"People outside even think you are stupid, so you don't care about things, for fear of being exposed if you care too much," Yuan Jiangxing couldn't help but persuade him, "Zhiyu, I agree with you not to fight when you are in the capital. That position is not so easy to sit in. Sometimes it is like a cage. But now there is only this place in Jiangnan, and the world has changed. You don't have to endure it anymore.
Zhiyu, you are a capable person. It’s not that I don’t want you to rest, but... I just feel it’s a pity.”
"I don't think it's a pity, that's good," Fu Zhiyu smiled and lowered his head, "Uncle, you don't have to persuade me, just leave it like this, I think it's good."
Fu Zhiyu now just felt that he was in the most comfortable position and didn't want to move at all.
Everything went as he wished. The annoying people didn't show up, and his family members whom he missed so much were all around him. They were all doing well, and he felt that there was really no reason for him to change his life.
The whole Jiangnan area is doing pretty well now, there's no need for us to get involved.
As for the post, he threw it aside and ignored it.
After hearing what he said, Yuan Jiangxing sighed. After knowing what he meant, he stopped trying to persuade him and left with the note.
About a month later, the shop opened by Yuan Lu and Ming Dao was opened. It was a jade shop named Mingyuexuan. Fu Zhiyu was invited several times by the two younger ones. He did not go on the first day to join in the crowded hustle and bustle so as not to make them too busy to take care of it. He just gave a gift and went the next day.
"Cousin, come and see which one you like?" Yuan Lu laughed. At first glance, it was hard to tell that he was the owner of this shop. "Take whatever you like. I will never hesitate."
"No need. Didn't I give you the sword as a gift?" Fu Zhiyu said, "I still have it on my head."
"That was the jade craftsman I found," Yuan Lu glanced at his head and said with emotion, "Sure enough, this looks best on my cousin. Wearing this jade on my cousin's head is a blessing for him."
Fu Zhiyu lowered his head and smiled, without saying much.
Yuan Mingdao was out temporarily as a batch of new goods was being escorted in from outside the city and he had to go and keep an eye on it. So Fu Zhiyu sat in the shop and waited for a while.
The shop Yuan Lu chose was very big, with three floors and partitions. Fu Zhiyu sat in a partition on the first floor drinking tea. Yuan Lu was also busy, so he chatted with him for a few words. Before he could finish his words, he was pulled out to do business.
The jade from southern Xinjiang is indeed top-notch, and the shops are full of people buying it one after another without stopping.
There were some books in the compartment, and Fu Zhiyu was not idle either. He took a casual look at them. They were probably brought back from southern Xinjiang. Some were storybooks, and some were travel notes recording the customs and folkways of southern Xinjiang. They were quite fresh. Anyway, he had nothing to do now, so he picked up a book at random, and flipped through the pages while drinking tea and eating snacks.
Before he finished reading the beginning of the book, he heard a commotion outside.
Yuan Lu was not so cute to outsiders. Fu Zhiyu heard his cold voice: "Deng Jinghe, get out of here. I don't want to do business with you in my store."
Fu Zhiyu was stunned, put down the tea in his hand and looked outside.
Yuan Lu was angry on the one hand, but the name Deng Jinghe attracted his attention for a moment.
No one can clearly tell the relative rankings of the four tycoons in Jiangnan, Yuanlin, Deng and Qian. It is a principle that everyone adheres to, not showing off their wealth. Moreover, as they do so much business, even the heads of the families cannot tell how much money their family has, making it even more impossible to make comparisons.
Deng Jinghe is that "Deng". He is considered a competitor of the Yuan family.
Not only that, Deng Jinghe is a very important character in the middle and late stages of the original novel, and left a deep impression on Fu Zhiyu.
In his previous life, the Yuan family was massacred in the capital, and Yuan Jiangwen's original business was greatly affected. Although each store had a shopkeeper, they were leaderless. What's more, the incident happened suddenly and no one was prepared. It is conceivable that the Yuan family's business was swallowed up in the chaos.
Fu Zhiyu was already in a difficult situation at that time, and had no time to care about what was happening in Jiangnan, thousands of miles away. It was only after he read the original novel that he knew everything that happened later.
The Deng family swallowed up most of the businesses left by Yuan Jiangwen. After the integration, they had become the richest businessman in Jiangnan. At that time, the head of the Deng family was the young Deng Jinghe, who looked about the same age as himself.
In the middle and late stages of the original novel, he cooperated with Xie Ke and took over the isolated area of Southern Xinjiang in the form of business without bloodshed. Xie Ke was able to unify the continent successfully, and Deng Jinghe also became a top-notch imperial merchant of the time. Apart from the emperor, he was probably the richest man in the world.
In the previous life, Fu Zhiyu and his timeline were a long way off, and the two had never met.
Now when he heard the name, the memory of the original work came flooding back all at once, making Fu Zhiyu a little dazed.
He had lived in comfort for too long, and sometimes he almost forgot that there was such a thing as the original work.
Deng Jinghe's life was quite dramatic. His mother was a prostitute who had an affair with Master Deng. After she accidentally became pregnant, she was brought into the Deng family as a concubine because of her status as a son. However, Master Deng was a playboy all his life. The people in his courtyard were even more numerous than those in the emperor's harem, and he had countless confidantes outside. Deng Jinghe's mother was jealous, short-sighted, and a little stupid. She tried to win favor several times but was discovered every time, causing unrest in the family. She was still put in solitary confinement when she was in premature labor and gave birth to the child in the woodshed. Unfortunately, she did not survive the night and died the next day.
