A wet market near the Tianyuan residential complex.
Xu Minli and Xu Fei were both laden with groceries—chickens in one hand, ducks in the other.
Xu Minli had also bought a couple of pounds of pork ribs, which cost over fifty yuan per jin, wanting to cook a nourishing meal for the "patient," Wu Jun.
"Feifei, how are things going with you and Wu Jun?" Xu Minli asked Xu Fei as they walked and chatted.
"What do you mean, ’how are things going’?" Xu Fei’s face turned red at her aunt’s question, and she played dumb.
"You silly girl, you can’t even be honest with your auntie?" Xu Minli nudged Xu Fei with her shoulder and asked with a smile, "Tell me the truth, do you like Wu Jun? If you don’t, I can introduce him to someone else. A great young man like him... plenty of old ladies in the complex are eyeing him for their daughters."
"No! Don’t, Auntie! I..." Xu Fei panicked at her aunt’s words. "I like Jun! I’ve decided he’s the one for me. No matter what happens, I’ll never leave him."
"Silly girl, finally telling the truth. Well then, you’d better act fast." Seeing Xu Fei’s nervous expression, Xu Minli smiled, shook her head, and stopped teasing her.
’This girl has fallen so hard for Wu Jun. The way her eyes sparkle when she looks at him... even a blind person could see she likes him.’
After they finished shopping and returned home, they saw Wu Jun and Cui Zhishen on the sofa, smoking, drinking tea, and chatting.
Normally, Xu Minli didn’t let Cui Zhishen smoke in the house. The hallway was his designated smoking area.
However, seeing that he had roped Wu Jun into joining him, she had to let it go. She shot Cui Zhishen a glare before heading into the kitchen with Xu Fei to get busy.
After more than forty minutes of work, a spread of eight dishes, a mix of meat and vegetables, was served on the table.
The minor injury on Wu Jun’s leg didn’t stop him from drinking. He and Cui Zhishen had alcohol while Xu Fei and her aunt had soft drinks. They started eating at 8:00 PM and kept at it until 10:00 PM.
After they had eaten and drunk their fill, Xu Minli and Xu Fei cleaned up in the kitchen. Then, the four of them sat together again, making small talk for a while.
"It’s getting late. You all should get some rest. I’ll be heading back now." Wu Jun glanced at his watch. It was already 10:30 PM, so he stood up to say his goodbyes.
After the supermarket fire, Xu Fei had moved back in with her aunt. Right now, he was the only outsider in the house, so he felt it would be rude to impose for too long.
"Wu Jun, where are you going back to? Do you have a place to stay?" said Xu Minli. "We have room here. Why go stay in a hotel? It’s so late, you’ve had a lot to drink, and you’re still injured. If you leave like this, how can we possibly rest easy?"
After speaking, Xu Minli shot Cui Zhishen a pointed look.
"She’s right." Cui Zhishen received the signal and chimed in. "No matter what, staying here is better than a hotel. Didn’t you see the news a while back? Some five-star hotels don’t even change the sheets, and they use towels to wipe the toilets. It’s disgusting just thinking about it. Just make do here for one night."
Xu Fei blushed and said nothing. Xu Minli and Cui Zhishen grabbed onto Wu Jun and absolutely refused to let him leave. Left with no choice, Wu Jun reluctantly agreed.
’I thought if I stayed the night at Xu Minli’s place, the two of us guys, Cui Zhishen and I, would share a room, while Xu Minli and her niece, Xu Fei, would share another.’
But as it turned out, Xu Minli pulled Cui Zhishen back into their room...
In the living room, Wu Jun and Xu Fei sat on the sofa. Their eyes met, and both of their hearts were beating faster than normal.
"Jun... I-I’ll help you to the room," Xu Fei said with a flushed face, standing up. She went to Wu Jun’s side, took his arm, and helped him into the guest bedroom.
After helping Wu Jun sit down on the edge of the bed, Xu Fei turned to close the door. Just then, the door across the hall suddenly opened, and Xu Minli came out of her room.
