Chapter 9: Zhou Holding Company Limited

Chapter 9: Zhou Holding Company Limited I looked at the small building I had purchased for my new company. It would be a holding company that would purchase and invest in other businesses. I needed a place to work out of if I was going to expand and keep records. The first thing I did was set up a Board of Advisors. I placed Ting in charge of hiring and personnel management. Hong was in charge of security, which included my personal security and that of my businesses. Then I hired Fang, my head accountant. He was fairly young, but had worked as an assistant accountant at the Woodcarvers Guild. I had interviewed him and checked his references. He wanted more money and a chance to spread his wings a bit, since becoming the chief accountant at the Woodcarvers Guild was unlikely because of seniority and politics. I was eight years old and things were going well. The cashflow was consistent and building up. After entering, I made my way to the large meeting room. Ting was to my right, Hong to my left, and then Fang to my second right. After that were the managers of my various businesses, like the two wood carving shops and the hot sauce production. The farm had no manager, and Fang handled that account directly. It was just moving numbers around since I was buying from the farm for my hot sauce production, but then got half that money back since I owned half the farm. I had insisted that businesses be kept separate. It involved more paperwork, but there was a reason I had managers and an accountant. I didnt want any embezzlement to occur. Thank you, everyone, for coming. While it has been unofficial for a while, with the success of the hot sauce, I am reorganizing everything under Zhou Holding Company Limited. The idea behind the holding company is to own and manage various businesses. The aim is to not take a monopoly, but develop profitable businesses through vertical integration. Vertical integration is about owning each portion of the supply chain. For the hot sauce, we control the farm, producing the peppers, bottle production, and hot sauce production. We are cutting our dependence out. There were nods at this as everyone got on the same page. While long term, I would like to invest in mining and iron, since we already have woodcarving businesses. In the future, there will be yearly meetings as each business presents how they have done over the year and any suggestions to expand that they might have. I had told everyone to come prepared. The doll shop was losing just a bit of money, which was frustrating. It was losing about 5 tael a year. The manager was also not motivated to do much, since he had to manage the mentally handicapped grandson of grandmaster wood carver Kang. I had just given up on the business, mostly. The manager didnt even look ashamed when he explained he had only lost 5 tael during the year. I would have Ting hire two people to replace him going forward. A caretaker for the grandson and to manage him and a manager for the shop. It would cost more, but the mans attitude annoyed me. Lings shop was doing very well. The ten rocking chairs had been sold to the sect, and there had been one custom order. The big money was from the patent licensing. I was earning 850 tael per year in profit. The manager had been very aggressive in selling chairs since he earned five percent commission. He didnt get that for the custom order since I handled that, but the business was doing well, and Ling was thrilled. The hot sauce business had really taken off and already there were people trying to copy us. But we had the market covered. Inferno Sauce was the cheapest at 40 bronze coins, then Hell Sauce at 60 bronze coins, and finally the super concentrated mix, new and improved The Death Sauce, which had been recently developed at 500 bronze coins. Production costs ran me about half the selling price. Since my fourth brother had to buy the hot sauces, we had no trouble offloading them. The main issue had been the pepper supply, but with the farm restored and growing peppers, it was no longer a major concern. Boiling the sauce and then bottling it, combined with the salt, preserved the sauce well. The manager had been looking to dry the sauce out into a powder form, which would allow us to ship it much further. The recent tests had been a success and Yuan Niu was evaluating the market, but it would take time. Intercity travel was slow and expensive. Still, there was a market, and it thrilled Yuan Niu by being the distributor for hot sauce. I had looked at the prices, and while they had been high initially, he had dropped them a bit and had about a fifty percent markup. People could bring the bottles back to us, and we would buy them back five bronze coins. Already several of the poorer kids would do that. Go about collecting bottles to be returned to earn some money. Even the servants and business owners would save the bottles and return them. We would soak them in water, and the labels were removed. The cost of this was cheaper than making new bottles, which was how we got the price down. All told, the business had made 282 tael for me in the last year, which had been used to pay off the last of the loan I had with the Coinage Guild. The farm earned about 150 tael per year. Minus the salaries I had to pay out under my holding company and the building itself, I had a profit of 1,212 tael for the year. I used 1,200 tael to pay off the interest and principle of the loan I had against the farm. I kept the remaining twelve locked up for daily expenses. That brought my debt down to 10,271 tael. Lings shop had already been paid off. There were no serious issues, and everything was running smoothly. At the current rate, I would pay my debt off in ten years. After everything was presented, they brought in food and drink. My holding company had a kitchen, and I could hire out a cook for the day. Catering wasnt a thing, unfortunately. Why that name, Zhou Holding Company Limited? Ting asked me as various people chatted and relaxed after all the presenting was done. Well, my name since I own it. A holding company, since it holds other companies in its possession. Finally