Chapter 12: Veteran Barbecue from the Heavenly Realm
[Current remaining lifespan of Tianbai Snow Mountain Hama Valley Glacier Park: 19 days]
[[First Opening] quest completed. Special project collaboration staff have been dispatched. Please proceed to the Three Realms Talent Exchange System to sign the labor contract as soon as possible.]
[[Earn satisfaction from 50 customers] Gain 5 days of lifespan. Current progress: 6%]
[[Earn satisfaction from 20 employees] Gain one skill card reward. Current progress: 25%]
After seeing off the guests, the hot spring closed for the day. The employees gradually finished work as well. Lying on a small wooden bed in a villager’s home, Xiang Yu stared at the “Hama Green App,” a faint melancholy rising in her heart.
Only three customers came on opening day, yet satisfaction was 100%. Each of them left with extravagant praise. The two college students were already polishing their promotional copy while roasting marshmallows in the lobby.
The wealthy “sister” even patted her chest, saying she would promote the place within her high-society circle, and suggested that Xiang Yu should launch premium services in the tens of thousands range so it would be easier to break into the market. Rich people didn’t really want to soak in a bathhouse that cost only a few dozen yuan.
If it weren’t for the fact that she only had 19 days left to live, this rushed opening could be considered a pretty good start.
But time waited for no one. Right now, it was the classic case of “good wine fears a deep alley.”
If Liu Bo’s borderline-shady marketing actually worked, he wouldn’t even need a job—he’d just spend all day filming videos and pushing them across platforms. Unfortunately, the trend now wasn’t the Schwarzenegger type anymore; girls preferred lean, lightly muscled physiques.
Xiang Yu bought promotions on several local platforms, but the more popular ones had schedules booked months in advance. The employees were also anxious—this ragtag team somehow had a surprising sense of ambition.
Perhaps because they were all the same age, it felt less like working and more like a university club. After Liu Bo’s “edgy marketing plan,” they even took the initiative to go distribute flyers, stuffing postcards into hotel door gaps like crazy.
She didn’t dare imagine what the people who received those little flyers would think when they picked them up and saw:
Front: “Welcome to the Hospitable Hama Valley”
Back: “So close, so beautiful—spend your weekend at Hama Valley”
She still had a few local influencer accounts under negotiation. They were clearly trying to take advantage of her desperation—like they were trying to squeeze her dry while she was already down. If no customer flow came in soon, she’d have no choice but to burn money and buy traffic outright.
Her funding hadn’t been released yet. Fortunately, she had saved some money from part-time jobs during university. At this point of survival-or-death stakes, she could only grit her teeth and spend it.
Feeling the looming pressure of fate like a speeding truck, Xiang Yu forced herself into survival mode. She rummaged through the Hama Green App and clicked through every red-dot notification in her inbox.
All she had in her backpack were volcanic mud and hot spring eggs—and one skill card she hadn’t drawn yet. It didn’t look like it would be of much help.
The system had said new employees would arrive, but she had no idea whether she could even afford their wages. The boss was now so broke she was seriously considering going back to food delivery.
She took out the labor contract again to look it over.
Thankfully, these new employees weren’t part of any traditional employment relationship and didn’t follow normal human labor procedures.
The employer (Party A) did not need to pay wages, social insurance, or any labor compensation. They only needed to provide lodging and a place to operate, and allow the employee (Party B) to interact with customers within their job scope.
Any special food provided by Party A was considered charitable care and did not count as salary or employment compensation.
Employees must obey the basic rules of the premises—actively cooperate with business operations, not intentionally harm or frighten customers, and avoid endangering the safety of the site due to excessive negativity, irritability, or other adverse states (see Appendix S1). Otherwise, the contract could be terminated early and the employee returned.
Looks like the ones they were sending over… were going to be troublemakers.
Xiang Yu clicked into the appendix and read it carefully.
The entity responsible for the appendix was the Office for Resource Allocation and Wounded Personnel Resettlement after the Fourth “Myriad Paths War.”
In short, not long ago, the Three Realms had just gone through a massive, earth-shaking war. It had left countless people severely injured. Even after nearly a hundred years of recovery in the Heavenly Court, the number of wounded remained extremely high. To address this, they were now providing qualified severely injured personnel with work opportunities in specific locations in the human realm, allowing them to gather “faith value” as a form of special therapeutic resource.
Faith value—in simple terms, was exposure.
Xiang Yu began to vaguely understand what this app was for. If traffic and visibility could be converted into cultivation power or healing resources, then in an era dominated by livestreams and short videos, this system was practically made for it.
