There was still one person left in the classroom.

Zhang Yiyang.

Once everyone else had cleared out, he shut the classroom door, walked over to the trash can, dumped out all the folded ballots, and started unfolding them one by one.

He wanted to know exactly how many votes he’d actually gotten.

By the time he’d unfolded every single one, his expression had gone completely blank.

Out of all forty-five ballots in the class, he’d only gotten three votes — and minus his own, that left him with two.

It hit him hard. It meant that even among his own three roommates, at least one of them hadn’t voted for him.

He couldn’t figure out where he’d gone wrong. He’d followed every step exactly the way he was supposed to.

First day of school, he’d worked the room, building rapport. Bad luck during military training meant he hadn’t landed company leader, but he hadn’t done anything wrong there either. The day before classes started, yesterday, he’d made the rounds through all three of the other guys’ dorms, said hello to everyone.

So why?

Why only three votes?

He kept running it back in his head, but no matter how hard he racked his brain, he couldn’t see where it had all gone sideways.

In the cafeteria, once he’d finished eating, Xu Ye got up and said to Zhang Xinzhou, “Come with me somewhere.”

“Where to?”

“I’ll explain on the way.”

Zhang Xinzhou wiped his mouth, unhurried as ever, and followed.

Xu Ye led him straight toward the school’s food street, talking as they walked. “Remember that business idea I mentioned a while back? I’ve figured out what I want to do.”

That got Zhang Xinzhou’s attention. “What is it?”

“A fruit shop.”

Xu Ye pulled up the wholesale price list on his phone and handed it over. “These are the wholesale prices. Take a look.”

Zhang Xinzhou’s eyes went wide. “The margins are this good?”

“Yeah. First off, there’s barely any competition — not counting anything off campus, there’s exactly one fruit shop serving our whole school right now. Second, a fruit shop doesn’t need a big storefront, fifty or sixty square meters is plenty, which keeps costs down. Third, there’s basically no barrier to entry, easy to learn the ropes. And the most important part — I’ve already got a connection.”

Zhang Xinzhou nodded. “Sounds genuinely solid. So where are we headed now?”

“Two things. First, I need real pricing on every fruit they sell — you’re going to pretend to shop while I record the prices. Second, I want to scout for a storefront. If we find one, I’d like to lock it down by the end of this week.”

“You don’t waste any time, do you.”

Xu Ye just smiled, not bothering to elaborate further. Windows of opportunity, chances like this — they all closed in the blink of an eye. His indecisiveness in his past life had cost him more than he cared to admit. This time around, he wasn’t letting a single opening slip past him.

When they reached the food street, the lunchtime crowd was noticeably thinner than the evening rush — with classes officially underway, most students were just eating at the cafeteria three times a day. Still, plenty of people came through this street for snacks in the evenings.

The two of them walked straight into a shop with a sign reading “Kangyuan Fruit Shop.”

It was summer, so the shop was stocked mostly with seasonal produce.

The moment they walked in, watermelons sat front and center, and the shelves on either side were lined with peaches, mangoes, lychee, yangmei [TL: also known as Chinese bayberry — a tart, sweet red fruit common across southern China], grapes, and a handful of other in-season fruits.

Most items had their prices clearly marked. Xu Ye started logging them into his phone the second they walked in.

He knew that the moment his own fruit shop opened, this place would become his direct competition, and a fight between two competing shops almost always came down to a price war.

Know yourself, know your enemy, and you’ll never lose. [TL: a paraphrase of a famous line from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War]

To run cover, Zhang Xinzhou wandered around the shop with exaggerated browsing, even buying half a watermelon and asking the owner to cube and box it up, just to avoid raising suspicion.

Meanwhile, Xu Ye used the cover to keep typing prices into his phone without pause.

After about ten minutes, Xu Ye finally shot Zhang Xinzhou a discreet thumbs-up. Zhang Xinzhou grabbed his box of watermelon and a box of cantaloupe, and the two of them walked out together.

