Chapter 57: The 57th Day of Livestream Selling
Then Reinhardt’s big face shoved right up to the camera, giving every “family member” who clicked into the livestream the most direct fluffy impact possible.
Regular viewers of Lin Zhao’s livestream instantly understood: he had found yet another new way to pad his streaming hours.
As for the fact that he hated work and only wanted to slack through it, Lin Zhao did not hide it at all. Sometimes he was so righteous about it that people could not help wanting to say, Why don’t you at least treat us like outsiders?
But everyone’s real purpose for entering the livestream was self-service shopping, so what Lin Zhao streamed did not really affect the bigger picture. Only some viewers who genuinely followed Wei’an and Simba’s prairie adventure were asking in the comments why Wei’an and Simba were not on today, whether there would be a chance to see them again later, and also, honestly, this new tabby cat was really cute too.
Lin Zhao would not reply to any of this, because…
He could not see it at all.
After saying to 1114’s camera, “I have something to do. Everyone, please watch my cat for me,” Lin Zhao really left. It was not that he had gone off to slack, though he truly wanted to. He simply had other work to do.
Lin Zhao had not even gone very far. He was still in the recording studio, somewhere Reinhardt could see with one glance.
The big cat’s eyes had not left Lin Zhao once. In fact, he still very much wanted to run over and cuddle with Lin Zhao. It was just that he had promised to help Lin Zhao.
Then he would endure it for a little while. Reinhardt thought so.
Lin Zhao was discussing a new company project with Qin Xiaoman. Aside from the supermarket and the winery, Lin Zhao had no plans for expansion for the time being. After all, he really had no ambition to build some grand business empire. He was no longer short of money, and neither were the people around him, so why should he work hard?
Qin Xiaoman was also a down-to-earth person. Although he had earned quite a bit of money by following Lin Zhao and could now be considered a man with some assets, he had not become blindly confident and decided he was some once-in-a-century business genius. He was very clear that luck had played a large part in bringing him to where he was today.
But a person could not rely on luck forever.
Qin Xiaoman had seriously considered his future and felt that, sure enough, he should steadily manage the company while working hard to enrich himself first.
By taking economics classes.
Yes, it was as simple and honest as taking classes.
Classmate Qin Xiaoman, who used to get a headache just from looking at numbers, was now taking proper online classes every day through 1114’s connections, learning from truly capable professors from all over. The subject was how to manage, operate, and expand a trading company. One could say it was extremely targeted. Originally, 1114 had prepared this for Lin Zhao, but Lin Zhao was not promising, after all.
The system, hating iron for not becoming steel, had tried to coax Lin Zhao into taking classes together with Qin Xiaoman. Unfortunately, in front of anti-PUA warrior Lin Zhao, all methods were futile.
Only Qin Xiaoman was genuinely interested in the matter, and he stuck with it. This young man from Liangguang, who still wore big shorts and flip-flops even after becoming a boss, was truly striving for self-improvement. He worked during the day and took classes at night. No one knew where he got so much energy. He even enthusiastically discussed with 1114 whether, after he finished studying these, he could try contacting teachers from other planes.
He really wanted to make progress too badly.
Lin Zhao: =?=
He had never seen Qin Xiaoman love studying this much before.
Qin Xiaoman scratched his head and smiled a little sheepishly. But people were just that contradictory. At the age when one should be studying, one hated books to death. Only when one reached the age where one had to work hard did one realize how lacking one was in knowledge, and how desperately thirsty one was for it.
Of course, it might also be because the human brain was only fully developed in one’s thirties. The math problems Qin Xiaoman used to feel he could not understand no matter what now did not seem that difficult. Though he still needed to think very seriously and carefully, at least he could finally understand what the teacher meant.
“Honestly, if you made me sit in a classroom the way I used to, I probably still couldn’t do it.” Qin Xiaoman only wanted to learn what interested him.
And right now, what interested him most was how to make money.
After chattering for a long while, the two people who had wandered all over the place finally returned to the main topic. They were currently sitting at a corner table on one side of the recording studio, each with a cup of milk tea in front of them. In fact, almost everyone present had one. Qin Xiaoman had bought them.
Lin Zhao did not want to expand the business, but business had come to him all the same.
Strictly speaking, it had first come to Qin Xiaoman’s assistant, Shen Han.
