The Unpretentious Yaling Beauty Center
The beauty salon's name was nothing fancy—just Yaling Beauty Center. It had been there when He Peiling took over the place four years ago, and since the signboard was still in decent shape, she couldn't be bothered to replace it. The shop itself wasn't small, spanning two floors for nearly five hundred square meters in total. But the location was lousy, so the rent stayed reasonable at just over six thousand a month. Toss in utilities, miscellaneous taxes, and it pushed past ten thousand. Then there was the rented dorm at another four thousand-plus, food for everyone, and wages for the girls—twenty-odd people meant at least fifty to sixty thousand gone every month. Bottom line: without hitting a hundred thousand in revenue, they were bleeding money.
It was evening now, and the place buzzed with moderate activity. Seven or eight customers were getting their hair washed, five or six more in the private rooms for treatments, a few others enjoying massages. Business was passable, all things considered.
But after flipping through the ledgers from the past few months, Chu Fei's face darkened. The financial crisis had hit hard over the last half-year, slashing the number of Hong Kong clients crossing the border. No wonder they were in the red—and no wonder his mom's complexion had soured. He strolled through the shop, greeting every girl with a smile, and it hit him: that was the real problem.
When He Peiling had first arrived and taken over, she'd handpicked a batch of fresh-faced beauties from her rural hometown back home. It had lit a fire under the place—who didn't love those pure, dewy girls? But four years on, Shenzhen's glittering, hedonistic world had corrupted them all. The stunners had been snapped up as kept women and vanished from the scene. The ones with potential but middling looks? Poached by rival salons with fatter paychecks.
They'd come with He Peiling, sure—but that didn't mean they'd signed their lives away. Two years of loyalty was plenty generous.
One or two stuck around out of closeness or family ties, too awkward to jump ship. The rest were hires she'd scraped together locally over the years. A couple were pretty enough, but one was covered in tattoos, the other a chain-smoking, heavy-drinking mess slathered in garish makeup. They turned stomachs before they sparked any desire.
The leftovers? Chu Fei could only shake his head.
Basically, the shop limped along on nostalgia from old clients, who kept coming in faint hope that He Peiling would trek back home and haul in another load of fresh talent. At least she still handled legit hair and beauty services, so the losses stayed manageable. They could only pray for a market turnaround.
He'd just arrived, so Chu Fei wasn't about to start barking orders. He'd observe for a few days, get the lay of the land in Shenzhen...
The decision was made, and he was here now. Like it or not, he'd throw himself into making this work—for his mom, and for himself.
Chu Fei headed back to the dorm first, took a shower, unpacked his stuff, and settled in to buckle down.
The "dorm" was really a rundown old factory space, partitioned into a dozen cubicles by He Peiling. She had her own private room; the rest were bunks, two girls per space. She'd set him up in one with bunks too, but he had it solo for now. The bathrooms—for showers and toilets—were communal, just two of them, no walls between, only flimsy wooden dividers. Conditions were rough, a far cry from the rosy picture she'd painted over the phone. This was her real life here.
He pulled his few clothes from his backpack and stowed them in the bedside cabinet. Then he picked up the two trinkets he'd snagged from the street market, pondering where to place them, when a sharp pain stabbed his finger. A jagged edge on the bronze pot had sliced it open.
But how? He hadn't even been moving it.
As he puzzled over it, a bead of blood welled up and trembled toward the floor. Then, impossibly, it veered midair, defying gravity, and zipped straight into the pot's surface—absorbed in an instant.
Absorbed?
Before Chu Fei could process it, darkness swallowed his vision. It cleared in a blink, but he was no longer in the dorm. He stood in an ancient pavilion amid a classical garden, fragrant with antiquity.
This... where the hell was this?
"Hahaha, finally got you in here! I've been trapped for tens of thousands of years—freedom at last... Kid, die! Become part of my chaos. It's your lucky break!"