Reborn: My Dad’s a Mob Boss, So I Teach Him How to Make Money

1998, on the eve of mass layoffs and a real estate boom. The moment Lin Dong opens his eyes, he sees his father, Lin Daqiang, carrying a machete and preparing to take his men to seize territory from their rivals. Remembering how his father had been framed in his previous life, jailed for half a lifetime doing sewing work, and left with a ruined family, Lin Dong clings desperately to his father's leg. “Dad! There's no future in beating people up. Isn't making money a lot better?” To steer this bunch of hot-blooded old-timers onto the straight and narrow, Lin Dong leads a group of tattooed toughs and somehow lands the entire city's old-town redevelopment project. While other demolition crews get eighty yuan for each house they knock down, Lin Dong's men go over everything with little brushes, “excavating” it with meticulous care. They pry crates of rare, out-of-print Monkey stamps and gold bars from the beams of an old Qing-dynasty mansion; They scavenge at bankrupt state-owned enterprises, buying imported high-precision equipment worth millions that was being sold off as scrap metal; They lease an abandoned, barren mountain for next to nothing, then turn around and discover a rich vein of top-quality jade! Staring at mountains of wealth, his father falls into a thoughtful silence. “Son, we're streetwise gangsters. How are we making money better than a printing press?” In just a few years, the Lin family goes from being street-level construction contractors to a top-tier financial powerhouse spanning real estate, finance, and technology. Their former enemies tremble on their knees outside the Lin family's commercial plaza. Dressed in a sharp suit, Lin Dong exhales a ring of smoke. “Sorry, we're legitimate businesspeople.”