“Get it all down?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s a few storefronts up for transfer on this street. Most of them are restaurant spaces, but those tend to be bigger, so the rent’s probably steep. There’s a multigrain crepe shop up ahead, though, the size looks about right.”

“Let’s go check the price.”

They walked over together. Inside, a man in his mid-forties was lounging in a rocking chair, absorbed in a novel called something like Village Vixens.

He assumed the two of them were there to buy crepes, slipped his feet into a pair of sandals, sat up, and asked, “How big a piece you want?”

Xu Ye pointed at the “Storefront for Transfer” sign taped to the glass door and smiled. “We’re not here for the food, sir. We wanted to talk about transferring the lease.”

The man’s expression soured instantly. Both of them were obviously college students.

“You’re looking to rent a place?”

“Thinking about it.”

Assuming this was just idle price-checking, the owner answered casually. “Leases on this street are all long-term. I’ve got two years left on mine — two hundred thousand for the rest of the term.”

Xu Ye smiled. “Don’t try to bluff a couple of college kids, sir. I already looked into rent prices on this street before coming here.”

“What’s your number, then?”

“A hundred and sixty thousand.”

“No way,” the owner snapped. “I’d be eating a huge loss at that price. I didn’t even sign my own lease for that little.”

“Sir, you’re not seriously expecting full price on a transfer, are you? Half the shops on this street are up for transfer right now — it’s not exactly subtle that business has been bad. Honestly, I’m not even fully confident taking this place over. If you want full price, there’s no point continuing this conversation.”

Xu Ye started pulling Zhang Xinzhou toward the door as he said it.

Hearing him talk like he was genuinely walking away from a real deal, the owner backpedaled fast. “Hold on, hold on, no need to rush off, let’s keep talking.”

“Talk about what?”

“If you’re serious about renting, I can take a hit. Just don’t make me eat too much of one.”

“We’re both college students,” Xu Ye said. “We’re not going to play the back-and-forth bargaining game. Just give us your real number.”

The owner hesitated. “A hundred and ninety thousand.”

“A hundred seventy.”

He winced. “That’s already a huge loss for me. Fine — out of respect for you two being students, I’ll knock off another two thousand.”

Xu Ye held firm. “Final number: a hundred eighty thousand. [TL: roughly $29,000 USD at the time] Eighteen-eighteen — sounds almost like ‘gonna prosper, gonna prosper.’ [TL: a play on lucky numbers in Chinese — repeated 8s sound close to 发 (fā), “to prosper,” making them a common good-luck motif in business deals] I’ll call it an auspicious number and leave it there. If you won’t take that price, there’s no point going further.”

The owner sat with that for a moment. The number landed right where his own bottom line actually was.

If he transferred the lease, he’d be taking a small loss. But if nobody took it over at all, the loss would only get bigger from here.

“When can you actually pay?”

“This Friday. I can put down a two-thousand deposit now, and we sign the contract and pay the balance Friday.”

The owner gritted his teeth, made up his mind, and slapped the table. “Fine! A hundred and eighty thousand it is. We sign Friday.”

Xu Ye paid the deposit, signed a written agreement, and once the details were settled, headed back toward the dorm with Zhang Xinzhou.

“A hundred eighty thousand,” Zhang Xinzhou said. “You actually have that kind of money?”

“I do.”

Zhang Xinzhou hesitated for a moment, then said it outright. “Xu Ye, I want in on this fruit shop too.”

Xu Ye, completely unsurprised, draped an arm over his shoulder, grinning. “Even close friends keep clean books between them. We each put in a hundred thousand, and split the profit sixty-forty. Deal?”

Zhang Xinzhou shoved him off, laughing. “You’d scam your own roommate? We’re putting in the same amount, why do you get sixty?”

“You know how to actually run a business?”

“Do you know how to operate a fruit shop?”

“You think you’ve got my people skills?”

“What’s people skills got to do with running a business?” Zhang Xinzhou cut in.

Xu Ye grinned. “For a small operation like ours, the whole game is built on people skills.”

(End of Chapter)