Weihaiwei is almost the most prominent section in the entire east. After passing here, the ships plunge from the Yellow Sea into the Bohai Sea and head towards Jinmen.
Therefore, it has also become a meeting place. Ships coming from the south and the north gather here, replenish or unload their cargo, fill the cabins, and then sail elsewhere, spitting out soot.
This place is said to be the territory of the empire, but in fact it is "leased" by the Krupp Company.
This huge industrial trust comes from the Rhine River. The founder Krupp was born in an old Junker landowner family. Later, he relied on courage, luck, and superhuman skills to achieve today's career.
After the Krupp Company settled here, the churches, factories, huge chimneys, winding railways, and the smell of coal smoke that could be smelled everywhere made this place completely different from Kyushu, filled with a suffocating sense of conflict. .
The old scholar Ding Jinqun was walking leisurely on the road carrying a wine flask, causing many people to avoid him in disgust when they saw him. After all, no one wanted to be bumped into by an old drunkard early in the morning and be tainted by the smell of alcohol.
He didn't care, he just continued walking on his way. No one was blocking his way, so he didn't have to take a detour, which made him feel more comfortable.
It wasn't until he was hit by someone that this feeling of leisure finally disappeared.
"Hey, don't you have eyes?"
"Sorry, it's too dark to see clearly." The man opposite adjusted his sunglasses and smiled playfully.
"It's dark?"
Ding Jinqun looked up. The sun was so bright that just one look at it would make people shed tears.
"Okay, just think it's dark. Anyway, everything I see is dark. It's okay. Be careful next time."
"Wait a minute, brother, it was my fault that I bumped into you. How about I buy you a drink and apologize?"
"I already drank it in the morning." Ding Jinqun raised the wine bag in his hand.
"That was in the morning. What I want to treat you to is the lunch drink, which is just a meal away."
"After a while?" Ding Jinqun touched his chin, "It seems so, but..."
His eyes wandered, looking at the well-dressed man in front of him wearing sunglasses and a satin mandarin jacket, "I don't seem to recognize you."
"We got to know each other after drinking. By the way, I am a fortune teller. Others call me Liu Banxian."
"What about him?"
Ding Jinqun was obviously more concerned about the man behind Liu Banxian with a sword on his back and a fierce look on his face.
As soon as he raised his head to look at the other person, he was immediately pressed back by a fierce look, as if he saw a ferocious lion.
"He? He's my bodyguard, his name is Ren Qi."
Liu Banxian made a gesture behind him, signaling Ren Qi to restrain his murderous intent.
It wasn't until Ren Qi stopped looking at him that the suffocating pressure Ding Jinqun felt quickly disappeared.
"Hey, there are bodyguards? It seems that you, the fortune teller, are quite rich."
"Wealthy? No way! It's just that we have many enemies. If you bring a bodyguard to protect yourself, you will inevitably offend others."
"Your accent sounds like you're not from here?" Ding Jinqun was still a little wary.
"Of course not!"
With a click, Liu Banxian opened the paper fan, and a majestic landscape painting appeared on the fan.
"If I were here, you wouldn't say you haven't heard of my name.
Because I am straight-forward, whether it is the feng shui of the yang house or the blessing of the yin house, I can calculate it accurately and without any mistakes. Anyone who asks me for a fortune will already know my ability, and I will spread the word about it in the streets, so that no one will I don’t know, no one knows! ”
Ding Jinqun squinted at him, obviously he had never heard of such heroic self-promotion.
After a pause, he asked: "Sir, do you think I look like someone who can make a great fortune?"
Snap!
Liu Banxian took back the paper fan, held it in his hand, and said slowly: "There are many kinds of rapid success, and it does not necessarily mean having money to be successful.
For example, if a warrior performs meritorious service on the battlefield, receives a great reward, becomes a general, or becomes a high-ranking official in a territory, is this considered a meteoric rise? ”
"There is no greater success story than this!" Ding Jinqun agreed.
"And this businessman, a businessman, does business, sells rice and cloth, and is distributed in thirteen provinces. Can he be considered a meteoric rise?"
"Well," Ding Jinqun touched his chin, "Businessmen and their ilk have a bad reputation after all!"
"There is also this man of letters. All the sages and saints have been lonely since ancient times, but they worked hard to write a poem and a good article, and their names will be remembered through the ages. Is this considered a meteoric rise?"
