The Lost Tomb : Restart (The Sound Of Providence)

Chapter 126: Shanxi's Goods

I had been going through my WeChat contacts on the way back to see if there was anyone I could borrow money from. In addition, I just wanted to know if there was anyone who hadn't paid me back before. At this juncture, I figured my previous good relationships with people couldn't overcome Uncle Two's authority and I wouldn't be able to borrow anything. Fatty was pulling his inventory and trying to clear the contents of his warehouse. He scratched his head and blamed me for abandoning the business in recent years. Everything he had bought before was out of date now.

In the antique industry, all the really valuable things were in auction houses. Generally, if the shop wasn't engaged in underground trading and sold goods on the surface, making money mainly depended on trends. The question was always: what's popular this year? If you chose right, you could sell the goods quickly. Fatty hadn't touched the market for a long time, and all the old goods he had weren't popular this year. It was worthless to put a price tag on them since no one would want them. After a long time, he eventually begged various friends and sold some things for more than ten thousand yuan.

I thought Fatty had some more valuable things, but he said that all of the good things had been moved to Rain Village. On that stormy night, all those things had been regarded as mine and Xiao Hua took them away to settle the accounts [1]. Fatty seemed to have a lifetime of bad luck just for knowing me. He went from getting accidental injuries to losing his whole fortune.

I sighed, pinched my brows, and realized that I had to make some money.

I had about ten thousand yuan in my WeChat account that was enough for food and gas for a while. I had to take care of both Fatty and myself, so I told him not to live in the hotel. We could save some money if he just slept at my house. I didn't sell my Jinbei in the end. I had a lot of rubbings and old inkstones piled up at home, so I opened a Taobao shop [2]. These old inkstones were still very valuable, so I figured we could get about seventy or eighty thousand yuan in cash. That could be used as the principal, but we'd have to go to the countryside to collect the items first.

Uncle Two could control the things taken from tombs, but he couldn't control what had been handed down. Moreover, many small-time thieves also stayed in the countryside and pretended to be fellow villagers. Those people also had good things, but the price was unstable and the negotiation cost was very high. These small-time thieves always cheated because they didn't know what would be in the next bag.

I went back and set everything up, but only got thirty-four thousand after selling all of the old inkstones. That was usually the starting price for a special corbel [3] on old wooden furniture. It seemed that even this money-making scheme didn't pan out. All those other inherited items were only valued at twenty thousand.

If I wasn't in a hurry to save those two, I was even willing to make ironware and beeswax. There had always been a steady market in these parts, but it had slowed down recently.

Why the fuck are you trying to die when I'm so poor? I stood there facing West Lake with a cold heart. I decided from that day on that I would care more about deposits and financial management.

After getting a feel for the market, I found that it was impossible to make the money we needed like this. Fatty and I made up a plan and decided to split up. Fatty would doggedly borrow as much as he could while I went and knocked on the door of Haoshanju.

Bai Haotian was wearing pajamas and didn't appear to have slept well these days. She had dark circles under her eyes and her face looked a little swollen. As soon as she saw me, she covered her face to keep me from looking.

"What are you doing here?" She asked. "If you don't go to work, you'll be fired."

"I'm here to show you how to operate Haoshanju," I said to her. "Take out all of your accounts and we'll go to Shanxi tomorrow to look for goods."

"Just you and me? What about the warehouse?"

"Ask off."

"You can only take two days off," Bai Haotian said in a panic.

She went to take out her phone—probably to call my Uncle Two—but I quickly snatched it away and looked at my watch. "Then we'll start now. I'll give you fifteen minutes to change clothes and grab all of your accounts and cards. Didn't you want to learn the craft? I'll teach you." 

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Notes:

[1] The explanation in Part 2 of "Extra Story: Some of Wu Xie's Thoughts".

[2] Taobao, a popular Chinese online shopping website. 

[3] A corbel is a structural piece of stone, wood, or metal jutting from a wall to carry a superincumbent weight, a type of bracket.