How many times have you brought them home?

Fang Chang'an exchanged a few casual words with Cheng Mengfei, then went upstairs to the study. He turned on Shen Chengyan's computer and skillfully logged into his account to check the status of his three stocks. Since he was unable to open an account in his own name, he kept all his investments in Shen Chengyan's account.

As always, Kweichow Moutai, the stock he had originally been most optimistic about, turned out to be the most sluggish. Its share price had only risen from 21 three years ago to 47, barely a little over double. Tencent had climbed from 0.8 when initially purchased two years ago to 3.0 in Hong Kong dollars, nearly tripling. The most eye-catching performer was Apple, which had surged from an initial purchase price of 0.4 to 2.1 in US dollars—a fivefold increase. And this was even after a correction this year; at the beginning of the year, it had exceeded 3.1, approaching an eightfold gain.

After the Spring Festival last year, Shen Chengyan successively expanded his business into the nearby Shahe Town and Xinguan Town. Although both towns had two middle schools each, their scale could not compare with Huangnan Township. The only "advantage" was that the school cafeterias over there were even worse, making their stuffed buns extremely popular.

The bun shop generated a monthly profit of around 30,000 during the school term in the township. Meanwhile, the combined profit from the other two towns had once surpassed Huangnan Township, but later, as those cafeterias made improvements, the profits gradually declined and leveled off.

The profit Fang Chang'an could actually pocket amounted to around 20,000 per month, and this was with him only holding a thirty percent dividend share. Of course, he was not ungrateful; rather, it was through this venture that he truly grasped the immense potential of the "retail" market.

These were only three townships, yet Qinglong County alone had eighteen towns, not to mention that Yunlong City had five districts and four counties. The sheer scale of the student food market alone made one's mouth water just to think about it.

Of course, if Shen Chengyan leveraged Shen Baoguo's influence to continue expanding into the surrounding towns, it might still be possible, but the difficulty would certainly increase steadily. Venturing any further out would practically be impossible without resorting to certain "commercial tactics."

Fang Chang'an had no intention of interfering in this aspect; he would leave all decisions entirely up to Shen Chengyan.

Over the past three years, Fang Chang'an's dividends from the bun shop had exceeded 200,000, all of which he poured into the stock market. During this time, based on his self-studied theoretical knowledge and current conditions—primarily observing which stocks rose the most—he adjusted the purchase proportions of the three stocks.

Presently, this 200,000 worth of stock was valued at around 500,000.

From the perspective of someone reborn, earning only 500,000 in three years—especially when a large part of it was due to luck—was somewhat embarrassing. But realistically speaking, at the present time, this sum of money was already a massive fortune, comfortably enough for two apartments in the city center.

As Fang Chang'an was pondering whether he could seize the summer vacation to find another get-rich-quick opportunity, Shen Chengyan walked in and leaned over to take a look. When Fang Chang'an offered to give up his seat, Shen Chengyan pressed a hand on his shoulder, pulled over a chair from the nearby desk, sat down, and smiled. "Finished your exams, and you're already scheming to get rich again?"

Fang Chang'an chuckled. "I'm fine either way, but Uncle Shen, you're about to become a dad. You've got to find ways to make more money, haven't you?"

"What, do you have another idea?"

"Not yet, still feeling a bit unsettled."

Fang Chang'an sighed with deliberately affected maturity. "Uncle Shen, you say we've made so much money buying stocks, just how much must those real big bosses be making?"

Shen Chengyan laughed. "What? You're just a kid, and you already want to be a boss yourself?"

"No, I was just wondering how much of that is economic bubble. You know what that means, right?"

Annoyed, Shen Chengyan gave him a light smack on the head. "Speak human."

Fang Chang'an curled his lips and said, "Before, I was busy with school every day and had no time for wild thoughts. Now that the high school entrance exams are over, and I see my stocks are worth around 500,000, I'm feeling a bit uneasy..."

He paused, then asked with some hesitation, "Logically speaking, it shouldn't be this easy to make money in the stock market, right?"

Shen Chengyan nodded. "Of course it's not that easy. You're doing well just not losing money."

"That's exactly my point! Both of us are half-baked amateurs, yet we made money so easily!"

Fang Chang'an agreed wholeheartedly, then pondered for a moment before asking uncertainly, "Do you think we're approaching a turning point where things go to their extreme and reverse?"

