The street food market near the Horrified Inn.
Construction was still in full swing here, though it was approaching the final stage.
The original large farmers’ market had been transformed beyond recognition. Although construction had not yet been completed, the overall cyberpunk style was already visible.
Numerous contrasting cool and warm neon lights covered the exterior walls, and to complement these lights, the entire building’s exterior had undergone some subtle adjustments: new structures with strong stylistic elements had been built to match the original deconstructed design.
Various illuminated billboards created a gaudy, glittering atmosphere, with these advertising boards intricately arranged to maximize the use of overhead space.
Inside the street food market, the cyberpunk style extended to every detail.
Although the original building structure made it impossible to perfectly replicate the scenes from “Beautiful Tomorrow,” Liang Qianfan had still worked hard to recreate several shops from the film inside the food market, including the scene where the male and female protagonists ate together.
It was precisely because the production team of “Beautiful Tomorrow” had referenced numerous cyberpunk styles during production that Liang Qianfan could directly borrow elements from the film, which greatly reduced his workload.
The success of “Beautiful Tomorrow” also gave more confidence to this “Cyberpunk Food Street” concept.
However, for Liang Qianfan, there was still a very pressing issue that needed to be resolved: the atmosphere of the cyberpunk food street.
In the film, they used a combination of limited real scenes and pure special effects, allowing for much creative freedom.
Many of the detailed elements were difficult to reproduce in reality.
To improve this issue as much as possible and further enhance the immersive experience of the cyberpunk food street, Liang Qianfan had thought of many solutions.
First was customizing props, creating numerous decorative items like a film set.
For example, all the nearby lighting used science fiction-inspired streetlights that were specially customized; a high-tech sports car model was parked at the entrance for customers to take photos with; and spaces were specifically reserved for shops selling replica gun models, medicine models, or mechanical prosthetic limb models, further enhancing the immersive experience of the entire scene.
Second was incorporating arrangements that could better create the atmosphere, such as fog effects.
Cyberpunk generally favors settings where day and night blur together or dark, rainy weather. This is because the various colorful neon light effects can be displayed most perfectly at night, with wet, rainy streets reflecting the neon lights. Combined with the dark sky suggesting criminal activities constantly occurring in this high-tech city, and the fog in the air diffusing the colored lights, the entire atmosphere could be perfectly created.
On a bright, sunny day, when all scenes are clearly visible, the cyberpunk feeling would definitely be weakened.
Jingzhou had normal weather, with not too many foggy or rainy days, so the conditions for achieving the perfect cyberpunk effect were rather strict.
Liang Qianfan couldn’t change Jingzhou’s weather and climate. If he had that ability, he wouldn’t just be working as an architect—he would have been employed by the meteorological bureau long ago.
To achieve the best effect, the ideal solution would be to encase the entire cyberpunk food street in a huge shell, creating fake outdoor scenery inside, including a dark sky and distant skyscrapers with flickering neon lights. But the cost of this solution was far too enormous, and at this stage, it didn’t seem necessary.
After all, the cyberpunk food street hadn’t officially opened yet, and it remained uncertain whether tourists would accept it.
Once the food market truly became popular, they could consider additional investments.
Liang Qianfan’s compromise solution was to install numerous spray nozzles inside and around the food market to create mist. These nozzles would be slightly hidden by the surrounding buildings but would make the environment feel somewhat damp.
Appropriate lighting would also be arranged around these sprays, further diffusing the mist visually to create a hazy feeling.
This way, at least in the evening, visitors could experience a more authentic cyberpunk atmosphere.
As for daytime, the effect might be better on cloudy days, and on sunny days, they would just let it be.
Like many tourist attractions that are only beautiful during specific time periods, creating distinct peak and off-peak seasons. Visiting during the off-season doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it—although the experience isn’t as perfect as during peak season, there are fewer crowds.
For the food market, evening would definitely be the best time to visit, but coming at noon or in the afternoon would mean fewer people and no lines at popular stalls, which was also a good choice.
So far, the food market was entering its final phase of work, and it was expected to officially open in about a month.
Zhang Yahui had already screened the first batch of excellent vendors to enter the food market. These vendors specialized in different street foods, and Zhang Yahui encouraged them to watch more cyberpunk-themed content and try to create similar foods.
Even simple items like skewers or hamburgers should be made with distinctive features. While ensuring deliciousness, they should aim for diversity to stand out among the other vendors.
Of course, even without Zhang Yahui’s encouragement, these vendors would certainly find ways to improve their flavors and launch new products to attract customers.
