Chapter 1624: Prospering Together in a Golden Age, the Industrial Revolution

After drinking a large bowl of thick, fragrant, and savory chicken soup, Zhu Yaofei regained a bit of energy — his body actually had no real problems. According to medical experts, it was "a long-term coma of unknown cause," which could also be called losing his soul... though that would make it sound unscientific.

This "long-term coma of unknown cause" of his would have been fatal without meticulous care, and the cost of long-term meticulous care was naturally quite high.

No, the cost actually wasn't high at all! It couldn't compare at all with the rate at which Zhu Yaofei... that is, the Zhu Yaofei living in this altered world, was squandering his family fortune!

Zhu Yaofei, soaking in a bath several thousand meters up in the air, was being tormented by a jumble of chaotic memories! After these shattered fragments of memory slowly pieced themselves together, he discovered that in this life he was a thoroughgoing wastrel!

And a workaholic-mode wastrel at that... his way of wasting money wasn't eating, drinking, whoring, and gambling — that was too lowbrow, beneath Zhu Yaofei's notice. Clubs, young models, high-stakes gambling, yachts, sports cars — none of it interested him in the least.

Because all those things were his for the taking!

His father was the Oil King of the Southern Seas! And this "King" wasn't a nickname — he was a genuine king! The tenth-generation king of the Zhu Ming Dynasty of Riau... and tracing further back, the successive Min Princes of the Great Ming Dynasty, and further back still, that dead man who still torments people — the Great Ming founding emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang.

This was a feudal dynasty of over six hundred years!

Although the Chinese Great Ming Dynasty of this timeline had already perished in the storm of revolution, outside China proper, a great many small Zhu Ming dynasties had mostly weathered the revolutionary storm and survived to the present day. The Kingdom of Riau, located on the island of Sumatra, was one such small Zhu Ming kingdom that survived the revolutionary storm.

Moreover, in the 1920s, when the age of the internal combustion engine arrived, astonishing oil reserves were discovered in the territory of the Kingdom of Riau! And because the Kingdom of Riau sat astride vital maritime trade routes, it had a long tradition of commerce, with successive kings personally participating in business activities. The eighth-generation king, Zhu Kuanxuan, who ascended the throne in 1920, was a commercial genius who seized the opportunity presented by the oil discovery and founded the Strait Petroleum Company.

With the Minas oil field within the Kingdom of Riau as its foundation, the Strait Petroleum Company obtained massive cash flow and then searched for oil fields throughout the Southern Seas region. It successively discovered multiple oil fields on Sumatra and Kalimantan, and later the Strait Petroleum Company developed several natural gas fields in the Southern Seas region, as well as offshore oil fields, and also invested heavily in petrochemicals, achieving remarkable success. By the end of the twentieth century, the Strait Petroleum Company had grown into one of the world's foremost large-scale integrated petrochemical enterprises... and the head of the Riau Zhu Ming royal family, who owned the majority of the Strait Petroleum Company's shares, became the true and rightful Oil King of the Southern Seas!

And Zhu Yaofei was the next Oil King of the Southern Seas, and also the next king of the Kingdom of Riau!

But was such easily obtained glory and wealth simply too boring for a wastrel of Zhu Yaofei's caliber? Was it too lacking in challenge?

So when Zhu Yaofei was in university, he made a grand resolution to start a business on his own merits... and so after graduating, he did not return to the Kingdom of Riau to be a good boy who ate, drank, whored, and gambled, but stayed in the territory of the People's Republic of China to start a business.

And he started from scratch — with bare hands... not asking his family for a single cent of startup capital. The capital needed for his ventures was scraped together through frugality from his own annuity — his crown-prince annuity wasn't much, only about one hundred million yuan per year. Over these past dozen or so years, he had invested a total of thirteen or fourteen hundred million in his ventures!

And the result of his ventures... was a total loss of capital. He truly lost money at everything he did! His level of investment and entrepreneurship was really unmatched!

After more than a decade, he had lost nearly everything. A man in his early forties, still making his wife and children rent a place to live with him — what a failure! A failure to the point that even Zhu Yaofei himself despised himself.

Those investments that lost all their capital were, in his view, all ridiculous projects. How could he have put money into them? Wasn't that idiotic? He was so smart — how could he have done such brainless things? And he'd kept at it for over a decade — truly squandering the family fortune through sheer competence!

And what left Zhu Yaofei even more speechless was that during the one year and several months of his coma, his financial situation had very likely improved.

Because being in a coma meant he couldn't start businesses... and staying in the best hospital room in Yingtian City, receiving the best care, the costs would at most not exceed ten million. That still left ninety million for Shen Xiaoru and the two children to spend freely!

Of course, Shen Xiaoru... the Shen Xiaoru of this timeline truly wasn't with Zhu Yaofei for money!

There was true love between the two of them! Shen Xiaoru really was a woman who didn't care much about money, because her life had also completely changed — she was actually a princess! She'd originally had a bit of a princess complex, but who would have thought that when history changed, it turned her into a genuine, bona fide princess!

Shen Xiaoru's ancestral home was Chongming, and she was originally a descendant of Shen Tingyang.

The world's largest automobile company and steel company today were both founded by her ancestors. Although Shanghai Shen Motors and Shanghai Shen Steel had long been reclaimed by the people in the revolutionary storm... the Kingdom of Surabaya owned by the Shen family was beyond the reach of the revolutionaries.

Although the Kingdom of Surabaya had no oil, it possessed a tropical island like a fairyland — Bali!

Bali, along with Phuket Island owned by the Kingdom of Phuket and Yingzhou Island owned by the Kingdom of the Immortal Isle, had for decades been the world's most popular tropical vacation destinations.

Moreover, when the Shen family fled the revolutionary storm, they took with them an enormous fortune. And this enormous fortune was not squandered carelessly but used for investment. And the Shen family's investment skills were far superior to Zhu Yaofei's — most of their investments succeeded.

So Shen Xiaoru, Her Highness the Princess of the Kingdom of Surabaya, was also a wealthy woman with an annuity. Although her annuity couldn't compare to that of the Crown Prince of Riau, it was enough to let her disregard money and choose true love... hmm, it should be true love!

At the thought of true love, Zhu Yaofei finally made a firm resolution: I can no longer be a wastrel who works hard at starting businesses! From now on I must thoroughly reform and be an honest, good person who squanders money properly...

His resolution made, the knot of doubt in Zhu Yaofei's heart rose again!

He had already applied so many patches to the Great Ming Dynasty — promoting the Industrial Revolution, cultivating aristocratic officers, establishing the Boy Scout Guard, founding the Heavenly Alliance for collective defense, and opening so many vassal states to absorb the Great Ming Empire's surplus population.

So how did Our Great Ming just... vanish?

Who exactly made it vanish? Who was this wastrel? The more Zhu Yaofei thought about it, the angrier he became! He had toiled bitterly for decades and finally collapsed from overwork, dying before even reaching ninety — how hard was that! How could it just be gone?

The timeline he was in now was clearly one where he had changed history! How on earth had the flourishing Great Ming Dynasty been squandered into oblivion?

He tried hard to think, but his memories were still too chaotic — three timelines were mixed together, and he couldn't quite tell east from west, north from south. The answers that surfaced in his mind were terms that sounded wrong the moment you heard them: World Unification War, Guard Succession Law, Officer Cadet Revolution, Era of Women's Rights, Dynasty Succession War... yet he had no way to reconstruct these terms into vivid historical events.

He abruptly stood up from a gilded bathtub and muttered under his breath: No, I need to find a history book and read it carefully!

The End