Ms. Shen was still as serious and diligent as ever, and still… loved food just as much as ever. But eating too much made her gain weight. Everyone had a love for beauty. She was not planning to lose weight, but she still wanted to maintain her weight a little. So, in order to eat a high-calorie meal, she got up very early that day to eat. How early? At five in the morning, she was already cooking a river-snail rice noodle hotpot.
Ahem. That was not the point. The point was, while cooking the hotpot, she found a letter inside the ingredients.
This required a bit of explanation. Ever since they realized that spirit plants could improve the natural energy in the air, Hua Country had begun trying to introduce all kinds of harmless plants from the cultivation world.
These plants naturally did not only include ornamental ones. They also included something Hua people would absolutely never miss—ingredients.
Or rather, vegetables. At present, the number of vegetables that had been researched by experts and confirmed to be directly edible was not especially large, but the people around Lin Zhao had basically all eaten them already. Foodie Shen Han’s favorite was a mushroom called spirit jade mushroom. That freshness—tsk. Let’s put it this way: even if she really ate herself into the hospital, she would only question whether her cooking method was wrong.
This spirit jade mushroom was truly delicious, and also truly not cheap. When Shen Han bought it, she used the internal employee price, but she still had to weigh it carefully and only ate it occasionally.
It was at that moment that she found a letter from a cultivation-world merchant, Boss Qian, tucked into the crevice of the container holding the mushrooms.
Every world never lacked smart people, nor people who could discover business opportunities. This Boss Qian was one of them. He had been trying to contact Lin Zhao without success, so he took another route and tried his luck by advertising through the shipping channel.
Lin Zhao’s livestream format in the cultivation world was similar to the wasteland world. It randomly generated a light screen, like a pop-up ad.
Lin Zhao was extremely careful not to leak any intelligence related to Hua Country, but over time, during so many livestreams, there would inevitably be omissions. This omission was that the office building had hired window cleaners, and Lin Zhao had said he hoped they would be careful and stay safe.
This cultivation-world business prodigy saw an opportunity in that.
Boss Qian’s family ran a clothing shop, though it was slightly more high-end than ordinary shops. It made enchanted robes for cultivators. But they were not particularly impressive enchanted robes, just basic first- or second-grade items with small arrays embroidered onto them. After all, refining enchanted robes also required cultivation, and though Boss Qian was very flexible in business, he was never very enlightened when it came to cultivation. His own cultivation was only a little stronger than that of an ordinary person. And because he did not have much money, he could not afford to hire powerful artifact cultivators, causing a vicious cycle.
In a world where Nascent Soul cultivators were everywhere and Golden Core cultivators were worth less than dogs, his family’s enchanted robes were simply not enough to look at.
But robes of that grade were more than enough to sell to mortals.
Only, mortals in the cultivation world did not have much money, so Boss Qian turned his gaze toward the vast market behind Lin Zhao. Now who did not know that the light screen that went around doing business with everyone was a special opportunity? One could buy novel and interesting little gadgets from it, as well as very special things.
Boss Qian was not interested in those things. He simply had a sudden idea. The person behind this opportunity must be very rich, so could he try selling something to that side?
What Lin Zhao had been leading everyone to practice was just the Basic Body-Tempering Art, something even mortals could practice. Boss Qian felt that his family’s enchanted robes might not be without a market.
“What market?”
“Selling enchanted robes to people in all kinds of dangerous jobs.” In fact, the state was already equipping firefighters with fire-repelling beads, and the results were extremely striking. Some foreign countries had even condemned Hua Country for technological monopoly, saying that Hua Country used natural energy to create life-saving items while completely refusing international exchange.
By the same logic, Qin Xiaoman wanted to use the enchanted robes from Boss Qian’s family for the ordinary civilian market. For example, sell wind-resistant robes to mountaineering teams, sell short-distance flying robes to film crews, sell defensive robes to high-altitude spider-man cleaning companies, and so on.
If not for fear of being accused of cheating, he even wanted to ask whether athletes needed robes that could make people run faster and dissipate heat better.
Of course, these enchanted robes would definitely also be very expensive.
“We could even start a rental business.” Qin Xiaoman got this idea from seeing his cousin’s posts on Moments. His cousin was a freelancer. When she had no money, she stayed home and earned money. When she had money, she traveled around the country as a “princess,” which meant dressing up in all kinds of beautiful costumes and makeup for scenic-location photoshoots. One makeup-and-costume session cost anywhere from a few hundred to two or three thousand. “Renting enchanted robes so people can experience being cultivators—does that have potential?”
Honestly, Qin Xiaoman and Boss Qian’s instantly aligned idea did have quite a lot of employment prospects. This commercial blue ocean was even currently theirs alone.
