Thinking carefully, this made perfect sense.

When selecting locations for Slackin’ Internet Café originally, they had all been chosen in rather remote places, essentially filtering through all the inferior positions in Jinzhou City.

And since the Mingyun Villa store was the biggest money-loser among all Slackin’ Internet Cafés, it naturally indicated that its location was the worst of the worst.

It wasn’t surprising that Pei Qian would find his way here when looking for a suitable place for this high-end restaurant.

Thinking it through, it seemed quite good.

How about playing the “ancient temple hidden in deep mountains” approach?

There were originally some commercial spaces around the Mingyun Villa residential area, but due to the extremely low foot traffic, most shops had already given up and closed down.

At that time, Pei Qian had chosen the standalone commercial building farthest from Mingyun Villa and turned it into the Mingyun Villa branch of Slackin’ Internet Café.

Now, those commercial spaces could still be utilized. Pei Qian planned to select one that was particularly well-hidden, preferably spacious, renovate it, and turn it into a high-end restaurant.

He wouldn’t list it on review websites or promote it. The company’s employees would quietly eat there, and it would operate at a loss in peaceful obscurity—perfect.

This time, Pei Qian definitely wouldn’t adopt a buffet format; that had a consumption ceiling and wasn’t extravagant enough.

He needed to create an exorbitantly priced menu. By ordering only the most expensive dishes, they could spend money at an impressive rate.

Ingredients would also all be the best and freshest. In short, all the premium ingredients available in Jinzhou City would be used.

What about waste if the customer flow was too low and ingredients couldn’t be consumed in time?

The system most likely wouldn’t allow this to happen.

Otherwise, Pei Qian could just frantically purchase ingredients and let them rot, which would loss of quite a bit of money. This completely contradicted the system’s consistent requirements.

For this issue, Pei Qian had also thought of a countermeasure.

Some ordinary ingredients could be purchased anytime and could also serve as staff meals. Since everything would be consumed internally, there wouldn’t be much waste, and the system shouldn’t care about these trivial matters.

For some relatively precious ingredients, like Australian lobster, Kobe beef, white diamond truffles, blue lobster, and the like, they would implement a reservation system. When a reservation was made for a certain day, they would purchase in advance based on the quantity needed.

For Pei Qian, this wasn’t an issue. After all, he always knew when gatherings would take place, and he could just notify the restaurant before the gathering to prepare all these high-end ingredients.

And for regular customers who occasionally came, only to discover that this ingredient wasn’t available, that ingredient wasn’t available, no good ingredients were available at all, everything required a reservation…

This would also create an excellent deterrent effect.

Killing two birds with one stone!

Then they could hire a few powerful chefs from the capital, Shanghai, or even abroad at high prices, keeping them on the payroll daily. Just the salary expenses alone would consume quite a bit each month.

Not only would they lose money, but they could also frequently enjoy feasts. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Thinking of this, Pei Qian considered taking a stroll around the area in the next couple of days to find a place that was remote enough yet spacious enough to finalize the restaurant’s location.

The space needed to be large, so it could accommodate enough employees.

…

…

July 19th, Monday.

Ma Yiqun arrived at Terminus Chinese Web and began his daily work.

There weren’t many manuscripts to review, even including those from Saturday and Sunday, and he quickly finished reviewing them.

After casually writing some plot for “Return to Shore,” Ma Yiqun felt a bit bored and wanted to slack off for a while.

So, he opened a web novel forum to browse casually.

Glancing at the hot posts on the homepage, he discovered that quite a few people were discussing Terminus Chinese Web.

This was normal; after all, Ma Yiqun had previously used various channels to announce that Terminus Chinese Web was open and seeking manuscripts. He had also posted on forums, so naturally, many authors would discuss it.

However, Ma Yiqun found that the reputation of their site on web novel forums didn’t seem very good.

“Recently, a new website called Terminus Chinese Web has appeared. I heard their full-attendance bonus is quite good—1,000 yuan for just 3,000 words daily, even better than Infinite Chinese Web. Is it worth joining? Could any expert give me some advice?”

“Small website, not recommended.”

