Ning Yi had run into Yun Zhu and Jin’er that afternoon while out for a stroll. With the New Year just passed, construction on the Bamboo Records branch shop had paused for a while, but with the Lantern Festival approaching, work needed to resume. Ning Yi had been fairly busy lately, and now that he had some free time, they’d dragged him along to take a look. Yun Zhu had some things to discuss with a supplier along the way, so Jin’er accompanied him to the branch shop first.
In truth, the renovation had progressed to the point where the shop’s style was basically settled, and there wasn’t much left for Ning Yi to decide. As for whether the shop should be called the Second Shop or Jin’er’s Shop, Ning Yi didn’t much care either way. The restaurant stood right by the river, and many of the windows hadn’t been fully installed yet; on the windward side, some drifted snow had piled up inside. Fortunately both of them were bundled up warmly, and Ning Yi’s rudimentary martial arts had reached a modest level—or at least he felt they had. Yuan Jin’er, ever lively, had recently boasted that she could bathe in the river even in heavy snow, so she wasn’t bothered by the cold either. The two of them chatted idly back and forth.
“Once this shop’s finished, I’ve decided I’m going to perform on stage myself for three days, to drum up some buzz.”
“You haven’t performed in ages. You’ve probably gone rusty.”
“Get lost, I only perform in front of Sister Yun Zhu… um, what do you think?”
“I’ve never seen you perform. It’s probably terrible.”
“I said I’m performing on stage.”
“…You know perfectly well yourself. Don’t go stirring up trouble.”
Though their temperaments seemed mismatched, Jin’er genuinely admired Ning Yi when it came to matters of real importance. She naturally had high hopes for the shop that bore her name, and had suggested performing to draw a crowd, but when Ning Yi said what he said, she just pursed her lips and dropped the subject.
“Then we’ll just have to find some of my old sisters from before—that’s going to cost a lot of money.” Jin’er dragged a stool over to a sheltered spot in the hall and sat down. She had a good network of connections and had done a great deal to help Bamboo Records make useful contacts, but she didn’t have much of a concrete grasp of money. Sometimes when Yun Zhu was going over the accounts and Jin’er sat watching, she’d get worked up over every expense, stingy to an absurd degree.
“It’ll build reputation, and you won’t have to keep company with a stinking man like me. Win-win.” Ning Yi moved a few stools onto the round table, clearing some space, and said with a smile, “Besides, once Bamboo Records really grows big, we can train our own group of performers.”
“Train…” Jin’er blinked, then said quietly, “Are you thinking of opening a brothel?”
“How is your mind so filthy!” Ning Yi glared at her. “Later on… once Bamboo Records has grown large enough, we could train up some girls ourselves—boys too, for that matter—teaching all sorts of things that can be taught and learned, forming a whole troupe, everything from opera and song to conjuring tricks and acrobatics. There are plenty of children out there who can’t even get enough to eat, after all. It’d be a bit of a good deed too, solving the problem of surplus labor.”
Listening to Ning Yi’s plans and vision, Jin’er was stunned for a good while. “That… that would cost a fortune. If you’re not running a brothel and just doing performances, a ragtag troupe like that can’t make much money at all, and besides… how big would it even need to be…” She simply couldn’t picture it—if it was just running around performing here and there, wouldn’t that be no different from some third-rate traveling opera troupe? Who would spend real money on something like that?
“Once we’ve got more than three branch shops open, it’ll snowball on its own—chicken and egg, egg and chicken. By then we’ll have a whole process worked out, and it can just keep splitting and multiplying on its own.” Ning Yi jotted down some notes about the shop’s layout on paper. “The important thing is… official connections working hand in hand with business. Yun Zhu is already fairly close with the Qin family, and she’s acquainted with Consort Kang too… that old man owes me quite a bit these days. That alone should be enough to keep the whole process running smoothly, staying on track without too much interference from the authorities, and if we ever need to pull strings, we’ve got the connections for it…”
He paused. “The key is to aim high-end, expand southward—Suzhou, Hangzhou, places like that—and gradually build up the entertainment offerings to match. As long as it’s managed and promoted properly, business will always come. This Wu Dynasty… well, it’s poor in everything except money, anyway. Of course, it also depends on whether you two even want to grow this big. If not, we can stop anytime.”