Things that in ancient times required shamans performing rituals and elaborate acts of mysticism just to secure a single temple’s worth of offerings could now be achieved through MCN-style traffic pushing and viral marketing.
This truly was a mutually beneficial project. Xiang Yu got free staff, the injured received employment placement, the Heavenly Court solved its resource shortages, and all three realms were keeping up with the times.
The system even used very modern bilingual terminology. Special employees were labeled “Differentiated Ability Users / Differently Abled,” a respectful phrasing for “disabled employees.”
Not a single word explicitly said they were injured—just that they had “different abilities” and “abilities,” all wrapped in a polished, internationally aligned tone of correctness.
No wonder employment was so competitive now. Even demons, gods, and all sorts of strange beings had to find jobs—and your competitors might not even be human.
The résumé of the first “Differentiated Ability User” had already been sent to her email.
Xiang Yu squinted at it. It was just one line:
“A cornerstone of the vast Heavenly Realm’s guardianship, an immovable monument of order—patrolling the heavens, expelling evil, sealing calamities.”
It gave off a feeling like… a mythic war god trying to ride a beat-up electric scooter.
That line of “cornerstone,” all that talk of “order,” “guardianship,” and “immovable monument”—and in the end, the guy is coming to work at a tiny private shop. It had the overwhelming vibe of the eldest son playing it safe and becoming a security guard.
The headhunter-style introduction below it was even more outrageous, describing him like this:
He is the embodiment of two great laws—“All Sources Returning to Origin” and “Sealing Calamity.” His status is transcendent; wherever his true form rests, evil retreats. His existence itself is a symbol of the Heavenly Realm’s ever-flowing wealth and unbreakable gates—he breathes the cosmos, carrying supreme majesty.
That restrained, heavy kind of “aura” was overwhelming… everything from heavenly mandate, to fundamental laws, to being above ordinary divine positions. The more Xiang Yu read, the more her phone felt like it was burning in her hand. She scrolled all the way to the end.
Job placement: attracting wealth, warding off evil, securing the household.
……
Oh no. So this was basically an application to become a door guardian stone lion?
Faced with these unfamiliar special-assignment employees, Xiang Yu proceeded with extreme caution.
These dispatched employees were not being given out as “benefits,” but rather as “problems.”
Helping the Heavenly Realm solve unemployment was the exchange condition for the assistance she received from the system.
The appendix explained that the injured personnel had highly specialized skills, mostly combat-oriented, and were severely mismatched with the human world’s ordinary job market in services, manufacturing, and administration. The cultural gap between the two sides was significant, so the employer had to carefully arrange suitable positions.
And more obviously, these employees were basically a group of “education system dropouts” in practical terms—she couldn’t expect them to handle accounting, maintenance, engineering, or other technical jobs either.
Finding work these days was really too hard. A month ago, it was just her own joblessness. Now that she had a “golden finger,” she was suddenly responsible for the employment of a whole group of people.
She had gone from criticizing Old Hao… to becoming Old Hao… and then surpassing Old Hao.
She closed the app.
No sooner had she done so than her worries deepened.
Lying back on the creaky wooden bed, she turned over and stared at the night sky through the gaps in the roof tiles.
The night in Hama Valley was very comfortable. When the city was under a heatwave warning, this place still kept temperatures that required a jacket to sleep through the night. Through a small crack in the wall, one could see seven or eight stars.
If one had the leisure to lie in the courtyard, they could see the sky stretching soft and deep like a silk curtain, and the Milky Way shimmering brightly.
That night when she had been overwhelmed by hallucinations from wild mushrooms, she had looked up at the sky and seen its light so dense it resembled fireflies. The galaxy drifted through the darkness like scattered silver fragments, flowing and rotating gently. The entire starfield was in quiet motion—truly no different from Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
Outside the window, quails and cuckoos called intermittently. Their “gugu” and “guaguaji” sounds strangely resembled frog calls, not at all annoying. What was more irritating, however, were the rustling noises under the bed—maybe mice, maybe cockroaches.
The hot spring’s starter package renovation only covered customer-facing areas. Xiang Yu was currently staying in a villager’s mud house, and when she turned over, she was facing an uneven earthen wall.
Still, it was comfortable enough to sleep. She had taken the system-provided straw mat and pine needle bedding—it was soft, thick, and carried a faint clean fragrance.
Only the indoor hot spring area was unlocked on the app’s map. All other icons—canteen, dormitory, town, glacier—were greyed out. She wanted a canteen selling mushroom dishes, and a better employee dormitory.
