Jia Tianlong followed his usual routine. He first went to Li Long's Big Courtyard and solemnly, reverently paid his respects to that huge piece of jade before discussing business with Li Long.
"Hey, Li Long, tell me something. Before there were hundred-yuan notes, I kept thinking how inconvenient those ten-yuan Great Unity notes were. But now that we have bigger notes, a hundred yuan somehow doesn't feel like much. Why are people so contradictory?"
"You're just being precious." Li Long exposed his little thoughts without any mercy. "Think back to when you hardly had any money. Back then, even a single Great Unity note was something you wanted but couldn't get. Why didn't you say that then?"
"True. And that was only five or six years ago." Jia Tianlong wasn't the least bit upset at Li Long exposing his thoughts. Instead, he grew reflective. "We just happened to catch a good time. Otherwise, I'd still be eating potatoes every day.
"Actually, every time I go back and see my old childhood friends still farming up on the mountain ridges and eating potatoes, I feel really lucky."
"Then haven't you given them a hand?" Curious about Jia Tianlong's past, Li Long asked.
He himself had become wealthy. He might still not be as rich as Jia Tianlong, but he didn't think the gap was that large.
What made Li Long rather proud was that after getting rich himself, he had used the opportunities available to him to help the villagers prosper too. They no longer had to carry debts at the end of the year as they once had. Life in his Fourth Team was better than in the other villages. On that point, even though quite a few people in the Team still privately criticized him for this and that,