Hirai Kōsaburō was nowhere near as kind and approachable as he looked. If anyone truly judged him by his appearance, he would tear them apart without leaving even scraps behind. Back in his early days in business, he had been nicknamed "the Alligator of the Land of Wind."
He had originally been a nobody who started out as a shop clerk. After his master, who was also his father-in-law, died, he handed the grocery store over to him. Hirai Kōsaburō worked tirelessly for ten years and became a modest millionaire in Dragonfly City. But what truly made his fortune were two particular matters.
Hirai Kōsaburō noticed that Dragonfly City's houses stood packed tightly together and were highly prone to fires, so he spent his entire fortune establishing a firefighting team. Whenever a house caught fire, he would exploit the owners' panic to purchase the burning house and its neighboring properties at dirt-cheap prices, only then beginning to put out the blaze. In this way, Hirai Kōsaburō acquired thousands of homes and residences, which he then rented out at high prices. For a time, he became a tycoon worth hundreds of millions.
The second was his marriage. After his first wife died, he was only thirty-five, yet rather than remarrying some young, beautiful wife or taking concubines, he chose a widow twenty years his senior. It was only because the widow's late husband had left her a vast number of gold mines. Just when everyone assumed Hirai Kōsaburō coveted the widow's wealth, he drew up a will leaving all his property to her son after his death! Yet less than ten years later, the widow died of illness, and her son also died under mysterious circumstances.
From then on, Hirai Kōsaburō possessed wealth rivaling that of a nation. A few years