Me! A high-ranking official!

His thinking became increasingly broad, and he perfectly transformed every "failure" of the martial arts city into a "unique feature" of the zoo.

The original, expensive artificial mountain? No need! Just spray imitation stone paint onto the dilapidated cement frame!

The original tacky antique street has been transformed into a "Mountain and Sea Market," where gentle animals such as red pandas and alpacas roam freely on both sides of the street. An abandoned stage can even be used to host a holographic light show based on the Classic of Mountains and Seas at night!

"Director Zhao, what's wrong with your brain...?" The two designers, frantically creating renderings with 3D software, couldn't help but exclaim in amazement, "With your renovation plan, the construction cost is less than one-fifth of building a new zoo! But the visual effects and the hype are unique in the whole country!"

"Don't flatter them. Make the iron netting over Kunlunxu into an invisible moat. The renderings must be realistic, so that the leaders can immediately see where the money was saved and what makes it so impressive." He took a big gulp of strong tea.

At five o'clock in the morning, the sky outside the window began to lighten.

A set of "Renovation Plan and Conceptual Design Drawings for the Former Site of the Linshui County Classic of Mountains and Seas Wildlife Park," which blends modern wasteland style with ancient Chinese mythology, has finally been fully presented on the computer screen.

Looking at those visually striking renderings, tourists walk on the glass walkway overlooking the Leize Water Town, where fierce Siberian tigers patrol the rammed earth walls of the ancient city ruins, and groups of macaques dart among the broken eaves and brackets...

This isn't an unfinished building; it's clearly a lost ancient demon city!

Seven o'clock in the morning.

Guo Nanguo carried four steaming hot servings of soy milk and fried dough sticks and pushed open the office door.

When he handed him the freshly printed brochure, still warm from the ink, the steady veteran looked at the imaginative yet logically rigorous transformation diagrams, and his hand holding the fried dough stick couldn't help but tremble slightly.

"Good! Good! Good!" Guo Nanguo exclaimed three times, his face flushed with excitement. He slapped Jianguo on the shoulder with surprising force: "Jianguo, just based on this map, my confidence has increased by 30%!"

Guo Nanguo tucked the picture album under his arm: "You guys hurry up and eat something and rest! I'm going to find Zhang Baocheng right now. This afternoon, I'll risk my reputation and force him to help me get on Secretary Zhou's good side!"

After Guo Nanguo left like a gust of wind with the picture album, Zhao Jianguo's nerves, which had been tense all night, finally relaxed completely.

He stood up, stretched, and his bones cracked with every movement. After sending the two designers, whose eyes were bloodshot from exhaustion, back to rest, he too was exhausted. He locked the office door, returned to the Yuepeng Hotel, and without even taking off his clothes, collapsed onto the hard bed and fell into a deep sleep.

I slept soundly for days.

When he opened his eyes again, the room was already somewhat dim. He rubbed his throbbing temples, reached for his phone on the bedside table, and saw it was 3:40 PM.

There was an unread WeChat message on the screen, a long voice message sent by his father, Zhao Dayong.

Upon opening the audio, the old man's voice, thick with a rural accent, came through: "Jianguo, your father and mother have taken the bus back to the countryside. The wheat on our few acres is almost ripe and turning yellow, so we have to go back and keep an eye on it. We've seen the house in the county town, and we feel at ease! You work hard in this government unit, take good care of yourself, and don't worry about home."

Hearing this voice message, he felt a pang of indescribable bitterness welling up inside him.

The elderly couple had scrimped and saved their entire lives, and now that they had finally made it to the county town, he hadn't even been able to have a proper meal with them, nor had he had time to buy them any new clothes. That's how rural people are; even if their son could easily pull out millions, what they still cared about most were the few acres of wheat in their fields that were almost ripe.

However, he quickly suppressed his sadness.

"Once the borderless ancient style experience area in Xiaozhai Village is built and those three courtyards are finished, I'll bring my parents over to be NPC shopkeepers." He secretly planned, "Then, under my own nose, the work won't be tiring, and I'll earn hundreds of times more than farming. My family will finally be able to truly reunite in the county town."

He washed his face to clear his head and then strolled back to the Culture and Tourism Bureau.

Upon entering the office, Wang Pingping was sitting at her workstation, eating sunflower seeds and watching a drama.

"Pingping, have the leaders all returned?" He pulled out a chair, sat down, and asked casually.

"No." Wang Pingping shook her head and kicked the wastebasket of sunflower seed shells aside. "I haven't seen Director Zhang or Director Guo since I started work this afternoon. Even Director Zhang's car isn't in the yard."

He nodded, understanding the situation. It seemed that Guo Nanguo was indeed a shrewd veteran who had managed to persuade Zhang Baocheng, who was afraid of taking responsibility, to take the blueprints of the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" and go to the city with Zhou Qingyan to lobby.

He couldn't help but yawn; the aftereffects of staying up all night hadn't completely dissipated.

Seeing this, Wang Pingping took a fruit knife, peeled an apple, and handed it to him, saying, "Director, have an apple to refresh yourself. Oh, by the way, have you heard something interesting? This morning, more than a dozen villagers from Xiaozhai Village voluntarily went to the village committee and signed agreements to cooperate with the project!"

He took the apple, took a bite, and showed no surprise, simply nodding slightly: "Yes, as expected."

After Liu Tao's Maybach incident the day before yesterday, which caused a stir, the villagers' psychological defenses had long been broken down. In their eyes, even big capital from other places was attracted by the smell of fish and came to bid up prices for houses, which meant that the cultural tourism project that the county was developing was likely to make a fortune in the future! These people are very shrewd. After weighing the pros and cons, they naturally decided to hold on to their houses tightly, gamble on the future, and voluntarily sign agreements to become NPCs in order to protect their core shops in the future.

After sitting in the office for a while, he checked the time, threw the remaining half of the apple core into the trash can, and stood up: "Pingping, come with me."

"Where are you going, Director?" Wang Pingping quickly wiped her hands with a tissue.

"Let's go and visit that abandoned fantasy martial arts city, and see it for ourselves."

The two scanned two shared bicycles at the entrance of the bureau compound, and rode for about twenty minutes under the afternoon sun to reach the southern suburbs of the county.

A tall but mottled imitation ancient city wall suddenly appeared before my eyes. The paint on the city gate tower was peeling off in patches, and the neon tubes that read "Fantasy Martial Arts City" were long broken beyond recognition.

As he walked through the gate and looked at the scene before him, he couldn't help but sigh inwardly.

This martial arts city was supposedly worth a total investment of 40 million yuan back then, which sounds like a large sum. However, because the county failed to secure special funds from the province and city, it had to rely entirely on the county's own finances. As a large agricultural county, the county's finances were already tight, and the 40 million yuan poured into this kind of city-building project didn't even make a ripple.