King Eric stared at the white man in the mirror for a long time, his mind in confusion. Pen | fun | pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 infoA memory belonging to this white man is emerging little by little. This is a man named John. Memories of C. Vanderbilt's 33-year-old railroad executive. A recent memory of my car being stuck in a sea of streets, and trees crashing down the river that shattered the windows. It was January 27, 1937, and the location was Louisville. King Eric vaguely remembers that Louisville did indeed experience the worst flooding in the history of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, when nearly a million people were left homeless.

"The 30s in America?" As various fragments of memories continued to emerge in his mind, King Eric finally figured out the era he was in. Thank God, at least I didn't throw myself into the primitive society, although there is no computer and mobile phone Internet, but there is electricity. And from the current layout of this room, the quality of the silk pajamas on his body, and the wedding ring on his hand, which seems to be worth a lot of money, it can be inferred that this Vanderbilt is quite financially wealthy.

Wait, wedding rings! I'm married! King Eric was startled by this discovery, and hurriedly began to search through his mind to organize memories of his family. First of all, he comes from a large family, the Vanderbilt family. For the surname Vanderbilt, Eric Wang, who is engaged in the logistics and transportation industry, still knows a little. It was a large Dutch-American family that dominated the shipping and railroad industries in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The family's founder, Cornelius Vanderbilt, is third on the list of the 15 richest people of all time in the United States, behind oil tycoon John Rockefeller and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. When Eric was in college, he played a computer game, Railroad Tycoon, based on Cornelius Sr.

At the age of 16, Cornelius Sr. borrowed $100 from his mother to buy a second-hand sailing barge and started his shipping business. Just 30 years later, he became the largest shipowner in the United States, and the American Business Journal called him "Captain", and his contemporaries called him so. However, Cornelius Sr. was not satisfied, and at the age of 70 he shifted his focus from shipping to rail. Soon he acquired the Harlem Railroad, the Hudson Railroad, and the New York Central Railroad, and later brought more than a dozen railroads such as the Michigan Central Railroad, the Lakeside Railroad, and the Canadian Southern Railroad under his control. This network of railroads across the United States eventually earned him the nickname "Railroad Tycoon". When Cornelius Sr. died, his personal fortune was $105 million, 1/87 of the GDP of the United States at the time. In this way, he is much richer than his future classmates Gates.

After the death of Cornelius Sr., in order to maintain the integrity of his assets, he left most of the estate to John's grandfather, William Henry Vanderbilt. For this reason, John's grandfather and his siblings fought an inheritance dispute lawsuit for many years. William. Vanderbilt was a tireless workaholic, and by the time he died at the age of 64, his fortune had nearly doubled to $194 million. However, he did not believe that his happiness was directly proportional to his wealth, and before his death he told his children: "$200 million is a huge pressure for anybody, big enough to kill anybody, because you don't get happiness." So he divided most of his fortune between his eldest son, Vanderbilt II, and his third son, Kisam, and divided the rest equally between the remaining six children and his wife.

After John's grandfather's death, Berconilius II the Grand took charge of many of the family's businesses, with William Kissam, the third uncle, helping to manage them. However, the two were more enthusiastic about building mansions and making generous charitable donations. They donated significant amounts to Yale University, the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many other educational, philanthropic, and religious groups, as well as the creation of Vanderbilt Hospital and St. John's Cathedral. After the death of the eldest uncle, the third uncle ceded the management of the railway to a foreign company and concentrated on charitable, social and sports undertakings.

John's father, George, was the youngest of the three generations of Vanderbiltrie. Unlike other uncles who were keen on the luxury of high society, he lived like a hermit in poor health. Never caring about the family business, he started a large estate in Asheville, North Carolina, and became obsessed with scientific farming, raising livestock and planting trees.