Shen Chengyan didn't quite catch his drift. "What do you mean?"

"An economic crisis."

As Fang Chang'an spoke, he opened Baidu, which was not yet as decadent and rampant as it would become in later years. "Logically speaking, an economic crisis shouldn't have anything to do with our country, but we live in a globalized world now. China is also an indispensable and vital component of the world economy, and will only become more important. What happens if there's a major upheaval?"

"Of course, a worldwide economic crisis isn't all that common, but the most crucial factor is the United States. Since everyone uses US dollars and they can print money almost infinitely, if something goes wrong over there, wouldn't they drag everyone down with them?"

The global economic crisis of 2008 was triggered by the US subprime mortgage crisis. While the actual economic crisis manifested in 2008, early signs of the subprime mortgage crisis were already beginning to surface in early 2006.

Fang Chang'an couldn't possibly remember every specific detail; he only remembered that there would be this economic crisis. In order to lay the groundwork for some of his future actions, he had intended to look it up, only to find that reports regarding the "subprime mortgage crisis" had already appeared.

Shen Chengyan leaned closer to the screen, looked at it, and asked with perplexity, "What's this about?"

"I was just bored and looked it up to understand what subprime mortgages are all about. To put it briefly, since they're the boss anyway, and their financial, military, and technological hegemonies are unbreakable, they just rake in money recklessly. Capitalist countries certainly don't care about capital, nor can they control it, so they'll do whatever it takes to make more money, stacking bubbles layer upon layer."

After finishing, Fang Chang'an put on an expression of "actually, I don't quite get it either." "Did you understand that?"

Shen Chengyan thought for a moment. "So you think an economic crisis is coming?"

"Uh... not quite. It's just that I made 500,000 out of 20万 so easily without doing anything, and it makes me a bit nervous."

"So you're saying we should sell the stocks?"

Shen Chengyan pondered for a moment and nodded. "I think that's reasonable. We've made enough already, and Apple's share price keeps dropping; who knows when it'll ever bounce back."

"We definitely have to sell, but there's no need to rush just yet."

Fang Chang'an hadn't expected Shen Chengyan to be so easily convinced. Still, he was merely planting an early precaution; if he were actually forced to sell the stocks now, he would rather die than do it. "If something really happens, even if the two of us fail to react in time, don't we still have Momo's dad?"

Shen Chengyan nodded again, looking somewhat relieved, and gave Fang Chang'an another swat on the head. "You scared me. I thought you kid was planning to take the money and do something bad. Since when do you get nervous?"

"What kind of person do you take me for?"

Only then did Fang Chang'an realize that Shen Chengyan had suspected him of finding an excuse to withdraw the huge sum of 500,000 yuan and was testing him with leading questions. He had originally thought Shen Chengyan trusted him to the point of absolute obedience without a second thought, but it turned out he had been overly sentimental and moved over nothing.

However, when dealing with such a massive sum of money, even parents would surely cross-examine their children thoroughly, and whether they would agree was another matter entirely. This no longer had much to do with mere trust.

"Right, let me tell you something."

After some idle chatter, Shen Chengyan seemed to suddenly recall something and said to Fang Chang'an, "You remember Mazude, the party secretary of your village, right?"

Fang Chang'an nodded, vaguely guessing what Shen Chengyan was about to say.

"His disciplinary results came down. Stripped of his position, expelled, and sentenced to a year."

Shen Chengyan wore a somewhat helpless expression. Fang Chang'an didn't ask further—even if he asked, he wouldn't dare write about it. In any case, Fang Chang'an was quite satisfied. The net of heaven is vast, with meshes wide, but it lets nothing through; corrupt officials had received severe punishment.

He stayed at Shen Chengyan's house until dusk, though Fang Chang'an didn't stay for dinner. When he returned home, Fang Lujun was minding the shop and had asked Cong Rong to go home and cook. Both Fang Changming and Fang Yanran had already finished school and arrived home.

"As the old saying goes, 'Even in a bustling market, poverty brings no visitors; deep in the mountains, wealth draws distant kin.' It's only now that I truly understand what that means."

While stirring a dish in one wok and boiling peanuts and corn in another, Cong Rong sighed somewhat sentimentally to her eldest son, "For all these years, when has your eldest uncle ever been this good to our family? This time, he actually thought of sending us some of their newly harvested spring peanuts and corn."

