Lu Lingyun chuckled and held onto Wang Jiluo’s hand, considering Luo Heng’s attention towards her. “Do you really know that Luo Heng?”
“I’ve only met him once. It’s not like I know him well,” Wang Jiluo shook her head, explaining her silence earlier.
Lu Lingyun listened and said, “Stay away from him in the future. Don’t talk to him.”
“Why?”
Lu Lingyun pondered, “Just look at how he answered Xing Dai Rong. Do you think he’s a good guy?”
Wang Jiluo nodded seriously, “You’re right.”
Seeing this, Lu Lingyun felt a bit relieved. It seemed she had nipped the budding interest in the bud, but she knew she couldn’t let down her guard. She had to stay vigilant in the future.
They chatted and laughed, and Lu Lingyun personally saw her off to her carriage. She then assigned two servants from the Houfu to escort Wang Jiluo back home.
As news of Wang Jiluo’s safe return came back, the banquet in the dining hall was nearing its end.
The servant reported that Cheng Yunshuo’s two friends were chatting happily with Xing Dai Rong, with Cheng Yunshuo hardly getting a word in edgewise.
The two friends praised Xing Dai Rong’s buffet idea as incredibly novel, and Xing Dai Rong, in turn, threw out several more new business ideas.
Right in front of them, she talked about her plans to open a milk tea shop and an underwear store.
The drink shop was one thing, but when she described her underwear store, Cheng Yunshuo’s face changed.
Finally, Cheng Yunshuo declared that Xing Dai Rong was drunk and forcibly took her away, ending the banquet.
His two friends burst into laughter, praising Xing Dai Rong as an extraordinary woman.
Lu Lingyun ordered the servants who had heard the conversation to keep their mouths shut.
But it turned out that Xing Dai Rong’s idea of opening an underwear store was genuine.
She thought that since ancient women didn’t wear underwear, her new-fangled idea of underwear would be a hit with women of this era.
She thought, “Once my store opens, the money will be rolling in! Underwear stores are incredibly profitable in the modern world. It’s a low-barrier, easy-to-operate industry, and it’s guaranteed to be a smash hit!”
She pestered Cheng Yunshuo for several days, meticulously laying out her plan, just about to convince him when the Ju Fu Buffet she had created was shut down by the government.
Kang Ping rushed over to find Cheng Yunshuo. “Young Master, it’s bad! Our buffet restaurant has been shut down!”
Hearing this, both Cheng Yunshuo and Xing Dai Rong turned to him. “What happened?”
Kang Ping looked troubled, “It’s the suppliers of our materials. They sued our buffet.”
“Why would they sue us?”
“It’s because we couldn’t pay them,” Kang Ping handed over a thick ledger. “Since opening, the buffet has been losing money every day, and we’ve been dragging our feet on the material payments. Now the debt has piled up, and we can’t pay it, so they sued us.”
Xing Dai Rong snatched the ledger. The numbers on the ledger were Arabic numerals she had taught, but she still couldn’t understand the accounts.
Cheng Yunshuo took it over. He glanced at the numbers and flipped through page after page, until he was confronted with a shocking number.
“One thousand one hundred and fifty taels?!”
“Yes,” Kang Ping nodded. “Our daily material cost is about forty or fifty taels, and the buffet’s daily profit is at most ten taels, and at least five taels. We’ve been losing more than eighty percent of the profit every day. Now we owe the suppliers one thousand one hundred and fifty taels.”
“How could we be in so much debt?!” Xing Dai Rong frowned. “How did you manage this?!”
“Miss Xing, we did everything according to your instructions. Even with a price of forty wen per person, we’re still losing money! You don’t know how much these people can eat, and they come from all walks of life. Every time one person comes, it’s like they want to eat their entire family’s share! There are always those who eat ten or twenty jin of food, and then they go home, stick their fingers down their throats, and vomit it all back up to feed their entire families.”
“That’s impossible!”
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