limited, since our goal isnt to get a monopoly or take over any specific market, I explained. Your father is quite interested in what you are doing, Ting informed me. You think he will do something? I asked her and she shook her head and then stopped.Follow current novels at novelhall.com) I dont know. But your business ventures match up with his to an extent. If anything, he would want to bring it all under the Yuan family name, like the cattle business. I nodded slowly at this. It made sense. My father, Yuan Chen, was not a wallflower. They had promoted me to the right of my first brother at family dinners at the head table. Unless I moved into contention for the title of heir, that was as basically as high as I would go until I became a cultivator. Then I would have the seat of honor to my fathers right, which I had for that one dinner he had recognized me in the past. My income was sizable for a mortal child. For a cultivator, it was nothing. My goal was to get my yearly income up to 10,000 tael a year with no debt by the time I entered the sect. There would also be no issues in exchanging tael for spirit stones and then sect points, since all of this had been done by me and wasnt inherited. The next step was to invest in lumber production. There were a couple of tree farms, but none of them had any financial issues. Mining was where there was a lot of struggling and a need for investment or a new way of doing things. A tree farm would take a century to turn around and make a profit off of. They were very stable long-term businesses that had cultivator backing. In fact, the second richest business man in Half Moon City controlled the tree farms and lumber sales. Even richer than my father. Everything was done with wood. While they made the core buildings in the city and some estates of stone, there wasnt that much stone. I had looked at doing a quarry, but there was already a quarry and they ran it efficiently. The main issue was that stone was expensive and stone buildings were a sign of wealth. There was just that much work involved in stone carving. So, most people were content with wood. Even with the risk of fire, it wasnt that high. The climate was fairly damp and if there was a fire, then the tree farms would just cut down more trees at that time and make a killing as people rebuilt. Mining was where there was potential. The main issue was the initial cost and massive headaches that mining involved. Buying a mine, investment, and covering expenses for a year would require about 50,000 tael. The four percent interest on such a loan would run at 2,000 tael a year. It just wasnt workable if I wanted to make money. But at a tael a cart, if I could manage ten carts a day, then I would be in business. My plan was to precast concrete blocks and ship them up to the mine to build bunkers. Each block would be about a half a meter or one and a half feet on each side. They would be massive. They would then set the blocks into the ground to build the foundation and the sides of various buildings. The cost to make such blocks, transporting them, and getting them placed would be expensive. Jian probably thought I was crazy, but he had no objections with everything going smoothly and tael flowing into his pocket. I was just an eccentric rich person who liked peppers and walking about the fields. I was now up to 250,000 motes of Qi at the age of eight. It was slower than I would have liked, but it was still amazing progress. Yi Rong also informed me we would pay another visit to the sect so I could look through the library. He was looking a lot older and was wheezing. He didnt speak during the trip. Once at the sect, he had forgotten to pick me up twice, and I walked back from the library to the house he had gotten for us. This would most likely be the last visit until I was twenty and joined the sect full time. I spent that entire month working through the mote layout I had planned and the failure points. Since I couldnt record anything, it was hard when I wanted to go back and reference something. I couldnt even write the names of the tomes or where they were located. I had to manage with just reading as best as I could and taking mental notes. The plan was to build four cores arranged in a pyramid and a fake core in the center to allow two rounds of explosions. They had tried it in the past, but filling up all the cores to the solid stage had failed. In addition, I would buttress each core I planned to build. The motes provided the structure. Right now, I was thinking about using a sphere-shaped design for my cores, with multiple outer structures. I was going to use triangles for the structure internally and hexagon meridians for the edge of my astral soul. Just having a lot of motes wasnt enough to support a lot of meridians and channels. A person needed to have the internal structure as well, so their astral soul wasnt ripped apart. Triangles internally would be the strongest, and hexagons as the outer layer to better pull back together after it detonated my cores. While the triangle idea was nothing new, the hexagon idea was something that I had seen across multiple people who had made it to the fifth stage. I considered that an important trend. The four cores, with a fifth fake core, were from a failed idea, but the theory crafting in the book had been very detailed looking at it from every angle. The cultivator had gone with smaller cores than normal, hoping the secondary core detonation would be more than enough. Their book was in the failed section, but unlike almost every other book, he actually wrote out that he suspected his failure was because of being only in the liquid core stage, despite having smaller cores when his time ran out. There were several things I had left to work out. The shape I should use for the motes where I formed my meridians and the shape of my channels. Unlike everyone else, I wouldnt be using a standard template for most things. That meant I had to work backwards to figure out the final number of motes I needed. Going under would be dangerous, going over would waste time. I also needed to work out the ideal number of channels. No wonder why no one tried to come up with an entirely