Bitcoin Billionaire: I Regressed to Invest in the First Bitcoin!-Chapter 235: Dragon’s Lair (Recap)

There, standing beside the Mercedes, was the Romanian girl from Cluj-Napoca — the one who'd given him the black card. Next to her stood a man, tall and gaunt, his expensive coal-black suit tailored to perfection, his face scarred and cruel, like a blade given human form.

The girl gave him an impassive look, but her eyes never left his, and the man beside her, he appeared to be proud, her curious.

Darren's mind could only think of the words 'Lotus Triad' and Rachel's safety when he was forced into the car.

The door clicked shut.

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Forget everything else. Forget conspiracies, old flames, or ancient secrets. This is about the money. The big money. Darren and Rachel are hunting one thing: 1,200,000 Bitcoins.

Think of it like buried digital gold. Right now, it might seem like $4,800,000 (if you squint hard at $4 per coin). But Darren sees the future – a staggering $180 million.

That fortune is locked away in a digital vault owned by a dead man – a hacker named Vladimir Skinner, known online as NakamuraGhost. He crashed his car, but his fortune crashed with him, sealed tight.

The Key? Not a physical key, but twelve words.

A seed phrase. This is the only password to unlock that digital vault and grab the Bitcoins. Lose one word, get the order wrong? The fortune stays frozen forever.

NakamuraGhost was paranoid; he split those twelve crucial words up and hid them in places only he trusted.

But here's how this particular chase has unfolded;

It started with the spark, when Rachel found a flicker in the digital underworld – a post confirming NakamuraGhost's death.

Why was this post so popular? Because NakamuraGhost had 1.2 million Bitcoins locked away. Now everyone in the crypto world wants to find where these Bitcoins are. But not everyone has the resources to.

Darren Steele? He had the resources.

So the first clue was a piece of the seed phrase was hidden in a grimy Berlin cybercafé NakamuraGhost used back in 2010. That's where they started. The target was clear: find the words, unlock the wallet.

In the café, they met a nervous hacker named Klaus. He didn't have the words, but he had a deal: give him some darknet data, get a drive. That drive held the first three words of the seed phrase. A quarter of the key!

But Rachel quickly found out that there weren't alone in this search, and Darren was even quicker to guess who could be chasing after the Bitcoins as well.

Following Klaus's lead, they hit a dusty safehouse. Rachel dug into an ancient computer, pulled out a hidden USB drive. Jackpot: three more words.

Now they had six word, that was half the password! The drive also spat out the next location: a warehouse in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The trail was hot, and the word count was climbing.

At the storehouse — a server fortress guarded by Elena, they made another deal: $20,000 and some digital artifacts bought them another drive. Rachel cracked it open.

This was the motherlode: four more seed phrase words. Suddenly, they had TEN of the twelve!

That was Darren's system gave in and warned him, letting him know that Adam Scotland was coming for the Bitcoin.

Underneath a sleek art gallery lay NakamuraGhost's ultimate vault, they pieced together the last two words from clues gathered along the way.

Using a special token from Romania, they breached the vault. And there it was: the prize itself. Not just numbers on a screen, but a physical cold wallet – a small, unassuming device holding the entire 1.2 million Bitcoin fortune.

They had the wallet and the full twelve-word phrase to unlock it. Triumph turned to terror instantly. They were attacked by Scotland's men.

After fighting through smoke and attackers, Darren and Rachel burst into the parking garage, the cold wallet clutched tight. Freedom seemed meters away.

But then, more trouble came. Headlights flared out of nowhere, blinding them. Shadows resolved into six figures with rifles, blocking their escape.

The Lotus Triad had arrived.

Outgunned and cornered, they had no choice. They climbed into the Triad's car.

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The car finally stopped. Rough hands pulled them out into the damp chill of an underground garage, far darker and more oppressive than the one they'd just fled.

The only light came from the headlamps of black SUVs, casting long, distorted shadows. Men materialized from the gloom, not just the six from the garage, but dozens more.

They moved like soldiers, used to such actions, clad in dark tactical gear. Their faces were hidden behind strange masks – smooth, white ceramic etched with faint, swirling patterns that seemed to shift in the low light, giving them the eerie, emotionless visage of ghosts.

The only sound was the muffled scrape of boots on concrete and the low thrum of idling engines.

No one spoke. Rifle barrels nudged Darren and Rachel forward, towards a heavy, unmarked metal door set into the raw concrete wall.

As they got closer, a single symbol became visible, illuminated by a recessed red bulb above the frame: Three stylized lotus flowers, intertwined in a circle, carved deep into the steel.

It pulsed with a light that was very faint and yet managed to be extremely menacing at the same time.

One of the masked figures stepped forward, placed a hand on a scanner hidden beside the door. With a heavy thunk and a hiss of hydraulics, the door slid open, revealing not a well-lit corridor, but absolute darkness beyond.

A cold, stale draft smelling of dust, ozone, and something vaguely metallic washed over them. The rifles nudged again, harder this time.

Swallowing hard, Darren and Rachel glanced at each other and then stepped across the threshold, flanked by their silent, masked escorts.

The heavy door slammed shut behind them with finality, sealing them inside. The faint red glow of the triple-lotus logo was the last thing they saw before the darkness swallowed them whole.

They had arrived in the hidden heart of the Lotus Triad.

"What's happening, Darren?" Rachel muttered, filled with nothing but dread.

"Don't worry, Rachel," Darren said with as much assurance as he could gather. "Everything is going to be fine."

The hunt for the Bitcoin had led them straight into the dragon's lair.