When it came to business matters, Ning Yi had more than enough strategic sense, and besides, in times like these, what mattered most in business wasn’t clever planning but having powerful backing. Letting Bamboo Records ride on the strength of the Consort’s household wasn’t something he needed to be shy about—it wasn’t a real problem. He hadn’t talked about any of this much with Yun Zhu and the others before, and hearing it now, Jin’er looked utterly astonished, troubled by the thought that she herself might end up some kind of wealthy tycoon someday—though she also thought this fellow was being far too bold in what he said, and didn’t quite believe it herself.
As they talked, Yun Zhu came in from outside the restaurant, glancing back toward the road to the side even as she closed the door behind her. Unlike Jin’er, who sometimes dressed like a man, Yun Zhu usually wore only women’s skirts, plain in color at most—from a distance somewhat unremarkable, but up close her radiant looks were impossible to hide. Seeing her come in, Jin’er laughed and rushed over, craning her neck to look as well. “Sister Yun Zhu, what are you looking at?”
“Uh, I thought I just saw… Miss Qilan passing by over there. Maybe I was mistaken.”
“Qilan?” Jin’er pushed the door open and looked several times. “Coincidence, probably. We were never that close with her anyway—there was even some bad blood from the courtesan pageant. It’s got nothing to do with us.”
“Since when do you have bad blood with Qilan…”
“She won the pageant, and that Ning fellow even threw two thousand flowers her way to cheer her on—made me lose face something fierce. That’s plenty of bad blood, if you ask me.”
Yuan Jin’er had never actually intended to compete for the pageant crown in the first place, but this was one grievance she liked to bring up whenever the mood struck, just to needle Ning Yi about his shamelessness. Yun Zhu laughed at that, while Ning Yi rubbed his forehead helplessly. He wasn’t far from a snowdrift beneath a window on one side of the hall; without a word, he walked over, scooped up a snowball. Jin’er’s expression froze, and she made to flee. Yun Zhu laughed. “Go on then, hit her.”
Ning Yi had no chivalrous impulse to spare anyone, least of all an habitual provoker like Yuan Jin’er. He swung his arm, and the snowball came whistling through the air. Jin’er covered her head with a low shriek, already thinking of how she’d get her revenge for this—but the next moment, the snow scattered in every direction.
Yun Zhu, who hadn’t reacted at all, ducked her neck as the snowball burst apart right on top of her head. Ning Yi froze in his throwing stance, momentarily stunned. Jin’er held back her laughter for a moment before her whole face puffed up with it.
“Some martial arts master you are… can’t even hit what you’re aiming at…” Yun Zhu brushed the snow off her head, shoulders slumping, a faint look of resentment in her eyes. Then, pressing her lips together, she started walking outside. Jin’er trotted after her, giggling, and the two women began packing snowballs together under the eaves.
“Hey, this is like flooding the Dragon King’s own temple—it was all a misunderstanding! Yun Zhu, you’re more reasonable than Jin’er, you two shouldn’t be like this…”
…
As it turned out, even reasonable people don’t take kindly to being hit for no reason. Not long after, when the three of them emerged from the hall again, Ning Yi was brushing snow off himself, looking rather rueful.
“You really do need to practice dodging projectiles, you know…”
“That just proves your dodging skills aren’t as good as ours.” Yuan Jin’er fixed her hair, looking as though she’d just been thoroughly roughed up, then turned to look back at the shop still awaiting its finishing touches. “It’ll be ready to open by February, right?”
“Mm.” Ning Yi nodded. “The Second Shop.”
“Jin’er’s Shop!”