After all, there was fierce competition among vendors.
These vendors had all come from other cities where they were among the best street food stalls in their areas. But after coming here, they were starting from scratch, competing with equally excellent vendors. If they refused to innovate, they would likely be eliminated soon.
To address this, Bao Xu had also formulated a series of rules to guide healthy competition among vendors. When the food market officially opened, these rules developed with a gaming mindset would certainly play a very important role.
At this moment, Bao Xu and Zhang Yahui were wearing safety helmets, inspecting the site.
Since construction began on the food market, Bao Xu had been coming here every few days, much more frequently than he visited Tenda Games.
His efforts were paying off—the people at Tenda Games all thought he was executing some important mission.
Obviously, in the next best employee selection, Bao Xu probably wouldn’t be sent abroad again for “having nothing to do so serving as a tour guide for others” like before.
However, this clearly had a side effect.
Bao Xu’s proactive approach had greatly stimulated Zhang Yahui’s work enthusiasm.
Zhang Yahui hadn’t expected that Bao Xu, as an employee from the gaming department, would care so much about the food market. This behavior of helping without considering departmental interests made him feel the warmth of the Tenda family.
Seeing that a colleague who came to help was so dedicated and responsible, he, as the actual person in charge, definitely needed to pay even more attention!
As the two were chatting, Liang Qianfan, who had left to make a phone call, returned.
“Good news, you two!”
“We have money now, we can buy the shops!”
Bao Xu and Zhang Yahui were stunned for a moment, not immediately understanding: “Shops? What shops?”
Liang Qianfan said, “The shops on the street from here to the Horrified Inn!”
The two suddenly realized: “Oh? That’s great!”
This matter had become somewhat distant, as Bao Xu and Zhang Yahui had been focusing on the internal affairs of the food market and had almost forgotten about it.
Earlier, when selecting the location for the food market and finalizing the cyberpunk style details, Liang Qianfan had proposed this idea: from the food market to the Horrified Inn was about one to two kilometers, and if they could buy or rent all the surrounding street shops, after some modifications, they could transform it from a single cyberpunk scenic spot into a cyberpunk food street.
An entire street could be styled similarly.
Of course, this project was quite enormous and couldn’t be completed overnight.
Currently, the main part of the food market was almost finished with decoration, but the shops on the street were still only at the negotiation stage. Originally, they were discussing ten-year minimum lease contracts, but currently, only a small portion of shops had signed contracts.
On one hand, work needed to be prioritized, and the matters at the food market were obviously more important. As for these street shops, buying them earlier or later didn’t make much difference. They would definitely need to wait until the food market was on track before gradually transforming the street.
On the other hand, regarding the specific rent issues, each shop owner had different attitudes, and the negotiation process consumed a lot of energy and caused some unpleasantness.
This area was originally near an old industrial zone, and there weren’t many young people left. The residential buildings and shops were mostly old houses, so whether buying or renting, the prices weren’t very high according to the surrounding market rates.
The condition offered by Zhang Yahui’s team was to sign a ten-year long-term lease contract with these shops at a 50% increase over the current rent, with a penalty fee for mid-term breach of contract.
Theoretically, this condition was already very favorable.
These shops were originally in a remote location, previously only doing small businesses with low profits. A 50-60 square meter shop had a monthly rent of less than 2,000 yuan, and Zhang Yahui, understanding the difficulties of these shop owners, had proactively raised the price to around 3,000 yuan, which was quite sincere.
Some shop owners were satisfied and immediately signed the contract, allowing Zhang Yahui’s team to freely modify their shops.
With these long-term contracts signed, they no longer had to worry about leasing their shops.
But there were also some shop owners who weren’t satisfied with this price and even secretly communicated with each other, wanting higher prices.
Because they could see that the Horrified Inn was already established, attracting a huge flow of customers from all over the country, and Tenda was now constructing at the original farmers’ market site, clearly busy with a new project.
Now they wanted to rent all the shops on the street for ten years. This must be a big move!
Thinking about how wealthy Tenda was, these people felt that a mere 50% rent increase wasn’t enough.
After all, this long-term contract would last ten years, and who could predict what would happen after ten years? What if the shops were earning five or ten times more in a year? If they couldn’t raise the rent, wouldn’t they lose out?
So, these people either hoped to further increase the rent or sign a shorter lease, like two or three years, so they could consider raising the rent later.
Liang Qianfan and Zhang Yahui were certainly unhappy about this.
