Chapter: 4308

An Chongqiu shrugged helplessly and said, "Actually, my sister's husband's family is quite prominent in the country, even reaching the top two positions at one point. However, compared to our family, they are still far behind. And when my sister was dating him, it just so happened that the Silicon Valley was on the rise. My sister had been making a series of investments there and started to reap huge profits. So my grandfather thought she was doing all this for my brother-in-law, and hence he became close to her first, with some reservations about him. Moreover, my brother-in-law wanted to bring my sister back to Hua Xia, which is the place where my grandfather is most protective of."

As An Chongqiu continued talking, Lee Yalin exclaimed in surprise, "Does that mean your grandfather wants your brother-in-law to become his son-in-law?"

An Chongqiu explained, "It's not exactly like that. My grandfather just wanted them to stay in the US and develop their lives there. He never said they couldn't have children or change their surname to ours. That shouldn't be considered as becoming a son-in-law."

Lee Yalin shook his head, saying, "There's a big difference, you know. They're not people with nothing, but rather a noble family without the wealth of our family. How could they possibly accept the condition of staying in their wife's household?"

An Chongqiu nodded slightly, "That's true. My grandfather thought this was already a great compromise, and he expected them to have no objections at that point. But my brother-in-law felt it was a matter of principle and couldn't be compromised, so they just couldn't resolve the disagreement."

Lee Yalin looked thoughtful for a moment before asking, "Oh, by the way, I remember your sister had a son. One time she took him to visit her mother-in-law, and I saw him then. How is that child now?"

Saying that, he paused for a moment and added, "My sister's incident happened that year, when my grandfather was setting up a special trust fund at Morgan Bank. He put in $10 billion each year."

"This money has two purposes - one is to find my nephew specifically, and the other is to give him what's left after finding him out."

"It hasn't been twenty years yet, but by then we've invested the principal of $200 billion. Twenty years of hiring teams worldwide to search for people has only cost us about half that, roughly $60-70 billion."

Lee Yalin's eyes widened in shock as he exclaimed, "It costs this much to find someone?"

"Yes," An Chongqiu explained, "it may seem easy to find someone in the information age, but actually, the world is so vast. If you miss just one spot, you might never find that person again, so we need multiple teams to spread out and search point by point, hundreds or thousands of people, running around and spending a lot."

"Besides, there's also the cost of gathering information - no matter if it's useful or not, as long as it comes in, you have to pay for it. And you can't ask local governments, police, or gangs for help because you're worried about information leaks. So we need our own team to search."

"Once we find a suspect, we also need to think of ways to get their DNA sample for comparison - that's another huge cost. We've done countless DNA comparisons over the years alone."

Lee Yalin was still puzzled and asked, "Didn't you find anyone?"

"No...," An Chongqiu sighed, "it's really strange. We've searched almost everywhere in the world where people are found, but we can't seem to find them - maybe we're going in the wrong direction."

Lee Yalin asked again, "Have you looked for it domestically?"

"Of course." An Chongqiu said. "At that time, we started from the place where it happened and flipped everything upside down, then gradually expanded to the entire nation, couldn't find anything, so we looked at neighboring countries, then spread throughout Asia and the world, searched everywhere, but found nothing."

Lee Yalin asked again: "Did you send someone to check your brother-in-law's family? Maybe they're hiding the child?"

An Chongqiu smiled scornfully: "We certainly checked, not just that. At first, we sent our top teams to monitor them for several years, but didn't find any leads."

"We didn't give up, because these big families are always playing tricks. Out of absolute caution, without getting 100% confirmation, we wouldn't give up, afraid they might be hiding too deep."

"So, fifteen years ago, we sent a batch of people to infiltrate them, including one person who spent ten whole years becoming their family's private butler."

"That time period is roughly five years ago, which was when we finally got 100% confirmation that my brother-in-law's family has no idea what happened to my nephew! And their old man is the same, searching everywhere..."

"Look at this sequence of events... We spent fifteen whole years just to verify whether someone is or isn't in my brother-in-law's family, or if they know some clue or not. The entire human and material resources we invested were basically futile."

"In the end, it was all for naught. Seeing the empty basket, we had no choice but to withdraw everyone..."

"Li Yalin listened to An Chongqiu's words and was utterly stunned, exclaiming: 'You're even more ruthless than spies... The entire war lasted only six years from 1939 to 1945, but you guys persisted for fifteen years...' 'Yes.' An Chongqiu spoke seriously. 'Look, these big families' way of doing things is basically like this - they don't care about spending money, wasting time or effort, and won't hesitate to spend whatever it takes just to leave no room for mistakes... The hidden engineering behind this you can hardly imagine.'" JrNovels.com