It was past five in the evening before Xu Ye drove back to school.

That same night, he told Jiang Meilin about going to Jinling with Chen Qingqing over Labor Day.

He knew that for parents, this kind of sudden-homecoming surprise only makes a person happy for a little while.

But tell them a week ahead and they get to be happy for a week. Tell them a month ahead and they get to be happy for a month.

He also mentioned that Chen Qingqing wanted it to be a surprise. His mother-in-law was a sharp woman — right there on the phone she said she would play along, and told Xu Ye not to let Chen Qingqing know.

The new week was much busier at the company than usual, especially in the investment department, where Lü Cheng and Tang Bowen took their people into round after round of negotiation with the Pets Online side.

Every round produced something, and things kept moving forward.

Li Tongwen wasn't idle either. After getting the franchising material the week before, he wrote a business plan of more than four thousand characters built around Tastien's actual situation, covering franchise rules, operating methods, revenue models and a great deal more.

Once Li Tongwen had sent the document to Wei Guoyou, the whole thing — which had started as a passing impulse — became something he took seriously.

Li Tongwen ran the numbers. Opening one branch would cost two hundred thousand at the outside. With two million, they could easily take a single prefecture-level city as a pilot, opening branches in different parts of the urban area; and if every one of them did good business, they could move on to seizing the market the way KFC and McDonald's had.

Once that idea took hold, Li Tongwen poured very nearly all his time and energy into the project, and he was on the phone with Wei Guoyou many times a day.

Xu Ye, by contrast, had become the least occupied person in the company. All week he'd been thinking about his mother-in-law's birthday, and about what…