The Cheapest Man
by Mason W.
Once, long ago in Beijing, China there lived a young man. And this man was very over confident, inexperienced, self absorbed, and cheap man. All day he would boast about how good he was in everything. He never really was though, so when he tried to prove something, he would fail and after awhile people didn't listen any more.
One day while speaking with some villagers he boasted that he could build a pagoda in only three months because he had a very good plan. This was the most outrageous thing that the man had ever boasted about so the people didn't believe him because a pagoda would take at least six months to build.
The man didn't care what the people thought so he went out to buy the wood. Now since the man was very cheap he bought cheapest wood he could witch happened to be rotten instead of the sturdy and firm wood. The shop owner warned him that the wood looked rotten and might be unsteady but the man didn't listen because he thought that he could work around that obstacle. So the man soon started work on his pagoda. Even the people pointed out that the man's pagoda would fall down eventually, but the man still would not listen. He worked on the pagoda for a long time. In fact he worked on the pagoda for three months.
He made his workers toil 14 hours a day for only two yuan a day. The workers rebelled many times and even quit but he always hired more. Even when the workers complained that the land was bad he wouldn't relocate his structure.
Now all the people would remind him that his pagoda would fall down but he would never listen and send them back the their work. The people who would complained the most would be the people who carved the wood because to carve rotten wood is nearly impossible but all the man did was send them back to there work.
Finally, the pagoda was completed just as the man had promised. The village men were very impressed and they started to think there first impressions were wrong. During that night, however a big storm hit and in the morning everyone discovered the pagoda had fallen to the ground. All the people laughed at the man and yelled out that they told him that the wood was to rotten to build with, and from that day on, the man learned his lesson...ROTTEN WOOD CANNOT BE CARVED.