The coffee at the Yoozoo Games headquarters in Shanghai always tasted like ambition. It was the winter of 2020, and the air inside the executive suites was thick with the kind of tension that only hundreds of millions of dollars can buy. Lin Qi was a man who wanted to own the future. At 39, the billionaire tycoon was young, charismatic, and obsessed with a literary universe where humanity faces an existential threat from an alien civilization. He had spent years, and a small fortune, buying up the global rights to Liu Cixin’s sci-fi masterpiece, The Three-Body Problem. He wanted to build an empire out of it.
Across the desk sat Xu Yao.
Xu was a brilliant corporate attorney, educated in France and the United States, hired to handle the massive legal maze of transferring these rights to global giants like Netflix. He was meticulous. He was proud. But on this particular winter day, the relationship between the billionaire and his top executive had completely deteriorated. Lin Qi had decided to cut Xu Yao’s salary. Worse, he was sidelining him, giving the credit for the massive Netflix deal to other executives.
In the high-stakes world of corporate entertainment, people get fired, demystified, or moved to lesser departments every day. Usually, they pack their boxes, sign a non-disclosure agreement, and nurse their wounds at a competitor.
Xu Yao chose a different path. He built a laboratory.
The Chemistry of Resentment
To understand how a corporate dispute transforms into a plot from a dark thriller, you have to look past the balance sheets. You have to look at the human ego under immense pressure. Xu Yao did not just want to leave the company; he wanted to erase the man who had diminished him.
He rented a makeshift lab in a remote district of Shanghai. He went online, using the dark web to purchase a cocktail of lethal toxins. Reports later revealed he bought at least hundreds of different poisons, testing them meticulously on small animals—stray dogs and cats—to see how they succumbed. He was looking for the perfect blend. Something slow. Something agonizing. Something that looked like a sudden illness.
Consider the terrifying patience required for this. This was not a crime of passion. It was a cold, calculated engineering project. Xu Yao mixed a lethal concoction that included mercury, tetrodotoxin—the deadly nerve toxin found in pufferfish—and thallium.
In December 2020, he brought his creation into the office.
He didn't use a dramatic weapon. He used a bottle of probiotic pills and a cup of tea. It was an ordinary, mundane gesture of workplace routine. Lin Qi drank it, feeling slightly unwell later that afternoon. Within days, the billionaire was hospitalized.
The news hit Shanghai’s tech sector like a thunderbolt. On December 25, 2020, Christmas Day, Lin Qi’s heart stopped. The young billionaire, who had dreamed of seeing his name plastered across the opening credits of the biggest show on television, was dead.
The Ripple Effect of a Single Cup of Tea
When a billionaire dies under suspicious circumstances, the market reacts first. Yoozoo Games stock plummeted. The police swarmed the executive offices. But the true horror of Xu Yao's plan extended far beyond his primary target.
Poison is an indiscriminate weapon, even in the hands of a meticulous lawyer.
Xu had also poisoned the office beverages of the executives who had replaced him in Lin Qi's favor. Two other colleagues drank from contaminated cups. They did not die, but the toxins tore through their bodies, leaving them with chronic illnesses and permanent physical damage. The corporate betrayal had bled into a literal poisoning of the entire executive ecosystem.
The police arrested Xu Yao almost immediately. The evidence in his secret laboratory was overwhelming. Yet, even as he sat in a interrogation room, the massive machinery Lin Qi had set in motion kept moving. The Netflix adaptation of The Three-Body Problem was already in production. Directors were hired. Scripts were written. Actors were blocked into scenes.
The dead man’s dream was alive, even if he wasn't there to see it.
This creates a bizarre, eerie disconnect for anyone watching the show today. When you see the executive producer credits roll at the beginning of an episode, Lin Qi’s name is there. It sits silently on the screen, a digital monument to a man who was murdered because he wanted to bring this exact story to the world. The narrative on screen is about cosmic survival, but the narrative behind the scenes was about old-fashioned, lethal human jealousy.
The Final Judgment in Shanghai
The wheels of justice in China move with a heavy, unyielding finality. The trial of Xu Yao dragged on for over three years, hidden behind the closed doors of the Shanghai First Intermediate People's Court. The details that emerged painting a picture of an extraordinarily cruel mind. The court noted that Xu’s actions were "extremely malicious" and that he had never shown true remorse for the lives he destroyed or the terror he caused.
In March 2024, the verdict was handed down. Death.
But the story didn't end with the sentence. In the Chinese legal system, the gap between a death sentence and its execution involves a rigorous review process by the Supreme People's Court. That process concluded recently.
On a quiet morning, the state carried out the execution of Xu Yao.
There was no fanfare. No dramatic final statements broadcast to the public. Just the cold, clinical application of the law. The man who had spent months carefully measuring out toxins in a hidden Shanghai lab to end his boss’s life had his own life ended by the state.
It is easy to view this entire saga as a sensational headline, a bizarre piece of trivia attached to a hit television series. But when you strip away the Hollywood connections, the streaming rights, and the billionaire status, you are left with something deeply tragic and terrifyingly ordinary. It is a story about how easily the human mind can warp when pride is wounded.
The massive sci-fi epic Lin Qi purchased was about the vastness of the universe and the insignificance of human squabbles. Yet, in the end, the billionaire could not survive the very human, very small malice brewing right across his own boardroom table. The credits still roll on television screens across the globe, a flickering reminder that sometimes, the most dangerous monsters aren't the ones coming from the stars. They are the ones sitting in the office next door, pouring a cup of tea.
