By this point, the smugness had vanished from Shen Xiaorong's face.
He calmly recounted what he had experienced in this reincarnation.
Because he retained his memories, he became a child prodigy. He passed the imperial examinations at a young age and entered officialdom, following in his father's footsteps. The rest of his life could be called peaceful and happy.
This cycle repeated several times.
With Shen Xiaorong secretly supporting them, the Shen family became a family of scholars after several generations, steadily climbing toward the pinnacle of power.
"...Before my next reincarnation, I saw my grandson and granddaughter-in-law." Shen Xiaorong remained calm. "My son in that life had backed the wrong side. When the new emperor took the throne, the Shen family was purged. In the blink of an eye, everything we'd built was gone."
Shen Xiaorong had little to say in the way of regret or lament. Even his earlier account had been rather matter-of-fact.
Life wasn't a TV drama. Stranger things might happen in reality, and there were real geniuses who could leave people incredulous. Shen Xiaorong wasn't one of them. He had struggled his way from a household servant to a powerful minister, bit by bit. Each reincarnation and each new life had been a process of learning and accumulating experience. The Shen family had indeed flourished, providing him with more and more resources, but the challenges he faced had grown increasingly complicated, too.
At first, he had been a farmer, then a household servant. Knowing how to farm and how to please a steward who was more or less his equal had been enough to live well. But entering officialdom meant entering another world. He might not have been managing an entire country, but governing a region was no task one could handle on a whim.