“I heard someone tried it and said the site’s initial traffic is too low. It seems they haven’t made any moves to poach big-name authors or direct reader traffic from other channels. So you should be prepared that for a very long time in the future, your income will only consist of the full-attendance bonus…”

“Is it that bad?”

“Yes, it’s that bad. Mainly because someone asked their editors, and it seems that besides providing full-attendance bonuses, this website doesn’t offer any other preferential conditions. If you have ambitions, it’s still recommended to try Infinite Chinese Web to achieve overnight success. Even if you write a good book on this small website, no one will subscribe to it.”

“Unless what you write is particularly terrible and you never expect to earn from subscriptions, then you can go there.”

These were comments from some forum users. There were also several other comments that Ma Yiqun could immediately identify as coming from editors or authors from other websites.

After all, Ma Yiqun had frequented this forum for a long time and was familiar with some common IDs.

“Everyone, don’t go there at all, it’s a trap!”

“This website has no promotion, no channels, so naturally no readers, and the book library is garbage. Over time, it will inevitably become a vicious cycle. If you update on Infinite Chinese Web, even if the full-attendance bonus is a bit less, you can still earn some subscription money when your book gets published!”

“Exactly, I don’t know if this website is laundering money, or if they’re so naive to think that just providing some full-attendance bonuses can attract good authors? Simply ridiculous.”

“Right, they could at least buy some slightly more expensive manuscripts. At least make the books on the homepage readable!”

“So I advise newcomers not to go there at all, you’ll get scammed! For web novels, you still need to go to big websites. What if this website runs away one day? You won’t even get your full-attendance bonus. Wouldn’t that be heartbreaking?”

…

Ma Yiqun looked at these comments and silently sighed.

Although he wanted to refute them in his heart, he felt that they made quite a bit of sense.

From Ma Yiqun’s standpoint, he had 100% trust in Mr. Pei and believed that Mr. Pei had ways to make the website popular.

But from an observer’s standpoint, what everyone saw was naturally the most unreliable side of Terminus Chinese Web.

Although some editors and authors from rival sites were embellishing and being sarcastic, it had to be admitted that most of what they said was true.

Not poaching big-name authors, not buying out manuscripts, no channels to direct reader traffic—just relying on these meager full-attendance bonuses indeed couldn’t attract any good authors.

Ma Yiqun silently closed the forum and continued working.

The website had been set up, and the authors whose manuscripts had been accepted had started updating. All sections and featured spots on the homepage had been assigned, at least giving it some semblance of structure.

And the webpage design was quite beautiful, after all, money had been spent on it.

But, just a slight look at these books on the homepage revealed all the flaws.

The writing was simply unbearable to read!

The titles were all uniformly XX Divine Emperor, XX Wild Son-in-law, XX Wild Soldier, and so on, even interspersed with a few female-oriented novels like “Wayward Wife, Don’t Anger the CEO” and “The Fake CEO’s Little Darling Wife.”

The book titles were very ordinary, but the content was even more ordinary, basically all worn-out cliché plots that would definitely flop miserably on Infinite Chinese Web.

And these were still considered relatively high-quality works that could be featured on the homepage.

Many more books couldn’t even reach this standard.

Ma Yiqun shook his head and sighed.

Indeed, things were just as Mr. Pei had said—they couldn’t be rushed.

Better to slowly write the plot for “Return to Shore.”

With nothing else to do now, he could polish the plot meticulously.

Several editors were also writing the plot for “Return to Shore” out of interest. They would regularly discuss, and when they encountered contradictions in the setting, they would communicate with each other until resolving them.

Updates were all very slow, making it difficult to even meet the full-attendance requirements.

But no one cared, after all, the benefits and salary levels Mr. Pei provided were quite good. They didn’t need to force themselves to write desperately just for that bit of full-attendance bonus.

In Ma Yiqun’s view, this was also a good thing. At least this way, the plot written had no filler content.

As the saying goes, slow work yields fine products. Writing slowly doesn’t necessarily improve quality, but writing too quickly almost inevitably leads to some minor flaws.

The plot of “Return to Shore” was meant to serve the game, not to rush for word count, so the more detailed the writing, the better.