"Driver, Guangyuan Building."
The high-speed rail journey from the provincial capital to Muzhou took two hours. After getting off at the station, Wang Chen hailed a taxi straight to his father Wang Zhenghai's workplace.
He had been to Muzhou many times before, so the city was not unfamiliar to him.
Wang Chen's father, Wang Zhenghai, had originally worked at the Wen County Administration for Industry and Commerce, a man within the system, while his mother, Chen Xiaomei, had been an accountant at a state-owned enterprise.
Before Wang Chen turned ten, the family's circumstances had been quite good. Old Wang was neither greedy nor corrupt; adding up his annual salary, bonuses, and benefits, they were not among the best, but far from the worst.
With Wang's Mother's income added in, raising Wang Chen alone had been more than manageable.
However, in the year he turned ten, Chen Xiaomei unexpectedly became pregnant. By the time they discovered it, she was already about three months along.
And she was carrying twins!
If there had only been one child, Wang's father and mother might have steeled themselves and terminated the pregnancy.
But there were two children...
In the end, both of them resigned and paid a hefty fine. Together with the cost of raising two children, the family's finances immediately became much tighter.
Fortunately, through an introduction from an old comrade-in-arms, Wang Zhenghai found work at Muzhou's Guangyuan Group.
Chen Xiaomei stayed in their Wen County hometown, looking after the twins while doing bookkeeping for small companies and businesses. They barely managed to keep things going.
Otherwise, how could they possibly have afforded Wang Chen's thirty-thousand-yuan annual school transfer fee!
But by this time next year, problems would arise within Guangyuan Group, and Wang Zhenghai would be implicated.
The innocent Wang Zhenghai would nearly