new cultivation method and only did incremental improvements while picking out things they liked from the cultivation methods listed. I needed to figure every detail out, since I would have so many motes. Using a standard design would only hinder me. The closest to a standard template was the internal triangle structure, but reduced by a factor of ten to provide a much denser structure inside my astral soul. The math checked out, but it was unclear if this translated to ten times increased to meridians and channels that it could support. While that was what was assumed and listed as the standard of thousand motes to one meridian, it wasnt clear if this changed at the higher amount of motes. Also, the channels were an issue. I would need to fit over a thousand channels into my body and connect my meridians to my core. For other people, this was just a straight line, but if I was using four cores and a fake core and all those extra meridians, it wouldnt be simple. I considered going with a single super core, but upscaling didnt provide that much of a benefit for the transition to the fifth stage and was much harder to solidify. A second core detonation was best, then density, and then size. People had planned out cores that were far too big and they were stuck with gaseous cores. There was a sweet spot of 1,000 drops and the core being solid based on a standard core size. None of this touched on how I would get through the third and fourth stages quickly, or my elemental attunement that I would use. I was making progress, but there was a lot left to figure out and I would probably need to construct a diagram. It would need to be a three-dimensional diagram, laying out my meridians, channels, and cores. With sub-diagrams showing the mote structure of those along with the internal structure and attachment points. It was a complicated project for sure, but I enjoyed problem solving like this. It was like writing a dissertation and having to do the reading beforehand to understand what worked and what didnt work to develop your own thesis. The proof would be in ones success. Failure meant dying of old age. If the tried-and-true path worked, then the elders would have stepped onto the path of immortality. That was the thing that made me choose this path of defiance, as Yi Rong called it. It got people up to the second bottleneck, but that was where they fell short. There was also a reason the two high ranked sects didnt have hordes of immortal cultivators. One couldnt depend on something that had already been done. That was why the library had been built to provide guidance on what worked and what didnt work. The stage plan with the mine had been a big help. But I wouldnt be able to do that here. The plan for the Foundation Establishment stage was to align each mote just slightly over a long period of time, so they didnt shift. That meant I needed to have a plan worked out ahead of time. I guess this was the big advantage sect kids and inner disciples got. They could work out their cultivation plan ahead of time to maximize their chance of success. Also, they would be rushed since they would also have to pay the sect fees of 100 sect points per year. That came in at around 100,000 tael. Since I was earning the money myself, I could fund my admittance while not having to worry about chores around the sect. It was a loophole, but one I intended to exploit. What other kid would come into the sect with a bunch of businesses they had built up under their own name? Sect kids wouldnt be out and about in the mortal world, and even then, business required focus and foresight. One couldnt just punch a business into submission. So, they might set up something in their teens while also cultivating, but it would be difficult, very difficult. I guess the two advantages sect kids had were that they were favored for easy chores they could volunteer for while in the sect, while not having to pay for their stay. Also, their parents could pay for the first stage cultivation resources to help them out. I am sure there was some assistance after that, but even cultivators didnt like useless children staying at home forever. Yi Rong had explained that some other sects did things differently than the Cloudy Moon sect. Like taking people in at twenty-one years of age or allowing elders to fund juniors much more heavily into the later stages of cultivation. Some sects also had everyone use the same element to focus on the development of techniques and cultivation methods involving a single element. There were sects that didnt charge members sect points and had dedicated families of servants who were vetted from birth to care for the sect. I was stuck with the Cloudy Moon Sect and there would be no changing things at this point. I had been accepted as an inner disciple. Another sect would not take me and even if I tried to join, the Cloudy Moon Sect would hunt me down. That was the general agreement between sects, dont poach people or accept people who were from other sects. The only exception was if an immortal made a personal request. But an immortal could break all the rules without issue. They made the rules. All this meant was that I would not be behind anyone else. Unless there was a helicopter parent, but even then, cultivation was about self-progression. You couldnt cultivate on behalf of someone else. There were even kids who left the sect after agreeing to keep its secrets since they were mediocre and lacked the drive to cultivate for countless years. The knowledge I had picked up from all the failed and successful cultivators was going to pave my way forward. But I needed some way to make the diagrams for the motes and channels. The best way would be a computer modeling program to do some three dimensional design. But I didnt have that. It would be far too complex to manage on paper, at least the channels. I needed to map out the point and path from each meridian to each core. A person following the regular path would draw mostly straight lines with maybe some adjustments. But I would have over a thousand channels and meridians with the path I was on. Once I got to that point, it would be very hard to correct any mistakes.