“Fine, whatever you say…”
It was getting late, and there wasn’t much left to discuss regarding the shop’s details—not that the details had really been the point of the outing anyway. The three of them parted ways on the street; Yun Zhu and Jin’er took a carriage home, while Ning Yi headed home a different way.
The weather remained cold, and the snow lay thick throughout the city. On his way home, he passed shops and teahouses with their doors open along the road, watching the faces of the passersby, which seemed to promise that this year, too, would be a peaceful one. Ning Yi mulled over the future development of Bamboo Records—on the surface it was all business, but to him, it felt more like playing house.
Rationally speaking, he leaned toward expanding southward. The Wu Dynasty, after all, was chronically weak, and whether it was the Liao or the Jin, however the situation developed, the future threat would most likely come sweeping down from the north—the south would surely remain more peaceful. But no sooner had he thought this than he remembered what he’d once discussed with Lu Hongti, about eventually expanding business into the Lüliang Mountains. That would be difficult to pull off now—especially since that region was impoverished, and with Tian Hu’s rebellion currently stirring up trouble there, any real business expansion in that direction would likely require an entirely different approach.
Ning Yi did have ambitions to grow the business—though not for the sake of some pointless achievement like building a national chain. His main reason, in truth, was to lay the groundwork for future inventions related to weaponry. He was certain he’d pursue that eventually, and if he really managed to produce something, he had no intention of simply handing it over to Kang Xian—for reasons that were rather complicated.
For one thing, half-baked firearms wouldn’t amount to much. If he really wanted to turn the tide of anything significant, there were many places he’d need to get personally involved, which would mean stepping out into official affairs himself—navigating the scheming and infighting of officialdom, with an emperor above it all. Ning Yi was well used to being the one at the top; it wasn’t that he couldn’t handle political maneuvering, but it would certainly be tiresome, and he had no taste for a system where someone was always looking over his shoulder telling him what to do. For another, he felt no sense of loyalty toward this dynasty at all—if anything, he felt far more aligned with Lu Hongti. He admired that strong, resilient woman, and if the opportunity arose, he wouldn’t mind lending her a hand.
Of course, whenever one’s thinking expanded to the scale of “the nation,” it always started to feel rather insubstantial in its specifics—with only two shops to his name, even entertaining thoughts of a national chain seemed a bit grandiose. Ning Yi’s sphere of activity these days extended little further than the city of Jiangning itself; lately he’d mostly been accompanying Tan’er on New Year visits, and in ordinary times his concerns were largely domestic or business trivialities.
This wasn’t an age of information overload, where any random passerby could hold forth on politics and patriotism. Later generations, looking back at this era, might see countless patriots, tales of tragic and inspiring heroism—but in the present moment, the fighting up north was, for most people, an extremely abstract concept. In the business world, one might have dealings with Liao merchants, but as for the actual state of the Jin, even the scholars who held forth so grandly in the pleasure houses and painted pleasure-boats had little real understanding of it.
Ning Yi only picked up scattered fragments of information now and then, from conversations between Old Qin and Old Kang. What he came into contact with more directly was still the leisurely rhythm of life within Jiangning city—the quiet bamboo groves near the academy, the children swaying their heads as they recited their lessons, his wife’s smiles and playful remarks as she went over the household accounts. These, in the end, were the things that felt truly real to him.
And yet certain sensations had, in fact, been gradually growing. The officials who had come to pay their respects to Old Qin around New Year had made the old man’s identity seem more complex and multidimensional than before. One thing could probably be said with some confidence: from now on, Old Qin likely wouldn’t be able to set up his chess stall by the Qinhuai River again. Ning Yi had no clear idea exactly what Old Qin had done; he could only piece together a rough outline from what others said. The old man was extraordinarily composed about the matter, never bringing it up in ordinary conversation—but ever since the New Year, Ning Yi had clearly sensed something taut in the air. Both Old Qin and Kang Xian seemed to be waiting for something to happen in the north.
But whatever they were waiting for hadn’t come yet.
That spring, the Jin and Liao states signed a truce. The war that had seemed imminent suddenly receded into an indefinite future once more…