The two of them had known Zhao Cheng for many years, so naturally they understood his temperament. Equalizing all things and wandering free was merely one side of Zhao Cheng, not the whole of him.
Zhao Cheng's ten years of pastoral living had, in essence, merely been the optimal solution most beneficial to himself under the circumstances of that time.
Had the environment been different—say, in this world—his path of development would certainly have been entirely different.
Given the circumstances of the real world, even if Zhao Cheng had been obsessed with fame and profit and climbed all the way upward, the final result would likely have been neither high nor low. If he were lucky, perhaps in his thirties he could have become what people in a small city considered successful, earning tens of thousands a month, amid the flashing neon of the steel forest that was a great metropolis, paying for a tiny home far from the city center with decades of debt on his back.
And such success could not withstand any storm. A single round of corporate downsizing, a slight mishap, could be enough to bury that meager success.
As for greater accomplishments, one could only say that such achievements had little to do with ability, and little to do with hard work. More than anything, they depended on the tide of fortune.
Even a billionaire—if you stripped him of everything, threw him to the very bottom of society, and made him struggle with all his strength for a single mouthful of food—then his billionaire-level talents would be nothing more than a joke.
In the real world, nearly a century of peace and the laws of the court had long since woven themselves into a vast net. For ordinary people, those seemingly existing paths of upward