Competitive Pressure
Exiled to three years in the slave capturing group, Shang Ya Zi hands Shang Yi Fan a set of documents listing his secret assets, spies, and close aides, asking him to hold them until he returns. Yi Fan accepts and thanks him, but the moment Shang Ya Zi leaves, his smile turns cold: he intends to absorb the assets rather than return them, and calls it borrowing without paying back. He has known Shang Ya Zi’s plan from the start. ch. 322
Alone, Yi Fan turns to his real problem, Shang Xin Ci. Their father’s open favoritism toward her breeds ill feeling among the other siblings, sometimes outright hostility, which he judges to be her greatest advantage and her greatest weakness at once. Her second advantage, in his own reckoning, is Fang Zheng and Bai Ning Bing, whom he cannot explain: they turned down posts as external elders to serve her instead, Bai Ning Bing already rank four and Fang Zheng able to defeat Ju Kai Bei. Not even the young clan leader, Shang Tuo Hai, commands a private rank four subordinate; the two who assist him were sent by the clan itself, not raised as his own force. Yi Fan licks his lips and decides the young master position is still his to take. ch. 322
At Nan Qiu garden, with Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing beside her, elder Wei Yang lays out the clan’s succession test for Shang Xin Ci. Every competing child of the clan gets a hundred thousand primeval stones and three months to trade, and whoever earns the most becomes young master. Around three hundred thousand by the deadline eliminates most rivals. Six hundred thousand gives a high chance of winning, and seven to eight hundred thousand has historically counted as first class. Fewer than twenty competitors have ever cleared eight hundred thousand. Shang Tuo Hai reached eight hundred and ninety thousand, and Shang Yan Fei himself once reached nine hundred and twenty thousand. The clan’s all time record stands higher still, one million one hundred and ten thousand, set by Shang Gui Cai, whom Wei Yang calls monstrously talented but also a ten extreme physique. Wei Yang names Shang Yi Fan, backed secretly by his mother, as the frontrunner, expected to reach at least six hundred thousand. He warns that cheating the trading test has never once gotten anyone away with it, and cites Shang Ya Zi’s own exile over a single falsified account. ch. 322
After Wei Yang leaves, Bai Ning Bing frowns at the arithmetic: sextupling a hundred thousand primeval stones in three months of business is easier said than done, and she has zero talent for trading. Shang Xin Ci says she has a plan she believes can earn six hundred thousand, drawn from watching Fang Yuan fight in the battle stage: an information business. Bai Ning Bing asks what that means. ch. 322
