Chapter 5

The beauty salon had an unremarkable name: "Yaling Beauty Center." It had been called that ever since He Peiling took over the place. The sign was still relatively new, and she hadn’t bothered changing it, so the name had simply been kept. The shop itself was quite large, with two floors and nearly five hundred square meters in total. Because the location was poor, though, the rent wasn’t high, only a little over six thousand yuan a month. Add utilities and assorted taxes, and the monthly overhead came to just over ten thousand. But once the dormitory rent was included, another four thousand or so, then food, the girls’ wages, and everything else, it meant that with twenty-odd people, the shop had to bring in at least fifty or sixty thousand a month just to stay afloat. In other words, if the monthly revenue didn’t exceed one hundred thousand, it was basically bleeding money.

It was night now, and the shop was still fairly busy. Seven or eight people were having their hair washed, five or six more were getting treatments in the private rooms inside, and some were getting massages. Business was still passable.

But after flipping through the accounts for the past few months, Chu Fei’s expression darkened. Maybe it was because over the past half year, hit by the financial crisis, far fewer people from Hong Kong had been coming over, so the shop had been running at a loss. No wonder his mother looked so worn down. Especially after Chu Fei walked a lap through the shop and greeted every girl there, he more or less understood the main reason.

Four years ago, after He Peiling came here to take over the place, she had selected a group of pretty girls from the countryside back home and brought them over. For a time, the shop really did boom, because who wouldn’t like fresh, naturally pretty girls?

But four years later, those once innocent girls had long since been completely corrupted by Shenzhen’s world of decadent luxury. The prettier ones were gradually kept by men and left the trade, while the ones with average looks but a little potential were poached away by other shops for big money, because those places offered better pay...

They had followed He Peiling here, but that didn’t mean they had sold themselves to her for life, did it?

Being willing to work for her for two years was already considered decent.

Aside from one or two girls who were on good terms with He Peiling and even had a bit of family connection with her, making it awkward to jump ship, the rest had been hired gradually over the years in Shenzhen. There were one or two pretty ones among them, but they were either covered in tattoos, or smoked, drank, and wore heavy makeup; just looking at them was enough to kill any appetite, much less sexual interest.

As for the rest, Chu Fei could only shake his head...

So in the end, the shop had basically been surviving on the loyalty of old customers who were reluctant to let go of the past. But at the core of it, they were all just hoping that one day He Peiling would go back to the countryside and bring another batch of fresh girls with her. Fortunately, He Peiling could still make a living doing legitimate services like hairdressing, so even though the shop was losing money, it wasn’t losing much. Everyone was just waiting for the market to turn around.

After all, Chu Fei had only just arrived, so of course he wasn’t going to start bossing people around immediately. He planned to observe for a few days first and, in passing, get a better understanding of the situation in Shenzhen...

Since he had already made up his mind and come here, whether he liked this line of work or not, he would have to do it well. For his mother, and even more for himself!

So Chu Fei went back to the dormitory first, took a shower, then sorted out his things and prepared to settle down and get to work properly.

The so-called dormitory was actually a disused empty factory building. After renting it, He Peiling had someone partition it into more than a dozen rooms. Besides the one room she occupied alone, the others all had bunk beds, with two girls sleeping in each room. Now that Chu Fei had come, the room He Peiling had prepared for him also had bunk beds, though he was the only one living there for now. The shower and toilet facilities were shared, and there were only two of them. There wasn’t even a wall between them, just a simple wooden partition. The conditions were truly crude, which also meant that He Peiling’s life here was nowhere near as good as she had made it sound on the phone before.

He took the few changes of clothes out of his backpack and put them into the small wardrobe by the bed. Then Chu Fei picked up the two things he had bought from a street stall and was thinking about where to place them when a sudden pain shot through his finger. It turned out that a jagged broken edge on the bronze pot had cut him.

The problem was, Chu Fei had been holding it without moving it, so how had it cut his finger?

While he was still thinking about that, he suddenly saw a drop of blood seep out of his finger and sway downward toward the floor. But at that very moment, it abruptly twisted in an eerie way, breaking free of gravity and flying toward the bronze pot instead, then instantly merging into its surface!

Merged in?

Before Chu Fei could even react, his vision suddenly went black. He quickly regained sight, but he was no longer in the dormitory. Instead, he was standing in a pavilion within an antique-style garden.

This... where is this?

"Hahaha, at last I’ve gotten you in here! I’ve been trapped for tens of thousands of years, and now I’m finally about to break free... Kid, die! Become part of my Chaos. It’s your good fortune!"