Fang Chang'an smiled. "In the past, our family farmed our own land, so we didn't need anyone to send us any."

Cong Rong sighed. "Sigh, it's different..."

She paused, scooped the stir-fried dish out of the wok, and continued, "A few days ago, your uncle came back from home and brought two bottles of sesame oil, giving us one. He said your grandmother pressed it at the mill on the east side of the village and saved it for us... I've been married into this family for so many years, and this is the first time."

Fang Chang'an smiled. "Should we pay him for it?"

"You have no seriousness!"

During dinner, Fang Changan brought up the matter regarding Mazude. Cong Rong paused, sighed again, and said, "It's no use. Even if they replace him, how much better can the next one be?"

"Then we'll replace them again, get rid of those current folks, or have an official college student village cadre assigned here, and things will get better. I just don't know when that policy will reach our place."

Fang Chang'an had no idea when such a policy had actually come into existence; he had just tossed it out casually, and Cong Rong didn't take it seriously. She asked instead, "Are you sure you applied for City No. 1 High School?"

"Yeah."

Cong Rong nodded and asked again, "What about Wang Ke?"

"How would I know that?"

"Classmates can discuss these things with each other."

"We haven't estimated our scores yet, have we? We'll know after we estimate the scores."

Before Cong Rong could speak again, Fang Changming, who had been watching television the entire time, suddenly turned his head and asked in a low voice, "Mom, are you suspecting my brother is in an early relationship?"

"Nonsense, when did I ever suspect your brother of being in an early relationship?"

Cong Rong retorted first, then immediately followed up with, "Did you hear something at school?"

Fang Changming glanced at his eldest brother and pouted. "No. Even if he were in a relationship, he wouldn't let me know."

Come to think of it, before entering junior high school, he had always prepared to make a big name for himself at school so he could protect his eldest brother.

As it turned out, shortly after transferring to the township's No. 2 Primary School, he happened to walk past a fight on his way home from school. It seemed some students from No. 2 Primary had a falling out and called upon their respective "backers." The confrontation was quite fierce, leaving him both thrilled and terrified.

Then, as he watched from afar, someone in the crowd seemed to recognize him and shouted something to the combatants. Following that, inexplicably, the two factions who had been fighting so fiercely stopped and all walked toward his direction.

Fang Changming was startled and baffled. Although the kids who fought in town were wild, and bystanders occasionally got caught in the crossfire, with so many people around, why on earth were they all coming to trouble him?

Frightened, he almost bolted on the spot, but he felt his legs go a bit weak. Moreover, there were towering junior high school students on both sides, and he figured he couldn't outrun them. Thus, he forced himself to stay calm, turned his head away, and feigned a curious expression, acting as if he was equally puzzled about who they were looking to cause trouble for.

One group walked faster than the other. The slower group seemed anxious, terrified of being wronged, and shouted from afar, "They started it!"

Then the ones walking in front shouted back, "Bullshit! It was obviously your younger brother who cursed my sister first..."

Fang Changming looked over at that person's sister and discovered she was in his class—quite a pretty girl, too. Not daring to speak, he quietly listened to the two sides bicker for a while longer until he finally began to dawn on the realization: did kids in town fight so civilly?

Fortunately, the spokespeople for both sides seemed tired of arguing, or perhaps seeing that he remained completely mute, grew impatient. Finally, someone uttered words Fang Changming could understand: "How about we stop fighting right now? Just don't tell your brother, okay?"

The pretty little girl from his class probably heard what was said and timidly walked over to plead with him: "Fang Changming, please don't tell your brother, okay?"

That was an autumn evening bathed in half-sky sunset glow. Eleven-year-old Fang Changming sank into deep doubt and unease. He suspected his parents had lied to him and that he had an even older brother than his eldest... Perhaps his parents had always wanted a girl, and upon having all boys, they gave one away to another family—probably right here in the township...

Now, after spending a year at No. 2 Middle School, Fang Changming understood his eldest brother's "true colors" all too well. Among the various legends circulating around the school and the township, there indeed were tales of early relationships, though people didn't dare discuss them too explicitly even in private, only mentioning who was particularly close to whom, or who always sat next to whom...

But their mother already knew all of that. His eldest brother had brought people home countless times, so there was naturally no need for him to run and snitch.