The Flesh Merchant

The Wicked Prince 02

Hong Kong, Central.

The city’s newest landmark, the WISH Tower, pierced the sky—one hundred and fifty stories of glass, steel, and arrogance.

On the one-hundredth floor, in the chairman’s private conference room, a high-level meeting was finally wrapping up. Outside, a ring of beautiful secretaries and assistants waited in formation. Some clutched notebooks, others held folders to their chests. Even in those brief idle moments, most of them were still working—taking calls through wireless headsets or tapping nonstop on their handheld devices.

Every time she stepped out and saw that spectacle, Lei Yat-tung felt that one day she was absolutely going to faint—dramatically and spectacularly—in front of them all.

This isn’t a job for a human being, she thought. Even a robot would burn out doing this.

It was her company. She had founded it. She was the one steering the ship.

But even she had never imagined that in just three years the company would grow into this.

They’d started with ten people.

Now there were over twenty thousand full-time employees, and WISH had swelled like a balloon on fast-forward.

The company’s entire history could be summarized in three words:

recruit, recruit, recruit.

It never stopped. The busiest department was never Sales—it was HR.

You could measure the workload by how quickly the head of HR’s hairline had retreated.

Building her own corporate aircraft carrier was certainly something to be proud of.

But piloting that carrier, day after day, felt a lot like self-inflicted punishment.

All of Hong Kong—and most of Southeast Asia—looked up to her now. Lei Yat-tung, the young woman who had created a legend of wealth. Today, the myth of WISH was spoken of in the same breath as the legend of Google fifteen years earlier.

But almost no one knew that just three years ago, Lei Yat-tung had still been a graduate student at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her father was a chronic gambler who had run up a huge debt with loan sharks. At one point, thugs were literally chasing her down with knives. She had nearly ended up sold into the brothels of Portland Street.

Then, one night, a man appeared like something out of a fairy tale and offered her a wish—

worth thirty million US dollars.

After that, everything changed.

It was as if fate itself had been grabbed by the collar and thrashed. Misfortune, which had stalked her for years, suddenly slunk away in embarrassment. And in its place, a steady, golden light of luck began to shine over her life.

The experience hit her so hard that she became obsessed with a single idea:

If a wish coming true could change one person’s life, what if you could give that chance to everyone?

So she built a website called Wish Tree, meant at first as a simple place where ordinary people could make a wish.

But that man had scoffed at the idea of an empty wishing wall.

“What’s the point of wishing,” he’d said, “if there’s no chance it’ll come true?”

He insisted on upgrading the site into a ‘Temple of Wishes That Might Actually Happen.’

At the time, Lei Yat-tung seriously suspected he wasn’t quite right in the head. To put it bluntly, he sounded insane.

Then he handed her a fund of one billion US dollars.

At that point, going a little insane didn’t seem so unreasonable anymore.

And so, WISH was born.

And the world… went crazy.

Because there had never been a company like WISH—

a company that literally went around giving away money.

Within months, the Wish Tree site became something almost on par with God in the minds of its users.

In the first year, Lei Yat-tung spent half a million dollars every day granting wishes from the site.

Wish Tree’s revenue?

Zero.

Everyone waited for the punchline—waited for Wish Tree to go down as an epic financial joke.

Under his calm, encouraging gaze, Lei spent money until her hands went numb, watching the numbers in the fund shrink day after day. In desperation, she recruited financial experts to manage the fund, scraping profits from the markets to patch the endless outflow.

Even so, by the end of the first year, the fund had shrunk by ten percent.

In the second year, daily spending doubled to one million dollars.

The man’s whereabouts became increasingly mysterious.

Lei’s feelings about spending money, meanwhile, shifted from pain… to numbness.

Fortunately, in the first half of that year, Wish Tree finally began earning a little. Their strict advertising policy and carefully curated content meant the income wasn’t enough to fully cover the exploding server and bandwidth costs, but it did slow the bleeding.

As their loyal user base grew, Wish Tree’s business model also began to evolve. The company’s internet technology advanced at a breakneck pace. In the second half of the year, major advertisers rushed in like a tidal wave, bringing her to the edge of collapse—and then, suddenly, pulling her back from it.

That year’s accounts closed with a surprise:

The size of the fund had not decreased.

It had actually grown by thirty percent.

In the third year, things went from unbelievable to surreal.

In just the first half, the growth rate was five times that. The usable fund had doubled.

By then, they were spending five million dollars a day granting wishes.

The year-end report showed more than three billion dollars in profit.

Projections for year four estimated annual profit of over five billion.

Now, halfway through that fourth year, Wish Tree had gone public on the Hong Kong main board, selling twenty-five percent of its shares and raising 7.5 billion dollars. The stock price had tripled on the first day of trading. By market cap, WISH was now valued at over one hundred billion dollars—

A true giant.

The legend of wealth had been written, loud and clear.

And almost no one knew that behind the legend stood an invisible hand.

Who was the shadow behind WISH?

Lei Yat-tung’s fingers slid unconsciously to the soft yellow ring on her left hand. A face surfaced in her mind—a smile she both loved and hated.

“I wonder where that bastard has disappeared to this time.”

She swore at him silently as she stepped out of the conference room, walking straight into the eager gaze of her assistants.

From that moment on, neither her hands nor her ears had a chance to rest.

“Chairman, this is the expansion budget for the Wish Fulfillment Department for the second half of the year, the upgrade budget for the data center and server rooms, the construction budget for the mainland logistics hub, and the procurement budget for the Archer Skywatch satellite project, please review…”

“Chairman, Liang Ruobing, editor-in-chief of Power magazine, would like to schedule an in-depth interview with you…”

“At ten-thirty, you’re due at HKUST for the scholarship inauguration ceremony for the Computer Science Department…”

“The Chief Executive has invited you to lunch. Rumor has it his son plans to propose to you at the table…”

“The Jockey Club has invited you to the annual races. Prince Shabuwe from the Emirates has sent you five thoroughbred racehorses as a personal gift…”

“…”

“Cut. I don’t want to do any of it.”

Lei Yat-tung suddenly cut everyone off.

“Find me the nearest lounge. Right now the only thing I want is to watch the live broadcast of the International Go Championship on Channel Five.”

The secretaries fell silent at once, staring at each other in confusion.

None of them understood what was going on with their glamorous, untouchable goddess of a chairman today.

Truth be told, Lei Yat-tung didn’t know either.

She just missed him.

Desperately.

He’d only been gone three months, but the tide of longing inside her was already surging out of control.

She knew it wasn’t healthy.

She also knew she had no right to demand that he stay by her side.

Because he didn’t belong to her alone.

“There’s only one prince,” he’d said, grinning wickedly, “but there are a lot of princesses.”

That was his line—delivered with the crooked smile that had earned him the nickname she used only in her heart:

The Wicked Prince.

Right now, she just wanted to see something—anything—connected to him.

Someone he had mentioned.

Some event related to him.

Anything that might help her hold back the impulse rising, wave after wave, in her chest.