"Forget it! How can this not be counted!"
Ding Jinqun's eyes widened, "This is what I want to ask sir!
Although the imperial examination is no longer popular nowadays, I feel that what I have learned in the past ten years and twenty years of study tours cannot be just a pile of old papers. They must be useful, but they have not been deeply explored and obtained. People just appreciate it. ”
"That's easy to say."
Liu Banxian tapped Ding Jinqun's nose with a paper fan, then turned sideways to measure the length of his face and the position of his facial features, and then said, "Sir, I think your face is not like that of an ordinary person."
"Of course not!"
Ding Jinqun nodded repeatedly, "My grandfather said that when I was born, the iron tree in my house that had not bloomed for a hundred years also bloomed some wonderful flowers!"
"This is certainly proof of a good sign!"
Liu Banxian held his shoulder affectionately and said, "I think I'm destined to be with you, sir. Why don't we go to a restaurant and have a good chat over wine?"
"Very good! I know a restaurant with reasonable prices and extremely delicious food, especially their roasted knives, which are unique in Weihaiwei! It's awesome! Shall I lead the way?"
"Sir, please lead the way!" Liu Banxian stretched out his hand.
So Ding Jinqun happily led the way, completely unaware of the whispers of the two people behind him.
"Didn't you say that fortune tellers don't lie when it comes to telling people's fortunes?" Ren Qi asked.
"I'm not lying either." Liu Banxian replied.
"But you just said that this person's face is "unlike ordinary people", isn't he just an ordinary person? Is it possible that everyone has hands longer than the knees like Liu Xuande, or like Huang Shang, with strange double eyes? ”
"You have to have strange eyes to be considered different from ordinary people?"
Liu Banxian smiled and said, "A Western philosopher once said that there are no two identical leaves in the world. When I say he is different from ordinary people, I just mean that he looks different from others. Even if they are brothers and sisters, you say they are different." They look alike, but they’re not so similar that they can’t be recognized, right?”
"It seems so."
Although he still felt that something didn't make sense, Ren Qi put aside his worries and concentrated on his duties as a bodyguard behind Liu Banxian.
"Dude, three sesame cakes, two pots of simmering knives, and a plate of peanuts!"
Ding Jinqun shouted happily as soon as he entered the door.
But the guy just walked forward coldly and stretched out his hand to Ding Jinqun.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"Give me the money first, then the wine." The waiter waved his palm. "When did this rule change?" Ding Jinqun frowned.
"Especially modified for you!"
The waiter pointed to the blackboard on the wall, "From the Dragon Boat Festival to now, you haven't returned any of the sixteen big boys. If I can let you sit down and order, it is already considered the kindness of our shopkeeper and respect for you."
"Is this called respect?" Ding Jinqun tapped his fingers on the table irritably.
"Okay, I settled the previous debt for him."
Liu Banxian took out three silver coins and slapped them on the table. "Please help me order the rest. The sesame biscuits are for dinner. They can only be considered as snacks at this time. Don't serve them yet. Change them to roast chicken and steam a fish for me." , a few more elbows, is this enough?”
"Enough! There's a rich man here, wait a minute, you three!" The waiter swept the money into his apron.
"There's also pork head, don't forget to serve the pig's head!" Ding Jinqun shouted at the top of his lungs.
Then he turned around and scratched his face in embarrassment, "You are a guest from out of town, and I ask you to invite me. How embarrassing are you?"
"Nothing!"
Liu Banxian waved his hand, "Money is something external to the body. It is something that is not brought in during life or taken away after death. If you don't spend it while you can enjoy it, what will you keep it for?"
"Huh?"
Ding Jinqun looked a little surprised, "What you said seems to have been said by an old friend of mine."
"Old friend?" Liu Banxian's hand holding the wine glass paused.
"Hey, we're not actually old friends, we just have an acquaintance. That person..."
"Did he sell you a landscape painting?"
"It's not a landscape painting," Ding Jinqun shook his head, "it's "Fenghua Continent"."
"That's right, "Fenghua Continent"!" Liu Banxian's voice also rose a bit.
"Huh?" Ding Jinqun felt something was wrong at this time, "Brother, how did you know?"
"Because I sold this picture to you back then."
Liu Banxian took off his sunglasses, his eyes glowing with water.
Ding Jinqun's eyes widened and he looked left and right. It took him a long time to recognize Liu Banxian.
