Chapter 103

The wine tavern sits at the village’s eastern side near the eastern gate, where foot traffic runs heaviest alongside the northern gate, so business stays steady day and night. Fang Yuan walks the floor without sitting, sizing up the single story building and its underground wine cellar: black tile floors, eight square tables, and a long sales counter backed by a liquor cabinet holding jars and bottles of every size. The old shopkeeper and the waiters trail him nervously. They are unsettled that this young man managed to take the tavern from the notoriously strict and cunning Gu Yue Dong Tu. ^{ch. 103}

Fang Yuan calls for the account books, tea, and answers, and skims through as many as sixteen books of pale green bamboo paper, catching the shopkeeper’s small mistakes without much concern. On the last page he finds that this month’s income has already been taken by the previous landlord. The shopkeeper, trembling, says they did not dare resist Gu Yue Dong Tu. Fang Yuan lets the matter go, then raises the waiters’ wages by twenty percent and the shopkeeper’s by forty percent; the kneeling staff break into tears of gratitude. ^{ch. 103}

From the tavern, Fang Yuan walks to the three rented bamboo houses, already nearly full of tenants, many of them rank two female Gu Masters who eye him with new interest once they learn who he is. He judges that Uncle and Aunt had run the houses well and decides to leave the arrangement as it stands, since the rent nearly matches the tavern’s own earnings. Days before, his primeval stones had not even reached five; now he stands among the wealthiest of the clan. Standing at the railing above the tenants’ amorous gazes, he tells himself this comfortable life is not what he wants. ^{ch. 103}

Looking out at the distant mountains, Fang Yuan resolves to use this inheritance only as a base, aiming next to recover the Flower Wine Monk’s inheritance and push to rank three so he can leave the village for the wider world. His brother Gu Yue Fang Zheng arrives below the bamboo house and calls up for him to come down and talk. Fang Yuan only looks down at him in silence. Watching Fang Zheng, whose aptitude is graded A, Fang Yuan privately judges him no more than a pawn that Uncle and Aunt mean to use against him. ^{ch. 103}