According to the planning map, those two areas were in the town section. But survival required traffic, unlocking the map required traffic, and new employees also required traffic…
The night was cool as water. For a moment she thought about how she absolutely needed to spend money on promotion tomorrow to break the deadlock. Then she thought the noises under the bed were too annoying and she should raise a cat. Slowly, lulled by the faint scent of pine needles, she drifted into sleep.
—
Meanwhile, in the city, nightlife had only just begun.
Kan Haoli stepped out of her Bentley and instructed her assistant to unload box after box of peaches from the trunk.
“Xiao Wang, put them in your car. Bring them to the company pantry tomorrow and let everyone have a taste. Be gentle with them.”
The assistant Xiao Wang helped the driver lift boxes, sweating profusely as he worked. While carrying them, he chatted:
“Such good peaches! Life’s good working under Ms. Kan. Where did you go for a trip that you brought back so many local specialties?”
“I went to get my face washed,” Kan Haoli said lazily, standing nearby with her arms folded, idly turning her jade bracelet as she sighed.
“Don’t even get me started. That place was really good. Didn’t I have a membership at RuiMei before? That little girl quit her job. Before leaving, she sent me a long message apologizing, saying she couldn’t wash my face anymore after she resigned, and even said sorry for wasting my money on the membership. Tell me—wasn’t she adorable?”
Xiao Wang immediately understood what she meant.
“Oh, that girl from Xihai University, right? That’s why people say university students really are more cultured.”
A competent assistant always knew his boss’s preferences. He secretly studied Kan Haoli’s face again and felt it looked brighter than before. She must’ve gone through some kind of “advanced treatment” this time.
He said sincerely, “What kind of treatment did you do this time? The effect is amazing—Ms. Kan, your skin looks like those early-twenties girls in our office building.”
“Oh my, I think so too. Students from proper universities really are different.”
No woman disliked hearing that. Kan Haoli touched her face, smiling so widely she couldn’t close her mouth. Then she stamped her high heel lightly on the ground, her fingers resting loosely on her arm as she sighed:
“That girl is about the same age as my daughter. Very diligent, very polite. Even apologized to me—so innocent. When I first entered society, I was just like that too, always careful not to upset clients. Now life’s better, I can help where I can.”
“Now that I’m older, I still feel sorry when I see young girls like that. My daughter, isn’t she at some university in California… Johns Hopkins or something? She applied herself, I don’t really understand it. Kids these days—she’s never short of money, yet she still says she doesn’t eat well. I even told her she can eat at Michelin restaurants whenever she wants. Guess what she said?”
“She said she’s getting anorexia soon, and all she wants to eat are the fried glutinous rice balls I make. Tell me, what does she even know?”
“So I’m telling you, compared to those kids who still do part-time jobs during holidays, she’s just had too easy a life. Xiao Wang, come upstairs with me later and help me pack some fried dough balls and dumplings to send to her.”
That overwhelming display of “humble-bragging” left Xiao Wang no choice but to catch the underlying message and put on a flattering smile at just the right moment.
“Our Xiao Kan is just acting spoiled with you. She even told me before that she misses her mom terribly and keeps waiting for you to visit her.”
“I’m not going,” Kan Haoli said bluntly. “I don’t understand what she says half the time, and I can’t eat properly over there. It’s way more fun here domestically—the hot springs today were really something.”
Talking about leisure again, Kan Haoli perked up. She straightened slightly and said enthusiastically:
“Your daughter is entering middle school this year, right? Are you planning to take her somewhere to travel?”
Xiao Wang froze for a moment, then gave an honest, slightly awkward smile.
“Not yet. She’s been insisting on going to the Maldives or something… kids nowadays see everything on the internet. I think traveling within China is already good enough. Plus I still have work. If we go anywhere, it’ll probably just be her and her mom.”
For an ordinary salaryman, overseas travel really wasn’t something you could decide on a whim. Especially not in front of your boss.
When the boss herself was only doing day trips within the province, talking about Singapore, Malaysia, or Thailand would feel… a bit presumptuous.
Xiao Wang very tactfully added, “Ms. Kan, you know my situation. House prices dropped these past few years and I still haven’t finished my mortgage. I’ve basically lost two or three hundred thousand yuan. Every morning my wife and I wake up and talk about money… we really don’t have spare energy for the Maldives.”
Kan Haoli clapped her hands, looking rather pleased, and said proudly:
“I’ve found a great place for you!”
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