Calculating Cultivation

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.

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.

Once the structures were built into the ground and covered with thick lumber on the roof, they could take a lot of damage if a beast came through. The idea would be to build the buildings into the ground and the side of the mountain, so they were submerged underground as much as possible. I had confirmed that thick walls on buildings were fine. But making a wall around an area would excite the beasts.

It wouldnt be cheap or easy. That was one reason no one had gone to such lengths. I had asked around, and basically mining was a death sentence, which was why debt slaves were used, since no one wanted to do it.

Mining was only done because some iron ore and other ores were needed, but the cost of metal was painful because of the difficulty of getting said ore. There were horror stories of some beasts coming through and ruining an enormous investment. That was why people running these mining camps did as little as possible to keep them functioning.

The plan was ready, and I had even worked out the concrete blocks to my satisfaction in my testing warehouse next to my holding company building. But the problem came from needing a large amount of tael to make it all happen.

Once the party wound down, I went back to my office to look over my plans. I could do it in stages. Purchase the mine for cheap, and then slowly make the buildings. Even if things went poorly, I could still try to sell the mine and break even.

I didnt need to do everything at once or shut things down completely, like my farm. Also, these were debt slaves. I could build one building for them to live in, instead of a small complex. It would suck, but at least they wouldnt get eaten.

Pulling out the sheets of paper, I began drawing up a new plan with everything slashed to the bare minimum. I used a sand tray to jot down some quick calculations to work out the final cost of everything. It would cost around 5,000 tael to build one building. If I purchased the mine for 15,000 tael, then the four percent interest would only run at 800 tael a year.

But the Coinage Guild wouldnt accept that. They would want at least 20,000 tael and wouldnt budge. So, make that 1,000 tael of interest per year, which the mine was covering at the moment. It was profitable, but only barely.

From what I had learned of the person trying to sell, they wanted to invest or retire in another venture and had inherited the mine. But they werent willing to cut the price on their end and there was a risk of defaulting, which the coinage guild didnt want.

Better to just hand it all off to someone who could pay the bill. They would rather have the cashflow and business moving and not try to squeeze out every tael they could.

My next meeting with the Coinage Guild had me purchase the mine for 20,000 tael and a 5,000 tael additional loan with all my assets as collateral. They would hold on to 20% equity with the agreement that money from the mine used to pay off the loan, interest, and investment back into the mine did not count against the equity. Once paid off, I would get the equity back.

Once everything was signed and I had ownership, I immediately hired a large section of laborers and purchased debt slaves to work. The carts that brought supplies now also brought in one pre-made concrete block as well per cart.

A large patch of ground was dug out down to the bedrock with a drainage ditch, so it didnt fill up with water. I went up to inspect the pit once it was dug out and it was ten feet, or three meters deep, twenty-two feet long by twelve feet wide.

I had the bottom filled up with a layer of gravel and two metal tubes made for drainage. Then the pre-cast blocks which had been stacked up as they were brought to the mine were laid out to make the floor and the walls. The blocks had indentations as part of them, so bumps would lock into depressions.

There was a beast attack during this time, and I had to purchase more debt slaves, but the mine kept producing and the building slowly took shape. The roof stuck a foot out of the ground and was over-engineered with a layer of wood beams and then wood planks on top of it for the floor.

There was a trapdoor and a ladder down to the sleeping area. Up above was a shack built with a kitchen and dining area for the workers, with the precast block walls.

Once the building was done, I had the foreman keep proper track of peoples debts. Before, it was a very loose situation, and the people were never really going to get out of debt once sold to the mine.

I had a board built in the kitchen area where everyones time remaining to pay off their debt was updated monthly. I also had meat shipped up once a week if they shipped ten carts of ore out every day that week. It was the poorest quality from the cattle ranches my brother Yuan Niu ran, but it motivated the workers like nothing else.

They actually had a bit of hope that they would live to see another day. The next problem was the water in the mine itself, slowing things down where the richest veins of ore were located. Metal pumps were available as a specialty order from another city.

The Smithing Guild kept their patents to cities and didnt license them, unlike the Woodcarvers Guild. I could get my pump repaired and get a replacement part made, but I couldnt have one built in Half Moon City unless I wanted to piss people off. I had ordered a pump ahead of time, and it took a year to arrive. A line of metal piping was purchased and laid down and placed in the main mineshaft.

The miners would constantly pump out the water. The leather piston valve had to be replaced weekly, but that was a minor upkeep cost of around 50 bronze coins, which was nothing compared to getting the mine drained and fully operational.

I didnt offer incentives for over 10 carts besides allowing the workers half a day off a week for the meat dinner. I wanted consistency and not overwork or danger, so I appointed a safety inspector whose job was to double check the bracings and inspect them. The miners were allowed to pick the safety inspector, which ended up going to the most senior miner at the camp.

The one thing I had made clear was that I didnt want accidents or injuries slowing people down. I had metal helmets with padding issued. None of the workers objected. I allowed them to set up an injury allotment, if someone was injured taking time to heal, as long as the ten carts of ore were produced a day. I made sure the manager knew his job was to keep the books and let me know of any issues, but I let the miners run things.

I also had a main shaft outside the mine under construction. If we wanted to go deeper, then we would need better air flow. That meant a central shaft down so the air could circulate. It would also make hauling up the ore much easier.

After seeing the cost of the pipes and the pump, trying to lay tracks was way too expensive. Better to build a shaft, set up an elevator, and load a cart up directly and then raise the entire cart up. This was much better than carrying baskets of ore up and dumping them.

We built the mineshaft building like the living area with an alternation. The dirt was cleared and then a rectangular hole was built into the floor that was slowly dug out. We built a ramp from the hole, leading outside the building to the road, with a space in the building for two extra carts to be stored.

As the shaft was dug, we built an elevator to lift people and rock in and out. It would take a few years to connect to the main portion of the mine, but if I wanted this mine to last, this needed to be done.

I had also hired a new master blacksmith who didnt want to be an apprentice anymore. He directly got the ore that was mined up and his job was to smelt it into iron bars. There was always a market for iron and the Smithing Guild standardized the sizes. A cart of ore could make five bars, each of them selling for a tael.

Like the Woodcarvers Guild, I could only own half of the smelter because of the Smithing Guild's requirements. So, every day I got ten carts of ore. Sold them to myself for ten taels, then turned all of that into fifty tael worth of iron bars, which I kept half of.

A bar was about half the thickness of a can of soda and about that one and a half times the length. They werent big. The main issue for not getting that many bars was the quality of the ore. Each bar had to be a certain purity to get a guild stamp on it. There were regular inspections by the guild.

If a bar didnt have a stamp, no blacksmith would buy it and a smiths products would be considered inferior. So quality was the baseline. After the smelters expenses, I was earning around ten taels a day from iron bars.

They could be made into things and sold, which my smith did, but the primary income from his workshop was smelting iron. Not every blacksmith had a dedicated supplier, and most were happy to just buy iron bars.

The workshop was streamlined, so they would back the carts up on a platform and the door dumped right into the smelter. Even the beast attacks didnt disrupt things as much anymore. The miners were sleeping in their warm and dry bunker or working in the mine.

Sure, we might lose a few people who were handling the food prep and the above ground buildings took damage occasionally, but it had become the cost of doing business, not a hemorrhaging of money like it was before.

My cultivation had made a lot of progress as well in the last three years. All this moving about had allowed me to collect a tremendous number of motes. I enjoyed visiting the farm a lot and checking out the various peppers growing. Taking a trip outside the walls to my mine was too risky to do constantly.

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.

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