Chapter 3392 — A Warm Reception
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
The group entered the Tang family's reception hall. Tang Taizhong volunteered to yield the seat of honor to Wei Zhao, but Wei Zhao waved it off and took a guest seat instead—he could not care less for such empty formalities. "Old Master Tang, it's not as if we haven't met before. If there's something to say, say it."
"Very well, then I won't stand on ceremony. The matter is like this…" With that, Tang Taizhong recounted to Wei Zhao and the others everything that had happened to the Tang family's businesses over this period—though all of it was what he had already told Qiu Lingshan before.
"In other words, have these people come to rob you again in the past two days?" Wei Zhao asked.
"Yes, they came yesterday, and the day before that as well—they've come every day straight. Whether they'll come today, I don't know!" Tang Taizhong said, rather helplessly. "The hidden Tang family has only just set up a great many businesses in the secular world. If they keep robbing us like this, we'll be bankrupt!"
The hidden Tang family had done business before, true, but always of the shadowy sort. Now that the Hidden Family Arbitration Association's restraints had lost their force, the Tang family had grown reckless—and not the Tang family alone; the other hidden families were the same. Everyone had rushed into the secular world to scoop up gold. After all, hidden families had many connections and many roads to profit.
Sure enough, the hidden Tang family had wanted to make a killing, and so had poured its entire fortune into the venture, branching into a great many trades—jewelry, rare medicinal herbs, retail and wholesale, private lending, and so on and so forth.
Originally, backed by the Tang family's influence, these businesses had all been thriving. But who could have foreseen that a gang of robbers would suddenly appear and begin plundering the Tang family's holdings—jewelry shops, rare herb shops, retail and wholesale stores, lending companies, every one of them robbed in turn?
Yet the Tang family could not simply shut their doors—otherwise those few companies that had just begun to build up a clientele would have to start building it all over again from scratch. So the Tang family could only keep resupplying while pleading for help from the Mysterious Investigation Bureau.
"If that's the case, then I say we go take a look at your stores directly—if someone tries to rob them, we can act at once?" Wei Zhao thought for a moment and said.
"That is a fine suggestion, but the trouble is that the Tang family's holdings are extremely scattered, spread across many nearby cities. With that many holdings, we could sit in one shop for a month and never see the robbers show up…" Tang Taizhong said with a bitter smile.
"Hell, aren't hidden families forbidden from doing business? Why the devil did you set up so many holdings?" Hearing that these businesses were not even in one place—that they sprawled across regions—Wei Zhao glared at Tang Taizhong in some annoyance. "Then there's no other way. We'll just have to wait until you're being robbed, and then go catch them."
"That's the only way, then…" Tang Taizhong nodded. Though he reckoned there might still be losses, at least Wei Zhao's arrival could cut those losses to the minimum. "Then, everyone, shall we go to the dining hall and join the banquet?"
"Let's go, then." Wei Zhao had nothing else to do, so he nodded and agreed.
To curry favor with Wei Zhao, the hidden Tang family had gone to enormous pains this time—Tang the Second had made the chefs pull out every trick they had, producing a spread akin to a Manchu-Han Imperial Feast.
But Wei Zhao was plainly not much interested in such things and merely picked at a few bites, whereas Shen Yushu and Yu Xiaoke went straight to work, laying siege to the banquet table. (To be continued.)