“And can you ask Arland if he can make something like a flying broom?” Which foreigner would not want to experience flying on a broom? The more Qin Xiaoman thought about it, the more ideas he had. He even slapped his thigh in regret. “It’s just that we still haven’t found the reason Third Aunt teleported from Qiong Island back to Jiangzuo. Otherwise, if we developed a teleportation business, who wouldn’t want to try Apparition once?”
“Still haven’t found it?” If Qin Xiaoman had not brought it up, Lin Zhao would almost have forgotten about it. He had thought it had been solved long ago.
“Yeah. In the end, they still didn’t find it.” As Third Aunt’s family member, Qin Xiaoman was one of the people most familiar with the progress of the matter. “After all, Qiong Island was full of tourists at the time. Xiangxiang said there were two biggest possibilities. Either Third Aunt’s ability itself includes teleportation, and it just only erupted that one time, or the one who triggered the energy was a tourist, who unknowingly left Qiong Island the next day.”
Qin Xiaoman’s family had been staying at a fairly large homestay apartment at the time. The surroundings were all tourists. It was not only Hua people going to Qiong Island for the New Year, there were also plenty of foreigners from all over. It was truly very difficult to conduct an investigation.
“Xiangxiang said whether or not they can find the source of this teleportation ability can only depend on fate.”
While the two of them were chatting again, Reinhardt, who had been impatiently flicking his tail in front of the camera and growing more and more displeased the longer he looked at Qin Xiaoman, suddenly perked up his pair of ears, which were slightly rounder than an ordinary cat’s. His half-lidded eyes fully opened too, and even his gaze sharpened considerably.
It was as if he was searching for something. Just as the viewers in the livestream began growing curious, he suddenly stood up, locking onto a certain extremely hidden signal, like a frequency gone wrong.
Reinhardt’s violet eyes darkened as he looked toward an inconspicuous corner of the recording studio, where the air was beginning to distort.
With one stomp of his foot, there came a sound like shattering glass—“crack.” It was very faint, yet it made the lights in the studio flicker. Only 1114, which was acting as the camera, was unaffected.
Lin Zhao and Qin Xiaoman both stopped talking and looked up in surprise toward the lights. “Is the current unstable?”
Around the same time, comments floated across the livestream: [Was there static just now?] [What happened?]
Then, in the next second, everyone knew what had happened. In the originally empty open space of the recording studio, the air looked as if it had been stirred apart. Amid constant twisting, like a cinema screen being torn open, a slit appeared. A squad in black combat uniforms and full-coverage helmets swiftly crawled out.
They were well trained, with a clear objective. After locking their eyes onto Lin Zhao, they formed a tactical formation and rushed rapidly toward Lin Zhao and Qin Xiaoman’s direction.
At a glance, it was clear that they intended physical contact, forced marking, and then using the teleportation channel that had not fully closed yet to kidnap Lin Zhao.
The female captain of the security squad reacted at once. Intruders. While sprinting toward Lin Zhao, she pressed the alarm in her hand.
But everything happened too quickly. From the air distortion to the intruders’ appearance, only a breath had passed. Qin Xiaoman instinctively threw the milk tea in his hand at those people and moved to block Lin Zhao. The livestream was already flooded with countless [???].
However, faster than those intruders was a silver-white figure.
On camera, Reinhardt leapt into the air. With one claw per intruder, he instantly pinned them dead in place. His thick tail even tossed one of them away like a broken sack.
Because when he landed on all four paws, Reinhardt’s body had already expanded and stretched open in an instant. His previously soft, flexible spine was like an inflating balloon, muscles bulging one after another. His body straightened, his ears remained rounded, but his limbs became even stronger and more powerful, like a small mountain.
The ceiling lights of the recording studio illuminated the contours of this white-tiger-like colossus with perfect clarity. He occupied nearly half the space in front of Lin Zhao. The former fluffy aura had been completely replaced by the wild, forceful dominance only a large predator could possess.
Reinhardt’s eyes were full of coldness toward the intruders, and a ferocity that had finally shed its disguise.
Under the powerful spiritual pressure that made everyone instinctively want to submit, the first scream came from the person hiding behind the distorted space.
A stream of spiritual power, far more terrifying than when he had interrupted the remote capture before, shot out like a sharp arrow through the spatial entrance that had not yet fully severed its connection. Ignoring physical distance, it flew straight through and stabbed viciously into the mind of the person on the other side.