"Feifei, wait." Xu Minli walked to the doorway, stuffed something into Xu Fei’s hand, and then turned and left.
Xu Fei looked down at the object in her hand, and her face burned hot. After closing the door, she leaned against it, her heart pounding like a war drum.
"Your aunt... what did she give you?" Wu Jun swallowed and asked in a low voice.
Xu Fei put her hands behind her back and said in a voice softer than a mosquito’s buzz, "I’m not telling you."
In the end, whatever Xu Minli had given Xu Fei didn’t get used.
Xu Minli’s apartment was small to begin with.
And on top of that, the soundproofing was exceptionally bad.
You could clearly hear Cui Zhishen if he so much as coughed in the next room.
If they really did anything, it wouldn’t be much different from a live broadcast.
Besides, being right under the noses of Xu Fei’s aunt and uncle made Wu Jun feel immense pressure, so he only went so far and then stopped.
「The next morning.」
After breakfast, Wu Jun and Xu Fei left the apartment and went downstairs together.
Sporting a pair of panda eyes, Xu Minli exchanged a look with Cui Zhishen, who had dark circles of his own.
The two of them hadn’t slept all night, but they hadn’t heard a single thing.
Cui Zhishen said, "The self-control of young people these days is truly admirable."
"If I’d known it would be like this... I should have just told them to get a room." Xu Minli sighed, full of regret. She felt that making Wu Jun stay last night was a terrible move, one that had ended up hindering her niece instead of helping.
Wu Jun had a lot to do that day. In the morning, he signed a contract with a homeowner brought by Li Jingwei and made the transfer at the bank.
In the afternoon, he signed another contract with the supermarket’s landlord, Zhao Shuzhen, and went through the procedures.
In a single day, he had spent over ten million yuan and acquired two properties, yet Wu Jun felt not the slightest ripple in his heart.
After all, when other people bought a house, they were pre-spending their income for the latter half of their lives, becoming mortgage slaves for life.
The money he spent on two properties was less than a third of his current savings.
When money comes easy, you don’t feel a thing when you spend it.
Because the injury on his leg hadn’t fully healed, Wu Jun didn’t show up at the company for the next week. He left all company matters, big and small, to Dong Lizhu, content to be a hands-off boss.
Wu Jun contacted Li Jingwei again to rent a new, larger warehouse. During that week, his in-game inventory had reached 700 tons.
After renting the warehouse, he had his cousin Chen Xingyang deliver the custom-made packaging bags and then moved the inventory out of the game.
Once everything was ready, Wu Jun gave the new warehouse address to Dong Lizhu and had Xu Fei take the keys to her.
With this new 700-ton inventory, plus the more than 300 tons that had accumulated in the two original warehouses due to Dong Lizhu’s strict control over shipments, they had plenty.
After gathering enough to fulfill the Ueshiba Komaruko order, Dong Lizhu had Wang Qidong contact a logistics company to ship 1,000 tons of Hongyun Rice to Tianjin Port. The final payment was settled without a hitch.
Wu Jun then received a "payment for goods" of 24 million yuan transferred from Dong Lizhu.
Within a week, the small supermarket’s renovations were also complete, and it reopened for business.
Everything was developing in an orderly manner.
The only thing not going smoothly was the hard drive data recovery on Zhou Xing’s end, which was showing no progress.
Apparently, the local technicians weren’t skilled enough, so the hard drive had been sent to Kyoto to seek help from experts.
「Eight days after the supermarket fire.」
Wu Jun’s leg injury had fully recovered. After getting up in the morning, he got ready to go to the company.
Just as he was leaving, he received a call from Zhou Xing.
Zhou Xing said that the hard drive data had been successfully recovered and, moreover, that there had been a major breakthrough.
By comparing the surveillance footage, they had identified the arsonist as Xu Penghui and had already dispatched people to Ping Shan to arrest him.