Steel Rose, Black Thorns

water king Realistic Urban

Before she turned sixteen, Hannah Zhao was the sole heiress of the Zhao Group Corporation. Her father, Martin Zhao, was a self-made “steel magnate,” and her mother, Sophia Song, was a renowned businesswoman. The family of three lived in the most opulent estate in City C. She attended the best international school and was admitted early to the history department of A University at the age of sixteen, with a promising future ahead of her. On her sixteenth birthday, during the height of a lavish pink castle-themed party, her father was arrested by the police in front of everyone, charged with “embezzlement.” That night, her mother died in a mysterious car accident while rushing to the scene. Hannah Zhao, still a minor, was suddenly thrust from being the apple of everyone's eye into the role of an “orphan.” What was even more cruel was that she witnessed her childhood sweetheart, Jason Zhang, embracing her cousin Sierra Zhao and casually telling her, “I never loved you.” All the love, trust, and pride she had known were shattered, and she fainted in the pouring rain.
Her mother's twin sister, Quentin Yue, a renowned lawyer in Chicago, rushed back to China and took her to the United States as her guardian. At the airport that day, Hannah Zhao looked back at her hometown, her eyes filled with a blood-red vow: one day, she would reclaim everything she had lost. After arriving in the United States, she abandoned her beloved history and switched to finance, enrolling in the ST Business School adjacent to Wall Street. She spent day and night poring over piles of annual reports and code, determined to understand how capital could be so ruthless. One rainy night, she was nearly harassed by a drunk man on the street but was rescued by Quentin Yue, a genius programmer from the same school—this young man, who had cashed out from a small game at the age of twenty but then stepped back at the peak of his career, became her most important ally thereafter.
Quentin Yue, on the surface a math PhD and tech geek, was actually well-versed in capital markets. He discovered Hannah Zhao’s remarkable intuition for numbers and trends and invited her to test his self-developed big data financial model. The two rented an apartment as a studio, attending classes during the day and monitoring the markets at night. From shorting retail stocks to targeting oil futures, their first attempts yielded millions in profits. Meanwhile, Hannah Zhao leveraged her aunt's legal network to commission a credit investigation agency to uncover the truth in Singapore: the whistleblowing materials from her father's case were authored by her uncle Miles Zhao; her mother's car accident was a “accident” orchestrated by Miles Zhao by bribing a truck driver; and Jason Zhang was merely a pawn used to disrupt her emotions. As the evidence mounted, she remained inactive—she was waiting for an opportunity to take down all her enemies at once.
Two years later, Hannah Zhao turned eighteen and formally inherited all the shares under her parents' names, becoming the invisible major shareholder of Zhao Group Corporation with over 51% of the shares. At this time, a steel crisis hit Singapore, and Miles Zhao, who was mismanaging the business, was desperate to push for the Zhao family's IPO to raise funds. Hannah Zhao instructed her legal team to “cooperate” with the IPO process, but at a critical moment, she revealed a secret offshore trust established by her mother before her death, freezing all shares and forcing Miles Zhao to publicly admit fraud during the roadshow. The stock price plummeted, brokers abandoned their positions, and the market value of Zhao Group Corporation evaporated by 70% overnight. She took advantage of the low prices to acquire shares in the secondary market, then returned to the board as a “strategic investor” and used forceful measures to remove Miles Zhao, expel Zhang's affiliated companies, and recall all of her parents' former associates. Miles Zhao attempted to fight back, but discovered he had already been abandoned by his partners—those “allies” were creditors who had been secretly bought off by Hannah Zhao using overseas funds.

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