But I already stepped in last time and had Yi Anguo sell thirty houses. If those thirty houses had been kept until now, they would have appreciated by at least tens of millions.

This meant Yi Anguo had lost tens of millions. Zhuo Weidong felt genuinely embarrassed to ask him to sell more houses to his friends. But now that Yi Anguo wanted to help his niece get into Shenzhen University, the situation became very simple. It was a perfect exchange of needs. Zhuo Weidong would also gain face in front of his friends, making it more convenient to ask them for help in the future.

Zhuo Weidong didn't conceal anything from Yi Anguo and explained the whole situation. Yi Anguo thought to himself, It's just selling a house, and I don't even have to owe anyone a favor. There's definitely no problem! Any problem that can be solved with money isn't really a problem.

The two sides quickly reached an agreement, much to their delight. Yi Anguo could also finally put his mind at ease.

"Shasha! Just wait for the admission notice from Shenzhen University to be mailed to you!" Yi Anguo said to Fu Shasha with a happy smile.

"Uncle! Are you serious? Did you just take care of it for me?" Fu Shasha asked, her voice filled with disbelief.

"Anguo, you're not joking, are you? Can you really just decide who gets into Shenzhen University?" his eldest sister asked doubtfully.

"You'd better not be making empty promises and getting Shasha's hopes up for nothing," his brother-in-law added, equally skeptical.

"Forget it! Let's not talk about it anymore. We'll talk when the admission notice arrives!" Yi Anguo couldn't be bothered to argue.

Once the admission notice arrived, they would have nothing left to say.

Only Li Shanshan had complete faith. She said to Fu Shasha, "If your uncle told you to wait for the admission notice from Shenzhen University, then there's definitely no problem. You have to believe in your uncle."

After lunch at his eldest sister's house, Yi Anguo took Li Shanshan and his daughter, Yi Xinyi, and drove to town. He first bought some Joss Paper, paper gold ingots, and other ritual offerings, then drove back to his own village.

As soon as Yi Anguo's car entered the village, it immediately drew the attention of the villagers. In this era, not many people could afford a private car, let alone an SUV that cost eight hundred thousand.

Yi Anguo parked the car on an open patch of ground in front of his house. After getting out, he greeted the villagers who had gathered, handing out cigarettes to the men.

When a man returned to the village from the city, he was expected to carry two packs of cigarettes, whether he smoked or not. When people came over to greet you, how could you not offer them a smoke? Additionally, one had to prepare snacks like candy, biscuits, and jelly. When village kids came over to join the excitement, you couldn't have nothing to send them off with, could you?

"Uncle Anguo, you've done well for yourself out there these past two years! Struck it rich, eh? This car must be pretty expensive, right?"

The speaker was Yi Xiaolin, a man with excellent carpentry skills. He was the younger son of Yi Anguo's eldest paternal cousin. His eldest paternal cousin had become a live-in son-in-law in a neighboring village. He later got a formal job at the municipal forestry nursery and passed away from lung cancer due to heavy smoking not many years after retiring.

When Yi Xiaolin got married, he held the wedding in Yi Village, which served as a formal acknowledgment of his return to the ancestral clan. His older brother, Yi Dalin, followed suit a few years later. After building a new house in Yi Village, he brought his wife and three children back to formally rejoin the clan. The eldest cousin's wife didn't return, choosing to stay in their old home. However, the two villages were adjacent, only a five or six-minute walk apart. Plus, with her two daughters married into the local village, she didn't have to worry about being cared for in her old age.

Yi Xiaolin was naturally much older than Yi Anguo, by at least ten years or so, but it was rare that he and his brother would call Yi Anguo "Uncle Anguo." This was probably because they had rarely seen each other before. When they did, it was always during New Year's when they followed their father back to the ancestral home to pay respects, so the habit of calling him "Uncle Anguo" had stuck. In contrast, several of Yi Anguo's paternal nephews who were older than him and had seen him every day while growing up would never call him "Uncle Anguo." They just called him by his name directly.

"It's not that expensive! Just average!" Yi Anguo said with a laugh. "Xiaolin, are you still doing carpentry, building furniture for people?"

"Occasionally. Nowadays, people getting married usually just buy their furniture directly. Very few hire carpenters to build it at home anymore," Yi Xiaolin said, shaking his head.

"Xiaolin doesn't bother with the little money from carpentry anymore," a female cousin-in-law standing nearby chimed in. "He's distilling liquor at home now, and business is booming."

"Distilling liquor" was just local parlance for brewing. Rice was steamed and fermented directly to produce what was also known as grain alcohol or grain spirits, which was very potent. This kind of liquor was cheap, so it was very popular among the rural population.

Men who did manual labor in the countryside almost all had a habit of drinking. Even the local women supported their men having a little alcohol, believing it was beneficial for those who did strenuous work. Many men in the countryside would have a cup at lunch and another at dinner to invigorate their circulation and relieve fatigue.

However, with their limited incomes, rural folk naturally couldn't afford expensive liquor. Their only option was this type of spirit, brewed in small, private workshops using rice. This alcohol certainly didn't taste great and burned the throat going down, but its main advantage was its price! You could buy it directly with cash, or you could trade a bag of rice for it, paying just a small processing fee.

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