"It's really you!"
Ding Jinqun clicked his tongue and said in surprise, "I thought that after meeting you once, there would be no chance of us meeting again. Counting the odds, we haven't seen each other for ten years, right?"
"Hi! A glass of wine with peach blossoms and spring breeze, and ten years of light in the rainy night in the rivers and lakes."
Liu Banxian raised his glass.
Ding Jinqun was also quite emotional, "Come, drink!"
The cups collided, and the friendship shook. When it entered the throat again, there was only a mouth full of heartache and pain.
"Brother, how did you end up in this situation? You used to be a well-known figure in this place."
"Well-known?" Ding Jinqun shook his head, "I can't call him well-known. At most, he is just decent. He is much more respectable than he is now."
In fact, this is a bit modest.
In the past, Ding Jinqun was a famous scholar in Weihaiwei area.
What made him famous was that he became a scholar at a young age, although this miracle only ended abruptly after he became a scholar.
In the following decades, he tried repeatedly and failed, and finally he was not qualified to be an official candidate, leaving only the title of "child prodigy".
When a person is young, being called a "child prodigy" is an honor, and it is a rare one, because this title is limited to a certain age, and after that, it is impossible to be called a child prodigy.
But if a person is thirty or forty years old and people still only call him a prodigy when talking about him, then this is a kind of tragedy.
No matter what, although he could not be an official, he was still quite respectable as a scholar in Weihaiwei, where merchants and craftsmen gathered.
After all, although "scholar, peasant, industrialist, and merchant" is not a strict class division on the surface, there are still traces of it in traditional thinking. The only one who is inferior in everything is reading.
"But how come you have fallen to this point, my friend?" Liu Banxian asked.
"Alas, the child has no mother. It's a long story. I used to run a small private school and lived on my family's property and students' tuition fees. I also taught several successful candidates, making me rich and prestigious.
During the New Year and the holidays, the masters of the National People's Congress would send several hogs of pork to my house to congratulate me.
But since the imperial examination was abolished, the world seems to have suddenly turned upside down. No one reads those books by saints and sages. They all study arithmetic, foreign languages, and other technologies. Are those books that scholars should read? Misleading people!
However, the general trend of the times is not something that you or I can change on our own. Since no one is studying, they are all going to study business or do business.
So since I am so smart and others can make a fortune, why can't I make a fortune? Huh?
So I also learned to do business with those foreigners, play stocks and futures.
There was an American named Frank, and I bought a boatload of whiskey from him. That stuff is not valuable in America. A barrel of corn can make several kilograms of wine, but if it is shipped to the Far East, it can be doubled more than ten times. , sold on two counts.
I originally started this business with him, hoping to make a fortune from it, but the boat encountered a storm on the way and sank.
Not only was my capital lost, but I also had to pay for the sailors’ pensions.
I asked him, if the boat didn’t reach the shore, why should I pay compensation? Moreover, my own capital was also included.
But that bastard told me that what we were doing was not a one-and-done deal. In the contracts I signed before, it was already stated that I became the shareholder of this ship, and I was still the largest one.
So not only did I lose my house, but I also ran into debt. From then on, when people saw me, they felt like they were seeing the god of plague.
Oh, damn the world! ”
Ding Jinqun angrily took a sip of wine, his chest heaving as he choked.
Liu Banxian patted him on the shoulder and comforted him: "Even Emperor Gaozu of the Han Dynasty was beaten to the point of being defeated by Xiang Yu and fled."
"Who are we that can compare with Emperor Gaozu of the Han Dynasty?" Ding Jinqun said angrily.
"They are all similar. They are all human beings. He must have two more heads than us. Is there anything that cannot be compared?"
Liu Banxian continued to comfort him, and then finally got to the point.
"Friend, I sold you the "Fenghua Continent" before. Now I want to redeem it. The price is not a problem."
“Price is certainly not an issue.”
Ding Jinqun was a little drunk and waved his hands lazily, "The problem is, that painting is no longer in my hands."
"What!?"
Liu Banxian suddenly became nervous and grabbed Ding Jinqun's collar, "You can't joke, this is fatal! Without "Feng Hua Continent", if I go to Changbai Mountain, doesn't it mean I am also looking for a needle in a haystack!?"
"No kidding."
Ding Jinqun burped, "I sold it to Mr. Krupp to pay off the debt!" (End of Chapter)