Although the Deng family had many women in the backyard, they did not have many descendants. There was only one son and one daughter born to the first wife, and no one born out of wedlock. The head of the Deng family was romantic and cruel. He would always prepare medicine for the other party and watch them drink it. Deng Jinghe's was really a pure accident. After all, the brothel was not his own home. Master Deng drank too much and forgot about it. The next morning he hurried to deal with business matters. He did not expect that he would be infected.
Originally they wanted to abort the baby, but the old lady of the Deng family was a Buddhist. Coincidentally, she had asked for divination at the beginning of the year, which said that it was not suitable to see blood or kill this year, and that one should be kind in everything, otherwise it would be detrimental to the Deng family's fortune. So she stopped them from having the abortion.
Deng Jinghe's mother dared to act so arrogantly because of her pregnancy. She violated the family rules several times in a row. The final punishment was just to lock her up in the woodshed for a few days to reflect on herself. After all, no one knew that she would have a miscarriage at that time. If it were someone else, she would probably be beaten to death.
After Deng Jinghe was born, he was raised by the old lady until he could speak, and then he was sent to a remote small house. The old lady saved his life, but she didn't like him at all. The only good impression she had about him was that Deng Jinghe's mother happened to die the day after the Chinese New Year, so her fortune was not tarnished.
Deng Jinghe had a very poor childhood. As the son of a wealthy businessman in Jiangnan, he almost starved to death several times before he gained some power.
When Fu Zhiyu read the original novel, he couldn't help comparing him with the people around him. He felt that he was a bit like Fu Lingxiao, and a bit like King Xi Dan. He had Fu Lingxiao's duplicity, and King Xi Dan's madness of not caring about anything.
The book describes him as having a handsome face but an elusive mind. If Fu Lingxiao is like a snake and King Xi Dan is like a wolf, then Deng Jinghe is like... a fox
Fu Zhiyu listened to the noise outside getting louder and louder. As he thought about it, he couldn't help but lift the curtain and take a look outside.
"... Look at you," Deng Jinghe said, facing the bullying Yuan Lu, his expression did not change at all, he shook his head, sighed and said, "It doesn't matter whose business it is. I really like that jade ruyi, it's a rare and good thing, and it just so happens that it's the old lady's birthday recently, and I promised my grandmother that I would give her a beautiful thing.
Yuan Lu, we are friends now, so just sell it to me and I won’t bargain, okay?”
Yuan Lu has always been kind to others. When he first met Deng Jinghe, he foolishly thought that the other party had a pitiful life and was a good person who never stopped striving for self-improvement. He planned to make friends with him. However, he was cheated by Deng Jinghe and a business line slipped away from him. Although Yuan Jiangwen thought it was not a big problem, it was normal to pay some tuition fees for doing business. If Yuan Lu could really learn something, learn to judge people, and be more careful in everything, then it would not be a loss.
Yuan Lu has grown up, but he will never forget that failure, so much so that he vowed to be irreconcilable with Deng Jinghe. This time, he won the battle for the Nanjiang Jade Mine with Deng Jinghe by tit-for-tat, which was a way for him to vent his anger.
But Yuan Lu knew very well that the man in front of him had no bottom line. Perhaps because of the regrets in his youth, Deng Jinghe had an overly obsessive obsession with money, so much so that he would do anything to achieve his goal and did not believe in feelings at all.
People with different ideas cannot work together. Yuan Lu didn't want to communicate with him anymore.
Deng Jinghe looked at the people in the store surrounding him, so he took a step back but still did not leave. He was about to say something else when he happened to see a person walking out of a small room on the other side.
Someone he had never met.
Fu Zhiyu was dressed simply today, in a plain white robe without any decoration on his body. His long hair was simply tied up with the jade hairpin given by Yuan Mingdao. The breeze blew through the hall, blowing up the few strands of hair that were lazily hanging on the sides of his cheeks.
He was just a little curious about Deng Jinghe, and also heard Yuan Lu's angry voice. He felt that it was not good for him to just sit there and listen, so he simply came out. But after he came out, the noise stopped all of a sudden.
Yuan Wanyun kept praising him for being more and more beautiful. Fortunately, he didn't like to go out, otherwise he would have delayed so many girls from other families. Fu Zhiyu always thought that it was just his mother's motherly filter. He was used to looking at his own face. It was quite good-looking, but he didn't think it was particularly stunning, let alone to the extent described by his mother.
But Yuan Wanyun was really not exaggerating.
She didn't know what her son had eaten, but just like the blood in his body, it always had an inexplicable attraction to people, and sometimes even made her worried.
Fu Zhiyu didn't care about the affairs of the rear house and usually didn't need anyone to serve him. He didn't know that the servants in his house had been replaced several times by the housekeeper Zhou. There were always some daring people who coveted the master, but fortunately they were all stopped. Some people got unlucky for no apparent reason, but they kept coming and couldn't be controlled. The latest batch looked quite honest, but they didn't last long and had problems one after another. Several maids who wanted to climb into the bed had been dealt with by the housekeeper Zhou.
There are countless beauties in the Deng family's backyard. Deng Jinghe has traveled all over the country over the years and has seen countless beauties, but he has never seen one like this. After taking a look at her, he couldn't say the words that were about to come out of his mouth.