Zhou Qi didn't know much about luxury cars, but he had read plenty of novels. He knew that in the show-off scenes of stories about fabulously wealthy protagonists, the usual choices were Aston Martin and Porsche Panamera.
But he had no interest in luxury cars.
Believe him: if you had the superpower to open Space Gates, you wouldn't be interested in luxury cars either.
Right now, he felt like someone standing above the clouds and looking down at mortals. They were all just ants, just specks of dust.
Whether it was a Panamera or an Aston Martin, there was no real difference from a Wuling.
Since there was no difference, he might as well support domestic brands.
"Yibing?" Zhou Qi looked at the somewhat chubby young man in front of him, whose hair had already receded by half, then recalled what he had looked like in their youth. Was this really the sturdy and handsome Zhou Yibing?
As the elder brother of Zhou Yining, the Zhou family's greatest beauty, he naturally couldn't have been ugly. But the man before him...
All he could say was that the future looked promising. He would probably look pretty good once he slimmed down.
"It's me!" Zhou Yibing looked at Zhou Qi, then at Tashigi behind him. "You actually have a girlfriend? Why didn't you tell me earlier? I would've brought your sister-in-law along to keep her company!"
"She's not my girlfriend, just a friend!" Zhou Qi hurriedly shook his head. Tashigi didn't understand Chinese right now, but that didn't mean she never would.
Maybe she would remember what had been said today, then suddenly understand it one day.
How would he ever face people then?
"Really?" Zhou Yibing didn't believe him. If she wasn't his girlfriend, why would she accompany him on the subway for an hour in the middle of summer just to buy a car?
But since his cousin said she wasn't, then she wasn't.
"How did you end up like this?" Zhou Qi asked. "I remember your dad wasn't bald either!"
Zhou Yibing smoothed his hair, looking somewhat wistful, as though mourning his lost youth. "This is proof that I'm a strong man!"
Zhou Qi fell silent. He had a point. He was a programmer, after all...
"Enough about that. Tell me about yourself. You want to buy a pharmaceutical factory? Are you serious?"
Zhou Qi didn't answer. He simply took out his phone and showed him the balance.
"Holy shit..." As expected, Zhou Yibing was stunned. "Where did this come from? Did you get yourself a rich sugar mommy?"
"With my looks, do you think I could land a rich sugar mommy?" Zhou Qi asked back.
"Well..." Zhou Yibing gave Zhou Qi a once-over. "Actually, if you dressed up a little, you might have a third of my handsomeness. You're just too sloppy..."
"Get lost!"
At the BYD flagship store, aside from the slightly restrained Tashigi, Zhou Qi and Zhou Yibing looked every bit like big spenders.
Their nouveau riche aura immediately caught the attention of a young saleswoman.
"Hello, gentlemen, hello, miss. Are you looking to buy a car? What are your requirements?"
"Recommend a business car!"
"Ah, then I recommend this BYD Qin PLUS. Its fuel consumption is only 3.7 liters per hundred kilometers, and its acceleration from zero to a hundred..."
"How much?"
"Ah?" The saleswoman froze, then hurriedly said, "We have four models in total. The Premium model costs 111,800 yuan, while the Flagship model..."
"Give me the most expensive one. I want to drive it away today. Can you get the plates sorted out?" Zhou Qi asked.
The saleswoman froze, suddenly wanting to cry.
She knew he wasn't short on money, but she hadn't expected him to be this unconcerned about money. The most expensive Qin was only a little over 150,000 yuan, while the Tang cost 320,000!
If she had known, shouldn't she have introduced the Tang instead?
But seeing how decisive Zhou Qi was, she didn't dare randomly recommend the Tang. With a customer this afraid of trouble, maybe saying two extra sentences would annoy him, and he might turn around and leave.
This was a street full of 4S dealerships. There were too many competitors.
The Qin it was, then. Better to get the money in hand.
"It definitely won't be possible to complete the registration today, but if you're in a hurry, we can first arrange temporary plates for you. Will you be using it in the city, or are you heading out of town?"
"I'm going to Nan'an!"
"No problem. We'll apply for it right away. If it goes quickly, it can be ready in an hour!"
Zhou Qi checked the time. It was already nearly eleven.
"Then go handle it. I'll pay first, grab lunch, and come back afterward!"
"Certainly!"
"That's it? You bought it already?" Zhou Yibing looked utterly dumbfounded. "You were that decisive? When I bought my car, I agonized over it for days..."
"I won't be driving it often anyway, so I'll just buy one at random!" Zhou Qi shrugged, then asked, "By the way, which restaurant around here is good?"
