Chapter 349 Stealing the Recipe Backfires!

The lights in the workshop went out one by one, and the workers left in twos and threes.

The noise gradually faded away, and the entire factory area fell into a deathly silence.

Suddenly, a dark figure emerged from a crack in the packaging workshop.

The movements were very light, like a black cat strolling along the wall.

The man looked around to make sure no one was there, then crouched down and crept to the door of the raw material preparation room.

He held a thin wire in his hand and fiddled with it in the keyhole a couple of times.

“哢哒”.

The lock is open.

Su Yue stood by the window, a cold smile playing on her lips.

This lock-picking technique doesn't seem like something a rural peasant woman would know.

"Mother."

A small hand tugged at my trouser leg.

Gu Ping'an had climbed onto the chair at some point, leaned against the windowsill, pressed his little face against the glass, and stared intently down below with his dark eyes.

He raised the wooden gun in his hand, pointed it at the dark figure, and uttered two words, crisp and clear.

"secretly!"

"Shh." Su Yue put her index finger to her lips, picked up her son, and said, "Come on, let's go catch mice."

The mixing room was dark.

Lin Zhaodi dared not turn on the light, holding a flashlight in her mouth with the beam extremely low, illuminating only the rows of labeled reagent bottles on the table.

She was breathing rapidly, and her hands were trembling.

There it is!

Right next to the innermost safe, there was a brown glass bottle labeled "Core Mother Liquid".

As long as I get this, I'll get the thousand yuan that Deputy Factory Director Wang from the provincial capital promised!

That's a thousand yuan! Enough for her to build three large brick houses in the countryside and never have to live at the mercy of others again.

She reached out her hand, her fingertips just touching the cold glass bottle.

"Smack!"

The lights were on.

The sudden, blinding white light made Lin Zhaodi instinctively close her eyes, let out a short scream, and lose her grip on the bottle, which crashed to the ground with a thud.

Thankfully, it was explosion-proof glass and didn't break.

"Taking things without asking is a bad habit."

Su Yue leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, followed by several burly security officers. Chen Xinyue stood beside her, her face contorted with anger, holding a notebook.

Gu Ping'an, perched on the neck of a security officer, looked down at Lin Zhaodi with a tense expression, then added insult to injury.

"bad!"

Lin Zhaodi's legs went weak, and she collapsed to the ground.

"I...I didn't...I just went to the wrong door..." she was still being stubborn, shrinking under the table.

"Wrong door?" Su Yue walked over, her high heels clicking on the floor tiles. "Wrong door and you can pick three locks without any instruction? Wrong door and you can accurately find this bottle of undiluted mother liquor?"

She bent down, picked up the bottle, and shook it in her hand.

"Do you know what this is? It's a high concentration of active enzymes. Without proper protective clothing, if this stuff gets on you, it can corrode your skin and flesh."

Lin Zhaodi shuddered in fright and crawled backward on all fours until her back hit the wall, leaving her with nowhere to retreat.

"No...don't arrest me! I had no choice...someone forced me to do this!"

Her psychological defenses crumbled even faster than Su Yue had anticipated.

In less than ten minutes, the woman had confessed her entire family history.

It's nothing new, just a cliché. The state-owned daily chemical factory in the provincial capital used to be the industry leader, but in the last six months, "Qiongdao Blue" has taken so much of its business that it can't even get a slice of the soup. Deputy factory director Wang Desheng was desperate and didn't want to spend money on research and development, so he came up with a crooked idea: he hired someone to steal the formula.

"Wang Desheng?" Su Yue murmured the name, toying with the brown bottle in her hand. "Trying to pick ready-made peaches? You've got quite the appetite."

"Sister, let's call the police!" Chen Xinyue said, her face flushed with anger. "This kind of person should be sent to jail!"

"Call the police?" Su Yue shook her head. "That's too lenient on him. At most, the police will only arrest an accomplice. That Deputy Factory Director Wang can easily find a scapegoat to clear himself. Besides, it's too difficult to gather evidence for industrial espionage."

She put the bottle back on the table, turned around and walked to the lab bench, picked up a pen and wrote a string of chemical formulas.

"If he wants it, then give it to him."

Chen Xinyue leaned closer to take a look, her eyes widening in surprise: "This...this isn't the one we abandoned..."

“This is Plan Two.” Su Yue’s pen continued to move. “It looks exactly the same as the genuine product. There is no difference in color, smell, or initial feel. In fact, because of the addition of excessive amounts of cheap thickener, the texture is even ‘thicker’ than the genuine product.”

She stopped writing, tore off the piece of paper, and folded it neatly.

"The only downside is that this stuff is extremely unstable. Once it comes into contact with oxygen in the air, if it stays for more than seven days, the active ingredients inside will quickly oxidize and ferment, turning into a puddle of foul-smelling yellow liquid, and it will cause severe skin allergies and rashes."

Chen Xinyue gasped.

This is a bombshell.

It's still a time-delayed detonation bomb.

"Listen." Su Yue walked up to Lin Zhaodi and stuffed the note into her still trembling hand. "I won't arrest you or call the police. Take this and give it to that Deputy Factory Director Wang. You can keep the thousand yuan."

Lin Zhaodi was dumbfounded, clutching the note as if it were a hot potato: "This...this..."

"What? You don't want the money anymore?" Su Yue's voice turned cold. "Or do you want to spend a few years in the police station?"

"Yes! I want it!" Lin Zhaodi nodded frantically, clutching the note tightly in her hand. "I'm leaving right now! I'm leaving right now!"

“Remember this.” Su Yue leaned down and whispered in her ear, “This formula was stolen with great difficulty. If that guy surnamed Wang sees through it, you won’t just lose your thousand yuan, you’ll also spend the rest of your life in jail. I don’t need to teach you how to act, do I?”

"I know! I know!"

Lin Zhaodi scrambled out of the gate and quickly disappeared into the night.

"Sister, are you really letting her go?" Chen Xinyue was still a little unwilling.

"Cast a long line to catch a big fish." Su Yue looked out at the thick night, a ruthless glint in her eyes. "Once that Factory Director Wang gets the formula, he'll definitely produce day and night to seize the market. Once this batch of goods is distributed throughout the supply and marketing cooperatives across the province..."

She didn't say anything more.

But Chen Xinyue had already understood.

The wider the operation, the more disastrous the consequences. It's not just about losing money; it's about the complete collapse of the entire state-owned factory's reputation. This tactic of using someone else to do the dirty work, without bloodshed, can utterly destroy the opponent.

"That woman is so wicked." Gu Ping'an, riding on the shoulders of the security officer, suddenly blurted out, patted the officer's head with his little hand, and then added as if he remembered something, "Mom is amazing."

Su Yue picked up her son and kissed him on the forehead.

"Son, remember this. When dealing with people who want to steal our jobs, we can't just beat them up. We have to make them spit out what they've taken, with interest, and also smash the pot."

...