Bitcoin Billionaire: I Regressed to Invest in the First Bitcoin!-Chapter 325: Queen of the Binary Sea

"Kara," Darren said, his voice dropping an octave as he answered the phone, turning slightly away from Cheyenne's prying gaze. "What have you got?"

"Ooh, straight to business! No 'Hello, dearest Kara, how's your day?' No 'Did you get home safe, oh queen of the binary sea?'"

Kara's voice was high-pitched and energetic as usual. Darren wanted to assume that she had just had her usual dose of caffeine for the day. But then again, this was everyday Kara.

"You wound me, Bossman," she kissed her teeth. "Truly. I'm bleeding pixels here."

Darren pinched the bridge of his nose, though a faint, imperceptible smirk touched his lips. "Bleeding pixels, that's a new one. Well patch up your wounds, Kara. I'm paying you to do your job."

"Ahhh. How crude."

"Did you find anything or not?"

"Did I find anything? Please. I'm insulted." The sound of furious typing—like a machine gun made of plastic keys—echoed in the background.

"You're no fun these days," she pouted audibly. "But whatever. So, I was digging into those shell companies you flagged. The ones linked to the Scottish Capital? They've been dormant for months, right? Boring. But... few days ago, they woke up. I'm seeing a massive data packet transfer to a server farm in Estonia."

Darren frowned. "Data transfer? What kind?"

"That's the weird part! It's not financial data. It looks like... authentication keys. Thousands of them. And get this—I traced a secondary ping to a dormant wallet on the blockchain. It's been empty since 2009, practically a fossil. But at the same time the shell companies woke up, someone primed it with enough USDT to buy a small island."

"Is it Richard?"

"Nope! Well, it doesn't look like it," Kara replied. "Richard's accounts are clean as a whistle. He's busy buying art or whatever old rich villains do."

"So whose is it?" Darren's eyes narrowed.

"This wallet is untagged, but the routing signature? It bounced off a server in the Caymans. A server that just happens to share an IP address with a subsidiary of Adam Scotland's hedge fund."

Kara giggled. "So, we have a mountain of login keys moving to a server farm, and a massive pile of cash sitting in a wallet waiting for a green light. I don't know what they're building, Boss, but it looks like a digital nuke. Or a really, really big party."

Darren's eyes narrowed, his mind racing as he processed the fragments.

Authentication keys... servers... a dormant wallet primed with cash.

From what he knew, Richard Morrison didn't care about crypto, so this was definitely Adam Scotland's part of the deal.

"Did you find anything else?" he asked her.

"Oh lots more," Kara chuckled dramatically. "I had a little help from Ileana but it was mostly my work."

Darren sighed.

"I traced a massive packet surge routing through the server farm in Estonia. From the looks of it, it's super shady, usually used for hosting illegal gambling dens or Russian botnets."

"I've heard about those."

"Yeah? But guess what? These bots aren't programmed for DDoS attacks or stealing credit cards."

Darren's eyes narrowed. "What are they programmed for?"

"Market flooding, baby!" Kara chirped. "I found a script called 'Project Icarus.' It's timed to execute at an undecided time. From what Ileana could source, the stuff's designed to ping every major crypto exchange simultaneously with micro-sell orders. Thousands of them per second. It's meant to trigger a panic algorithm. Artificial volatility."

Darren went still. "They're trying to crash the price."

"I know. It's crazy right." The sound of her keyboard continued as she spoke. "But here's the cherry on top of this doom-sundae. I found a mirrored transaction queue sitting in a dormant wallet."

"What's in it?"

"Massive leverage short position set up on Deribit. Like, 'betting the GDP of a small country' massive. And the beneficiary wallet? It's not Richard Morrison's main accounts. It traces back to a trust fund in the Cayman Islands registered to... drumroll please..."

"Adam Scotland," Darren finished, his voice cold.

"Ding ding ding! We have a winner! The man loves his digital gold," Kara giggled. "So, yeah. They crash your Bitcoin, you panic sell, the price tanks, and Mr. Scotland laughs all the way to the bank while his short position prints money faster than the Fed. Evil? Yes. Smart? Kinda. Did I catch them? Absolutely."

"Good work, Kara," Darren said, his mind already racing, dissecting the information. "Can you stop it?"

"Can I stop the sun from rising? Can I make a cat bark?" She paused for dramatic effect. "Yes. I can jam their signal, redirect the bots to buy counterfeit products on an online store, or just brick their servers. But... Do you want me to?"

"No," Darren said darkly. "Not yet. Let them think the gun is loaded. I'll tell you when to pull the trigger."

"Ooh, ominous. I love it. Talk later, Bossman! Good luck with the shareholders thing!"

Click. The call line cut.

Darren lowered the phone, a blank expression on his face. For Darren, this usually meant he was infuriated, and was trying to hide it.

He had assumed Richard Morrison wanted to destroy him—that much was obvious.

Richard was a man of old money and older grudges; he viewed crypto as "fairy dust." He wouldn't care about profiting from it; he just wanted Darren Steele bankrupt and broken.

But Adam Scotland…

Darren's eyes darkened, resembling the abyss of a deep ocean.

As annoying and desperate that loser was, Adam wasn't just a pawn; he was a parasite. Richard was the hammer, but Adam was the thief waiting in the rubble.

He was using Richard's hatred to facilitate his own ascension to "Bitcoin King."

'He wants to be me so desperately,' Darren thought, a dangerous calm settling over him.

It was almost flattering if it wasn't so insulting. Adam Scotland had been fighting for Darren's attention for months, like a child tugging at a tiger's tail.

'Fine,' Darren thought, slipping the phone back into his pocket. 'You want my attention, Adam? I'll give it to you.'

He was going to destroy this guy and bury him so deep in a financial rubble of his own worthless assets.

"Trouble in paradise?" Cheyenne asked, her voice silky as she watched him return to the table.

She had been observing him like a hawk, noting the shift in his aura from business-casual to irritated.

"Just pest control," Darren replied smoothly, sitting back down. "Who is next?"

Cheyenne studied him for a second longer, sensing the violence beneath his calm exterior, before she signaled the guard. "Focus, Darren. We have two spots left. Let's make them count."

Darren stared at her. "I'm focused."

Cheyenne raised a playful brow. "Are you really?"

"Yeah," he nodded. "I am."

She shook her head. "You're such an open book, Mr Duckling, it is hilarious."

Darren didn't know what she meant by that, but he returned his focus to the door regardless, waiting on the next shareholder aspirant.