses spanned multiple sectors, including gaming, online education, social media, software security, and data analysis. Within a few years, the group's net profit surpassed fifty billion annually.
If Zhuang Hua Mao and Liu He Yu were representatives of uneducated entrepreneurs, Jiang Ye Star saw an even greater number of highly educated entrepreneurs emerge.
Bu Dan Xue, a third-year graduate student, pursued degrees in both chemistry and pharmacy. She published papers in authoritative journals at a rate of one per month, with even her advisor being promoted to professor due to her achievements. She had never tested her IQ but claimed to solve ordinary Sudoku puzzles in five seconds and could recite Li Bai's complete works after reading them only twice.
Bu Dan Xue's entrepreneurial journey was purely coincidental. She noticed small cockroaches frequently appearing near her laboratory. On one occasion, the cockroach repellent at the school supermarket was sold out. Thus, she used her knowledge to attempt to concoct some cockroach repellent. The repellent was highly successful, with dozens of cockroaches found dead in the corridor outside the laboratory. Soon after, Bu Dan Xue discovered that the cost of her self-developed cockroach repellent formula was only 5% of that of commercially successful cockroach repellents.
Sensing immense profit, she decisively took a leave of absence from her studies, secured initial investment from Jiang Ye, and built a small factory. The factory was divided into a three-seven ratio: three-tenths of the area was used to manufacture cockroach repellent, and seven-tenths was dedicated to breeding cockroaches.
Bu Dan Xue acquired numerous popular cockroach repellents from the market and continuously cultivated the resistance of the cockroaches in her factory until a completely new species of mutant cockroaches emerged, which treated ordinary cockroach repellent like candy.
These mutant cockroaches soon appeared mysteriously in many areas of Jiang Ye Star, arriving in formidable swarms. Both residential and factory areas suffered greatly, as purchasing cockroach repellent proved futile against them. It was at this point that Bu Dan Xue's "Cockroach King" brand cockroach repellent appeared on supermarket shelves, each bottle featuring a simple, blunt slogan: "If the cockroaches don't die, I die."
People discovered that "Cockroach King" was the only effective solution for eradicating cockroaches, igniting demand and sales. In just three months, "Cockroach King" had aggressively captured 80% of the cockroach repellent market share on Jiang Ye Star, with peak daily sales reaching eight million boxes. Subsequently, Bu Dan Xue's company increased its research and development investment and launched "Rat Killer," "Termite Killer," "Mosquito Killer," and other products, each with even more astonishing sales figures.
Especially the "Mosquito Killer," the box was as small as a bottle cap and contained a white, odorless ointment. Placing a box in a bedroom and opening the lid would result in several mosquitoes being found stuck dead to the ointment the next morning. Even when placed between humans and the mosquito repellent, mosquitoes would choose to bite the repellent. This product, being cheap and effective, quickly spread beyond Jiang Ye Star, conquering the markets of over thirty planets within two years.
Bu Dan Xue's rise to fortune reminded Jiang Ye of ancient wheelwrights. Some wheelwrights would scatter nails on the roads near their shops, puncturing the tires of passing vehicles. Bu Dan Xue had simply replaced the nails with cockroaches.
Another highly educated individual in Petro City achieved fortune through a nearly identical method, but with a higher level of technical expertise.
Ban Ming Zhi, an immigrant from Solaris Star. In his previous life, Ban Ming Zhi was a network security expert. He existed in a soul state within a black box on the seabed of Solaris Star for two hundred years. During these two centuries, he never stopped learning, constantly researching network knowledge from various planets. After being reincarnated as a human on Jiang Ye Star, he rented a basement apartment and used all his savings to purchase a set of high-quality computer equipment.
In that damp thirty-square-meter basement, where sewage pipes had once burst and flowed with feces, Ban Ming Zhi spent six months developing a suite of extremely potent computer viruses. He released these viruses to attack the official websites of major corporations. When the companies' network security personnel were at a loss and their executives were in distress, Ban Ming Zhi descended like an angel to promote his developed network protection software, demonstrating on-site solutions for viruses and data recovery.