The door slammed shut.
Baili Pangpang stood amid the money scattered across the floor, frozen stiff.
After an unknown amount of time, he finally pointed at the door and said in disbelief, "Is he crazy? He said my money was counterfeit?! How could my money possibly be counterfeit?!"
Shen Qingzhu frowned deeply. He bent down, casually picked up a bill from the floor, and examined it carefully for a moment.
"It's real."
"Of course it's real!"
"But that villager's expression didn't look fake either. When he heard the figure of fifty thousand, he was genuinely tempted." Cao Yuan frowned in thought.
Shen Qingzhu picked up the bills from the ground one by one and stuffed them into Baili Pangpang's hands. Then he turned to look, eyes narrowed, at the ancient fishing village shrouded in darkness and slowly said, "There's nothing wrong with the money. What's wrong... is this village."
"What do you mean?" Baili Pangpang asked in confusion.
"I noticed something was off from the moment the first household opened their door." Shen Qingzhu spoke calmly. "The calendar hanging on their wall was dated fifty years ago."
Baili Pangpang froze, frowning as he thought carefully, but he had no impression of that calendar at all.
"A calendar from fifty years ago?" Cao Yuan said in surprise. "Could it have been hung up by mistake?"
"No. That calendar was far too new. It didn't look like a paper product from fifty years ago at all; it looked like something that had just been manufactured." Shen Qingzhu said with certainty. "And the shoes and oil lamps in the later households weren't things from this era either. They were extremely old, and most of them had long since been discontinued. You couldn't buy them even if you wanted to.
"At first, I thought