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Steel Rose, Black Thorns

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Blurb

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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The black stretched car stopped at the gate of a rather old mansion. The door was opened attentively, and a woman in a black dress and long hair tied up got out of the car. Under the black sunglasses, the woman's thick black eyebrows were sharp, and she looked coldly at the house without a trace of fireworks. With a "creak", two servants pulled open the door that had been locked for a long time. It was probably because no one had lived in it for too long, and no one had maintained the house. Even the door that was very imposing in the past was a little out of control. Ten years, it took her a full ten years to get to where she is today. The memories that had been sealed in her mind suddenly became vivid, all the laughter and sorrow that happened here... She thought she had forgotten it long ago... Following her memory, she stepped into the familiar hall, walked up the familiar stairs, and pushed open the familiar door... Everything ten years ago seemed to be still in front of her... Hannah Zhao looked at herself in the mirror, lightly made up, wearing a pink princess dress, long hair draped over her shoulders, and a white pearl necklace on her neck made her even more bright and charming. She pursed her lips and felt that today was the happiest day in her sixteen years, so happy that she was a little nervous. Ten days ago, she received an admission letter from her favorite university. Next month she will become a freshman in the history department. She once worried whether the separation between the two places would affect the relationship between her and her dear boyfriend, but her father promised her that he would let him go to the city where she was studying in college to be a branch manager, and then they could be together forever... Thinking of Jason Zhang, her eyes were shining, her face was flushed, and she was so bright and beautiful. "Hanru, are you okay?" Sophia Song pushed the door open and saw her daughter like this. She knew what she was thinking. She felt a little sad. She had worked hard to raise her baby for 16 years, and now she was going to become someone else's family soon. She suppressed her sadness and comforted herself silently that the child would always fly away from their arms when they grew up. "Mom," she turned around in a panic, and seeing the teasing on her mother's face, she couldn't help blushing again, and took her mother's hand in a coquettish manner, "I'm fine, let's go down together." "Wait a minute, let mom take a good look at you!" Sophia Song pulled Hannah Zhao to stand in front of her, stretched out her hand to straighten the wrinkles on her body that didn't exist, "My baby has grown up. I remember when you were just born, you were so small and wrinkled like a little mouse. Who would have thought that you would grow up so big in the blink of an eye..." "Mom," Hannah Zhao took her mother's arm in a coquettish manner, and said coquettishly, "I'm a lady, don't compare me with a mouse, okay?" "What's wrong with a mouse? Didn't you like Mickey Mouse very much when you were a child?" Sophia Song smiled and pinched her daughter's tender face, not hiding her doting. The strong woman who always kept a serious face outside turned into a soft and gentle woman in front of her daughter. This is her daughter who she didn't know how much hardship she had to endure to give birth to. She is the only treasure in her life. "Xiaoyang is here today, too. We'll treat him well later." Her daughter deserves the best. The Zheng family is their old friend, and Zheng Xiaoyang grew up under their watch. The two children are childhood sweethearts, and they know each other well. She feels relieved to leave her daughter to him. "Mom," Hannah Zhao pulled her hand back unhappily, "I have a boyfriend." "You're still young, what boyfriend? You're not even an adult yet," Sophia Song was a little helpless, "You can make more friends of the opposite s*x now, but you must wait until you're eighteen to fall in love. This is responsible for yourself. You're a little girl who hasn't seen much of the world. How can you make such a hasty decision about your love?" Her daughter likes Jason Zhang, who is six or seven years older than her. How could she not know that the boy comes from a poor family and has not received higher education? The most important thing is that she can't feel Jason Zhang's love for her sweetheart at all. How could she agree to hand over her daughter, who she has raised since she was a child, to such a person of unknown origin? She and her husband both disagreed with this matter and talked to their daughter many times. However, every time they talked about this matter, their well-behaved daughter would always argue with them. However, there was no way. She knew it was unpleasant to hear, but she still had to say these words. "But Dad agreed!" Hannah Zhao blushed, this time because of anger. Thinking of Miles Zhao, who was even more of a daughter slave than herself, Sophia Song was even more helpless. At least she could stick to her principles in front of Hannah Zhao, but Miles Zhao never dared to go against his daughter's wishes. He knew that Jason Zhang might not be a good match for his daughter, but he still agreed without principles. "Han Ru, you have to remember that your father didn't agree to let Jason Zhang go to City A to be the branch manager. This is the need for the company's business development, not for you. Your father just asked him to take care of you. You don't have to take it too seriously."

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