John himself is the youngest of four generations of Vanderbiltry, and many of his cousins are more than 20 years older. In fact, when he was born in 1904, three generations of Vanderbilt were no longer young. Since his father's death when he was 10 years old, John has been cared for by his cousin, Harold's family. Dad donated most of his estate to the New York Public Library, Columbia University, and the American Society of Fine Arts, leaving John with only some real estate and a $2 million trust fund. But at the time, $2 million was a lot of money, as a Ford Model T was only $850.

In general, the Vanderbilt family is gradually declining, and has not been able to maintain its influence into the era when King Eric lived, as Rockefeller, Morgan, DuPont, and Ford did. Of course, this "decline" is also relative to those wealthy chaebols, after all, the emaciated camel is bigger than the horse. Eric remembers seeing a news story in later life in which Gloria Vanderbilt, the mother of Anderson Cooper, the famous silver-haired male anchor of CNN, issued a statement saying that she would not leave her $200 million inheritance to her son. This Gloria Vanderbilt appears to be the daughter of John's deceased cousin, Reginald, who is now just 13 years old.

John spent his childhood on his father's farm, but as a member of the top family on the East Coast of the United States, he received a rigorous elite education from an early age. Music, art, literature, etiquette, horseback riding, fencing, John remembers as many as four private tutors as a child. Unlike his other cousins, John seems to have inherited his father's technocratic characteristics and had a keen interest in mechanics from an early age. But instead of becoming an engineer, John went to study mathematics at Columbia University. From the point of view of the aristocratic families on the East Coast, going to college was about developing a better aristocracy, not about learning the skills to make a living. Therefore, subjects such as law, philosophy, literature, and mathematics to improve personal quality are the first choice. This is still evident in later generations in the United States, where technical disciplines such as computers are famous for universities in the Midwest, while universities on the East Coast focus more on basic subjects.

After graduating, John worked for a few days as a personal assistant to his cousin, Republican Senator William Vanderbilt III. But soon, John grew tired of the political life of the HSD. After his cousin's successful candidacy for governor of Rhode Island, John landed a good position in the family's railroad company. Thanks to his family's influence in the rail industry, John spent a few years as branch manager, managing several important rail lines centered on the Cincinnati Rail Junction.

However, these memories were not important to John, except for his cousin Harolds, who had taken care of him, and John's relationship with the other family members was not very close. What John was anxious to find was a memory of his wife. Yes, 3 years ago, John got married, and his wife Adele is the daughter of a French banker. During World War I, the French banker, who had started as a plantation in the Far East, ended his business in Europe and moved his family to the United States, where he soon established a strong influence among the French-American merchant community in the southern United States. Adele was 4 years younger than John, and the two met at a church mass. John was quickly attracted to the soft, intellectual, French-accented girl, and soon the two fell in love and were married on Thanksgiving Day that year.

Both John and Eric are very satisfied with the warm family life at present, and all the memories of family make him smile involuntarily. Adele was very fond of painting, and the two often drove along the Ohio River or Lake Erie to collect wind and fish. John notices that Adele and his former girlfriend-to-be, Mei Yu, are somewhat similar, and both are from Louisiana. Two years ago, John and Adele had their first child, their angelic adorable daughter Ella. John was trapped in the flood because he was in a hurry to return to Cincinnati to celebrate Ella's second birthday.

After sorting through these memories, Eric King finally breathed a sigh of relief, after the initial shock and hesitation, the calm personality and rigorous logical thinking he had cultivated over the years made him begin to calmly think about the situation in front of him. It was January 1937, and the eight-year War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression in China was about to begin. The United States will also join the war that will affect the world in 5 years. I will be almost 40 years old by then, and it is unlikely that I will carry a gun to the battlefield or something, but no matter what I do, I will inevitably be affected by this war. It is not known how the Johns family would have spent this time in history. But he knows that he is now the future of Adele and Ella, and they are his responsibility in the future.

King Eric looked at his watch resting on the bedside, it was already 1 o'clock in the morning. I was in a daze for more than four hours. King Eric, who was a little tired, closed his eyes and went to sleep! When he woke up, he was no longer King Eric, but Adele's husband and Ella's father, John. C. Vanderbilt!

Welcome to 1937, John!