"Do you want Hunan cuisine or Cantonese cuisine?" Zhou Yibing asked. "There's a Tujia cuisine place that's pretty good too."
"Do they have Henan cuisine?" Zhou Qi asked. "Henan cuisine is ridiculously expensive here. I couldn't bear to eat it before..."
"Henan cuisine..." Zhou Yibing thought for a moment. "Then all we can have is Big Plate Chicken..."
After all, Henan cuisine didn't seem to have any particularly famous dishes. They couldn't exactly go drink spicy pepper soup in the middle of the day.
"Then Big Plate Chicken it is. It'll be a good chance for Da—ah, Da Qi to experience it..." He had almost blurted out Tashigi's real name.
"Da Qi?" Zhou Yibing glanced at Tashigi. He was a married man, and this girl seemed likely to be his cousin's girlfriend, so naturally he wouldn't stare at her, much less greet her.
Still, were there really people with the surname Da?
That only made him think of Uncle Da.
Oh, and Da Vinci.
"Hello, Da Qi. I'm Zhou Yibing, Zhou Qi's... cousin, I suppose," Zhou Yibing said.
"She's from Okinawa and doesn't understand Chinese," Zhou Qi said from the side.
"Huh?" Zhou Yibing was startled. "Okinawa!? Japan?"
Then Tashigi softly said, "konnichiwa..."
Big Plate Chicken was a dish invented by people from Nanhe in Xinjiang, then further developed in Shaanxi.
Therefore, the restaurant was called Authentic Xinjiang Nanhe Big Plate Chicken, with two smaller words above it: Shaanxi flavor.
The restaurant wasn't large, with two floors, but there were plenty of customers. The first floor was already full, so the three of them could only go upstairs.
Zhou Qi took out his phone and ordered a serving of Big Plate Chicken first, then handed the phone to Tashigi. "See if there's anything else you want. Don't be polite, order whatever you like. You don't need to save me money."
"Uh..." Tashigi had never used a phone before, but simply scrolling through the dishes wasn't difficult. She just couldn't recognize many of the words.
"This..." She ordered a roujiamo.
"And this one!" This was preserved egg.
Then she stopped ordering.
"Is that enough?" Zhou Qi asked. Didn't people from One Piece World all have huge appetites?
"It's enough!" Tashigi hurriedly nodded. She hadn't reached the point where she could eat an entire cow in one meal. After all, this was four years earlier.
"Alright!" Zhou Qi thought for a moment, then ordered three bottles of fruit beer.
"This afternoon, we'll inspect the factory with the people from Linlang Consulting. If it looks good, we'll buy it today. Then you'll be the Factory Director, Yining will handle HR, and we'll bring in all our poor relatives..." Before the food arrived, Zhou Qi explained his plan to Zhou Yibing. "My goal is to bind the whole family together, then pull everyone up, every last one of them!"
"I know you want to help everyone, but this is a bottomless pit!" Zhou Yibing shook his head. "Drug profits aren't high in China, especially not for Amoxicillin, which any factory can produce. Layoffs are happening everywhere right now, yet you want to hire more and more people. You'll probably start losing money from the first month. Even if you have a hundred million, how long can you last?"
"One person costs 5,000 yuan in monthly wages. Supporting a thousand people in one factory costs five million a month, fifty million a year, and that doesn't even include water and electricity..."
"You know about pharmaceutical companies too?" Zhou Qi asked with a smile.
"Didn't you say you wanted to do this? So I looked into it a little," Zhou Yibing said. "I think you'd be better off opening a cat food factory than a pharmaceutical factory. People these days don't want to get married or date, but they still need a companion. If they can't find one, they raise cats. Haven't you seen how cat beds are selling like crazy online? With a hundred million, if you put it all into cat food, you could probably build the largest and most professional cat food manufacturer around. Wouldn't that be far more reliable than selling medicine?"
Zhou Qi shook his head. "In China, an Amoxicillin pill costs forty cents. But if I take it overseas..." He glanced around. The restaurant was noisy, with everyone eating. They probably couldn't hear what he was saying.
His voice wasn't loud, either.
"Overseas, I can sell one Amoxicillin pill for fifty yuan!"
"Rubles?"
"Rubles my ass! Yuan!" Zhou Qi rolled his eyes.
Zhou Yibing frowned. "Zhou Qi, don't mess with me. Where could you sell Amoxicillin for fifty? Even if you could sell it for fifty, why would it be your turn? Foreign pharmaceutical companies would have rushed over to seize that market long ago!"
