Where the Great Tide Begins

When he headed south with two hundred yuan in his pocket, everyone in the village laughed at him. He'd thrown away his secure job at the steel mill and left behind a stable life just to try his luck in Shenzhen. He sold goods on the street and ran from the urban management officers; traded steel and got surrounded by local gangsters; opened a factory and was squeezed out by the big manufacturers. In ten years, he climbed out of the mountain ravines and fought his way to billionaire status, building his own business empire. But the more money he made, the more he changed. The young man who had once gripped a wrench and worked with all his might began indulging in luxury and ruthlessly crushing his rivals. The wife who had shared his hardships left him decisively at the height of his success; the brothers who had built a life with him were abandoned without mercy. He stood in the empty villa he'd built, surrounded by silence so deep he could hear his own heartbeat. Luxury cars gathered dust in the garage, bodyguards waited downstairs, but he had no one by his side. When the tide rose, he stood atop a skyscraper with the whole city beneath him. When it ebbed, the tower collapsed and everything came to nothing. What he regretted most wasn't how much money he'd made, but that he'd lost the young man who once gripped a wrench. This is a story of an ordinary man rising and falling over thirty years, and of an era's tides, rising and falling.