Hu Xiaotian pointed at Liu Zhiyang's pile of goods and held up one finger.
A surge of delight swept through Liu Zhiyang, but he pretended to be reluctant. "Ten thousand taels! That's a little low!"
Hu Xiaotian shook his head. "One tael!"
"What?" Liu Zhiyang thought he had misheard. "What did you say?"
Hu Xiaotian walked over to Gu Jiayuan's pile. "One tael for these, too!" He was perfectly impartial, offering each of them one tael.
Their faces went white. None of them were fools; greed had simply smoked out their senses, and the prospect of enormous profits had blinded them. Now they understood everything. They had been played. First, he had paid high prices for their worthless belongings, then dropped hints that made them mistake him for an easy mark and buy goods to resell to him. They had spent a fortune acquiring this heap of things, only for him to offer them a pittance.
The fat on Liu Zhiyang's face trembled with rage. He had spent two thousand taels of silver.
Gu Jiayuan's face turned positively green. Three thousand taels-after deducting the other man's five hundred, he had only scraped together the remaining twenty-five hundred by taking out a high-interest loan. The jewelers had made at least a thousand taels off this pile. That meant he was running a loss. He was not in the jewelry trade himself; if he tried selling these things, he probably would not even get a thousand taels. How was he supposed to repay his debts? Gu Jiayuan sneered. "Master Hu, where is your good faith in doing this?"
Hu Xiaotian smiled. "How am I not acting in good faith? If I weren't, I wouldn't give you a single copper coin. What? Did you really bring this heap of junk here hoping to