"Arigato..." Tashigi's voice came from beside them. The waiter holding three bottles of fruit beer paused, surprised that there was a Japanese customer in his restaurant.
But he quickly calmed down. Nanhai City had people from every country. Rare didn't mean nonexistent.
Zhou Qi helped open the bottle caps and poured drinks for Tashigi and Zhou Yibing, while thinking at the same time.
He hadn't expected that he could fool his parents, but not Zhou Yibing.
Still, as the second-smartest person in the village, it wasn't strange for Zhou Yibing to have that level of understanding.
Besides, he worked at an internet company. His sources of information weren't limited, so fooling him would be difficult.
What should he do? Tell the truth?
He didn't want to come clean yet. At the very least, he needed to wait until he had acquired the Thunder-Thunder Fruit and the Door-Door Fruit, until he possessed absolute power.
Since he couldn't tell the truth and couldn't fool him either...
Then he could only argue shamelessly.
"Believe it or not, that's just how it happened!" Zhou Qi shrugged. "Some things are simply unreasonable. Take cough syrup, for example. A huge bottle of Huoxiang Zhengqi costs two yuan here, but in Africa it costs eight cents, which is five yuan..."
"Besides, haven't we squeezed plenty of foreign industries into bankruptcy? Is it possible that we're now the only country in the world producing Amoxicillin, and foreign pharmaceutical companies have stopped manufacturing it because their costs can't compete with ours?"
This...
Zhou Yibing fell silent. He really didn't know cough syrup could sell for so much in Africa. He only knew that some people in Africa had become addicted to the stuff.
Well, not just him. Zhou Qi actually didn't know how much it cost in Africa either. He had made it up, but Zhou Yibing had no time to verify it.
Even if he found out it was wrong later, Zhou Qi could just say he remembered incorrectly.
"That's where my hundred million came from. It's an advance payment for part of the medicine!" Zhou Qi said. "They still have massive demand afterward. Forget supporting a thousand people—I can support ten thousand!"
There might not be that much gold in One Piece World, but that was fine. Copper would do too, and China was in desperate need of it.
The Red Soil Continent was soil rich in copper, and One Piece World had two Red Soil Continents.
"This..." Zhou Yibing had nothing to say.
"Not only am I going to support people, I'm going to ban 996. I'm going to buy land and give everyone housing, selling it cheaply, selling it at a loss, without any shared-area charges!"
Zhou Yibing's mouth twitched. "That's completely backwards corporate culture. You're making enemies out of capital..."
"Just tell me, do you want to do it or not?"
Zhou Yibing couldn't refuse. Doing this might indeed make people hate him, but it would also feel amazing, especially since he himself worked at a 996 company...
Even the novel websites under Penguin spent all day criticizing Penguin, let alone an even more hated Alibaba. Being able to make enemies of them really would feel great.
"Damn it, I'm in!" Zhou Yibing slapped the table. "Wait for me. I'm quitting that idiot's company right now. Before I leave, I'm going to give him a piece of my mind too. I've disliked him for ages!"
"No need to curse him out!" Zhou Qi hurriedly said. "Better to avoid unnecessary trouble. Let people off when you can!"
Zhou Yibing was stunned. That wasn't right. Based on what Zhou Qi had just said, he wasn't that kind of person!
"By the way, what's your company called, and what does it do?" Zhou Qi asked.
"Oh, Longke Network Services Co., Ltd. We develop, operate, and maintain enterprise management systems..." Zhou Yibing said.
"See? Now there's an overlap!" Zhou Qi shrugged. "We can give our company's business to him..."
"What?" Zhou Yibing was dumbfounded. "I hate him that much, and you still want to give him business?"
"The business still has to go to him. But have you ever encountered those clients who are great at picking faults, have tons of opinions, don't pay much, and love delaying the final payment?" Zhou Qi asked.
Zhou Yibing's eyes lit up. "Plenty! There are so many of those. Thinking about a few of them still makes me grit my teeth!"
"See? Now you're the client. Seize the opportunity and let your imagination run wild!"
"I understand!" Zhou Yibing immediately lowered his head and revised his resignation letter.
In the letter, he sincerely thanked his supervisor for all the care, support, and guidance over the years, and wished him smooth sailing and continued success in his future life and work!
Heh, he had settled on a Factory Director. Now he could be a hands-off boss.
The food happened to arrive as well. The fruit beer was good too, and the three of them ate happily.
Sure enough, the secret to staying happy was transferring other people's happiness onto yourself!
Before you continue