In their view, the reason this place could develop was entirely thanks to Mr. Pei. If Mr. Pei hadn’t successively invested heavily in building the Horrified Inn and the food market, the rent on this street would not only not increase but might even decrease with the gradual loss of people.
With rent already increased by 50%, their sincerity was more than adequate. If other companies wanted to rent, these shop owners probably would have agreed without hesitation.
But merely because they thought Tenda was wealthy and profitable, they opened their mouths too wide, which was really unreasonable.
Moreover, whether this street could make money was still unknown.
If the food market didn’t succeed and this food street didn’t attract much customer flow, yet they had signed a ten-year contract at an extremely high price, wouldn’t that be a huge loss?
Mr. Pei trusted them so much and handed such an important project to the three of them. If they ended up in this situation, the responsibility would be too great to bear.
So, the two sides had reached an impasse. Except for a few more open-minded shop owners who had already signed long-term contracts, other shops were still waiting and watching.
Liang Qianfan said, “Now that Mr. Pei has provided some funds, I think this matter can come to a resolution.”
“For these shops, we give them three choices: either sign a long-term lease at the current price for ten years; or we buy their shops at a 50% premium over the market price; if they don’t accept either option, then we’ll simply make the food street detour around them.”
“If they want to take advantage of us, no way!”
Although it was called a food street, the Cyberpunk Food Street was much longer than most food streets.
A distance of one to two kilometers wasn’t just a single road. From one end to the other, there were at least six or seven large and small intersections.
If a certain shop didn’t cooperate, Liang Qianfan could consider buying next door and then using certain methods to guide tourists around this shop.
For example, creating a route map to guide tourists along specific routes; or having Tenda’s own shops use unified signage and guidance indicators.
Those shops that had signed contracts would be uniformly planned and arranged by Tenda, with a clearly recognizable decoration style. It would be difficult for other shops to imitate even if they wanted to.
Moreover, tourists naturally tend to be averse to “fake shops” that try to ride on the coattails of popularity. As long as Tenda informed them that a certain shop wasn’t part of the food street, the vast majority of tourists wouldn’t go there.
It wasn’t so easy for these shops to take advantage of Tenda.
Therefore, shops that didn’t cooperate with Tenda would likely end up with nothing in the end.
Even if they ran their own businesses, the vendors on Tenda’s side were elites from all over the country. How could these original owners compete?
Liang Qianfan had to make all shop owners clearly understand: Tenda would absolutely not be extorted, so they shouldn’t get the wrong idea.
Otherwise, if today someone came to demand a rent increase, and the day after tomorrow someone else came to cause trouble about changing the contract, wouldn’t it be endless?
As for buying versus renting, although the price fluctuation looked the same, there was actually a big difference.
As a second-tier city, Jingzhou’s current rent-to-sale ratio for most shops was about 1:300, meaning a shop with a monthly rent of 2,000 yuan would cost 600,000 yuan to buy.
Spending 600,000 yuan to buy a shop would require collecting rent for 300 months, or nearly 30 years, to break even.
With the same 50% premium, the monthly rent only increased from 2,000 to 3,000 yuan, but the total price of the shop rose from 600,000 to 900,000 yuan.
This numerical difference was quite significant.
An increase in rent meant getting an extra 1,000 yuan each month, which wasn’t much, but an increase in the shop’s selling price could get them an extra 300,000 yuan at once. The higher the total price of the shop, the more money they would get.
With this large sum of money, they could immediately invest or manage their finances, which was a much greater temptation.
Most of the shop owners on this street didn’t have much money, and for them, the temptation of several hundred thousand yuan was quite substantial.
Moreover, shops in this area had always been extremely difficult to sell. While they could find people to rent for their businesses, when it came to selling, almost no one was willing to spend hundreds of thousands to buy them.
If they missed this opportunity to sell, there might not be another chance to sell at such a high price in the future.
Of course, selling also had risks. If the value of the shops increased by more than 50% after ten years, then they would have sold at a loss. In contrast, those who had signed long-term leases would still own their shops after ten years and could still collect rent, which would be much more profitable.
But not everyone could resist the enormous temptation of immediate benefits, especially since no one could predict exactly how much these shops would appreciate in the future.
Now Liang Qianfan was laying his cards on the table with these shop owners: either sell or sign a long-term lease, there was no third option. If individual shop owners wanted to play tricks, Liang Qianfan would rather spend more money to make the food street take a detour than let them have a sip of soup!