Chapter 350: My Cargo, Their Lives!

"Settlement."

These two characters, like two nails, were hammered firmly into the floor of the top‑level office and also into Ye Ning's and Lu Qingjun's spiritual crowns.

The whole space was dead silent.

Lu Qingjun collapsed on the floor, mouth open, a ho‑ho sound like a broken bellows coming from his throat. He tried to speak, but found his vocal cords unresponsive; the strand in his brain called Rationality snapped completely the moment it heard the word "Settlement."

Ye Ning was no better off.

On her face, which was always etched with calm and professionalism, now only a blank after a data collapse remained. The financial logic she was proud of, capable of stirring a storm on Wall Street, was crushed to pieces by Lu Qingshan's casually spoken words.

She wasn't unfamiliar with lunatics; Wall Street was full of them.

But she had never seen this kind—using a principal of three billion to lever nearly a hundred billion in physical Settlement, openly defying the rules of the entire London Futures Exchange… god!

This was no longer gambling; this was using one's own life to ask God whether He would dare swap a card with him.

Amid this suffocating atmosphere, Lu Qingshan, as if nothing were wrong, walked over to the desk, opened a newly released 1982 Lafite, poured himself half a glass, and poured a glass each for the despondent Lu Qingjun and Ye Ning.

"Why are you all standing? Come over, have a drink, celebrate." He lifted his glass, faced the London nightscape outside the window, gently swirled the deep‑red wine, "We've fired our first shot in London; the sound may be faint, but the recoil should be substantial."

Lu Qingjun smelled the wine, his stomach roiled, and he clung to the sofa, shakily standing up, his complexion paler than a corpse.

"Brother… stop… stop joking… this isn't funny…" his voice trembled like leaves in an autumn wind, "A hole of over six billion pounds! We'll be liquidated! Not even a bone fragment will remain!"

Lu Qingshan glanced at him, said nothing, and simply took a sip of the red wine, letting the rich liquid roll over his tongue.

Lu Qingshan tasked Ye Ning with monitoring the information, without worrying about small orders or price fluctuations, but to find a way to ascertain the large physical goods purchase orders.

Ye Ning forced herself to recover from the apocalyptic weight of the two words Settlement, picked up the tablet on the floor—its screen already shattered—but she paid no mind, staring fixedly at Lu Qingshan, her voice twisted by extreme shock: "Boss, a sixty‑billion‑pound funding gap… this isn't a figure that can be patched through manipulation, it's an abyss! We'll be torn apart by the rules!"

Lu Qingjun also scrambled over, clinging to Lu Qingshan's thigh, his face wailing, "Brother! Brother! I beg you! Can we stop playing? Let's close out the futures, earn a few tens of billions and we'll return to Hong Kong Island! Enough! Really enough! If we keep going, we won't even be able to go home!"

Lu Qingshan lowered his head, looking at his brother, who resembled a maddened demon, and the pallid Ye Ning, yet the unsettling smile on his face did not change at all.

He ignored his brother's pleas and turned his gaze to Ye Ning, slowly asking, "Ye Ning, I have a question for you. Can your financial models calculate what would happen if a nation's war machine needed to be activated, but the steel for warships, the cotton for uniforms, and the sugar to sustain soldiers all vanished from the market overnight?"

"What?" Ye Ning was startled; her mind, for the first time, could not process such a hypothesis—it was beyond the scope of finance.

"What would happen?" Lu Qingshan's smile turned grim and cold, "They would spare no expense! No regard for price or source, as long as they can obtain the goods! Because for an empire, losing a war is more terrifying than bankruptcy!"

He released Lu Qingjun, walked back to the massive floor‑to‑ceiling window, overlooking the heart of the Financial Empire beneath his feet; his voice became calm, yet carried an absolute control as if surveying a chessboard.

"So, Ye Ning, from now on, I'm assigning you a new mission."

Ye Ning instinctively straightened, like a devotee awaiting a divine decree.

"Forget the flashing numbers on your screen, forget the noise made by retail investors and small speculators; they mean nothing to me." Lu Qingshan's voice was low, yet seemed to carry a time‑piercing power, "I want you to deploy all our intelligence resources to lock onto the real buyers! Those industrial giants that need tens of thousands of tons of steel to keep shipyards running, those great families that require tens of thousands of bundles of cotton each month to power their textile mills, and those multinational conglomerates that supply food to all of Europe!"

He slowly turned, the black pupils reflecting London's myriad lights, yet colder than the winter night outside.

"Don't bother with those dozens or hundreds of small orders; I want the massive procurement plans that require an entire cargo ship's worth in a single shipment! Compile the names of these companies and families, the banks behind them, their production plans, and how anxious they are right now, into a list for me!"

Lu Qingshan paused, a cruel smile flickering on his face, and uttered the words that froze both Ye Ning's and Lu Qingjun's souls.

"I want to know how many soldiers' lives my cargo can exchange for."

"We won't sell, we'll just watch, and wait."

"Wait for them to go from anxiety to panic, then to desperate, sparing no expense."

"Wait for them to realize that London's rules changed the moment we bought the first contract."

"When that time comes, we won't be the ones chasing money." Lu Qingshan lifted the deep‑red Lafite, gestured lightly toward the brilliantly lit building belonging to the Shason Family outside the window.

"Instead, the money will cry and beg to be taken by us."

At that moment, the office's internal phone rang.

Ye Ning, as if shocked by electricity, jolted, and mechanically walked over to answer the phone.

"Boss, reception… reception says there's a man claiming to be Mr. Weierxun Sha Sun who wants to see you." Ye Ning's voice was dry and eerie; she looked at Lu Qingshan, her eyes filled with absurdity, "It's… the one from Hong Kong Island earlier."

Pfft—

Lu Qingjun had just tried to sip water to steady himself when he heard the name; a mouthful of water shot out, and he coughed violently.

Weierxun?

The unlucky fool who was beaten on Hong Kong Island by his brother, losing forty billion and nearly leapt off a building?

What does he want?

Come to show off? Come to mock them? How does he know…?

Countless thoughts flashed through Lu Qingjun's mind, each sending a chill down his spine.

Yet Lu Qingshan's expression did not change a iota.

He simply set the wine glass down, dabbed his mouth with a napkin, and, in a matter‑of‑fact tone, calmly instructed:

"Let him come up."