At the start, I had to choose one of four options, and I immediately picked the Brahmin from the cou

After Wang Jianguo finished signing the papers and stuffed the 20,000 yuan in cash into his pocket, before the smile on his face could even relax, he noticed that the atmosphere in the courtyard suddenly seemed a little off.

The old neighbors who used to surround him asking about prices and practically begging to pull out their property deeds on the spot are now all avoiding him.

Old Zhou stood by the flower bed, his hands behind his back, gave him a meaningful look, then turned and went into the building. Aunt Qiu, who was wearing a red sweater, also shrank back into the crowd, muttering, "Let me look again, let me look again."

Even the old men who had just been playing chess with his father awkwardly looked away.

He instantly realized that these people were very shrewd.

It's true that the Wang family sold their house for 450,000 yuan, but that was under an installment payment contract, and the money hasn't been received yet. If Hao Dabiao really is a swindler, Wang Jianguo's 450,000 yuan will be worthless. Rather than following the trend and taking the risk, it's better to see if the Wang family's money will actually arrive in their account.

Waiting and seeing has become the dominant theme in the entire Hongqi Machinery Factory residential compound at this moment.

Xu Qiang stood by the flowerbed, watching everything unfold, his heart sinking. He stubbed out his third cigarette, tossed his head at Monkey and his two other henchmen, and said, "Let's go."

"Brother Qiang, are we leaving already?" Monkey glanced back at the few drab concrete buildings, unwilling to give up. "We haven't even gotten one unit yet."

"Are you staying to wait for a feast?"

Xu Qiang's face was ashen as he walked quickly toward the courtyard gate.

"The news about this compound has already spread. Old Zhou's son works at the Land and Resources Bureau, and he knows that the red line for the High-tech Zone extends to Guangming Road. Sooner or later, others will find out too. Right now, these old folks are still watching and waiting. Once they've finished watching and realized what's going on, the prices will skyrocket. With our limited resources, we're not even qualified to go toe-to-toe with them. Let's go somewhere else, like the textile factory's residential compound in the east of the city. The news there shouldn't have leaked out yet."

The monkey responded, called his brothers to get in the car, and sped off.

However, they were still a step too late.

When Xu Qiang's car turned into the narrow alley of the textile factory's residential compound in the east of the city, the scene before him made his heart sink to the bottom.

Three cars were parked at the entrance of the residential compound—an Audi A6 with a Zhejiang C license plate, a Buick GL8 with a Jiangsu E license plate, and a brand-new Mercedes-Benz without even a license plate. Three groups of people, from three directions, were all crowding into the compound.

A tall, thin old man in a t-shirt was surrounded in the middle, clutching the property deed in his hand. His expression was like that of a rabbit surrounded by wolves, looking left and right, unsure of who to hand the deed to.

"Hold!"

Xu Qiang slammed his fist on the steering wheel, and the horn emitted a piercing screech.

The monkey panicked: "Brother Qiang, what... what do we do? Why are there so many people at the textile factory?"

"The information came from the provincial level; we're not the only ones with this channel."

Xu Qiang gritted his teeth, jumped out of the car, grabbed his black leather bag, and rushed into the yard.

"Stop talking nonsense, grab as many units as you can, throw money at anyone you see, don't care about the layout or the floor, as long as it has two or more bedrooms and clear title, just buy it!"

From 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Xu Qiang, along with Monkey and a few henchmen, shuttled back and forth between six old residential areas in Jiangyang County like madmen.

Hongqi Machinery Factory, textile factory, meat processing plant, printing plant, agricultural machinery company, grain and oil station—they didn't miss a single old residential compound built in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But every time they arrived, they saw the same scene: Audis with Zhejiang C license plates, Buicks with Jiangsu E license plates, Toyotas with Guangdong B license plates, and several groups of local speculators like themselves, all using the same method to grab the same batch of houses.

Throw money at the problem, break contracts, impose penalties for breach of contract.

It's a competition of who acts faster, who has more cash, and whose information is more accurate.

By 5 p.m., Xu Qiang finally managed to snag his third apartment of the day in an old tenement building where even the hallway lights were broken, for 310,000 yuan—almost double the market price.

The landlady was an elderly woman in her seventies who was very hard of hearing. Xu Qiang shouted at her for ten minutes before she finally drew a circle on the contract with trembling hands.

As Monkey emerged from the building, he plopped down on the edge of a flowerbed, his forehead covered in sweat and his voice hoarse: "Brother Qiang... three sets, just three sets. We brought 1.8 million, and we've only spent less than a million in total. We can't spend the rest."

Xu Qiang leaned against the car door and tilted his head back to gulp down half a bottle of mineral water.

He did the math. He'd bought all three apartments at inflated prices, averaging around 400,000 yuan per square meter. After deducting taxes and financing costs, he wouldn't even break even if the price didn't rise to 5,500 yuan per square meter. His original plan was to collect deposits on 30 apartments, locking in a 50,000 to 60,000 yuan difference on each, a sure-fire way to make a profit.

Now things are really messed up; thirty sets have become three, half the ammunition is left, and the battlefield is already over.

"The reason you can't spend the remaining money is because you don't have a house?" Xu Qiang crumpled the empty water bottle into a ball and threw it into the trash can. "It's not that we don't have a house, it's that we can't compete with them. The people from Wencheng have two sacks of cash, the people from Suzhou have three vans, and the people from Guangdong are offering prices without even showing the houses. Our capital is just a drop in the ocean compared to them."

The monkey was silent for a few seconds, then suddenly raised its head, a strange light flashing in its eyes. "Brother Qiang, you said... all these old, dilapidated houses around here are being fought over like this, so what about the piece of land that Lansheng has—"

Before the monkey could finish speaking, Xu Qiang glared at him and shut him up.

"That piece of land owned by Lansheng? Are you genuinely unaware or pretending? Have you inquired about the surname of the owner behind Lansheng?"

The monkey scratched the back of its head, looking bewildered. "Surname...surname Li?"

"How did Wang Jianhui fall? How did the people from the Provincial Commission for Discipline Inspection get demoted? Do you think it just fell from the sky? You're telling me now that you want to mess with his plate?"

The monkey shrank its neck and dared not utter a sound.

Xu Qiang stubbed out his cigarette on the car door, sparks flying onto the calluses on his hands, but he didn't even flinch. "The few of us here, at best we can only scrape together a little profit from these old, run-down apartments. Don't even think about those other things; no matter how much you think about them, they'll never be ours."