PFC Chapter 340 Grasping the Underworld Dragon Vein to Make a Fortune? It's Just a Piece of Dust on
Chapter 340 Grasping the Underworld Dragon Vein to Make a Fortune? It's Just a Piece of Dust on
The dust and smoke of Chang'an had not yet dissipated from Zhen Xiaosi's memory when the neon lights of the modern city enveloped her. She was no longer the little girl who hid behind the screen, eavesdropping on her mother and broker discussing selling ancestral land to bury her maternal grandmother.
At this moment, she sat before the floor-to-ceiling windows of a top-tier office building in the city center, gazing at the scrolling data on her tablet—real-time reports from her "Return to Home Life Aesthetics Service Group." The cold light from the screen reflected a hint of shrewdness and ruthlessness from a thousand years ago in her eyes.
"Land is the root! Life and death are all business." This is a belief etched into Zhen Xiaosi's bones. Back then, her maternal grandmother's burial plot almost exhausted the family's entire fortune. She would never forget the greed that gleamed in the eyes of the brokers and tax collectors.
Today, in this megacity where land is incredibly valuable, she has precisely replicated all the core elements of the "cemetery plot economy"...
Zhen Xiaosi's "Sigui Group," under the guise of "cultural heritage" and "scarce ecology," acquired several scenic hillside plots on the outskirts of the city at low prices, supposedly where "feng shui dragon veins converge." She knew that while modern people weren't superstitious about ghosts and gods, they were loyal to "scarce resources" and "class markers"—
This is similar to the "grades" of burial plots in the Tang Dynasty. She meticulously crafted "Cloud Top Fairy Tale," a top-tier family cemetery, as if it were a fairyland; there is also the art-themed burial area "Pine Waves Garden," and the affordable eco-friendly burial area "Starry River Serenity," where even the living can feel a peaceful starry sky...
The small memorial tablet in "Cloud Top Wonderland" costs as much as the down payment for a luxury house in the city center, and you must also purchase the exorbitant annual fee for the "Eternal Guardian" management service. This is an astronomical property fee for filial piety.
Qiu Rongmu saw this clearly. Although Zhen Xiaosi was extremely low-key, as long as she stood in the business world of Songjiang City, her aura was like a business monster that jumped out of the "Tang Liudian". She also added a limited skin with eighteen layers of regeneration to the traditional burial economy.
Of course, in her vast business empire, this traditional burial economy is just a small piece of a sugar painting on Zhuque Street—it looks exquisite, but it's actually just the tip of the iceberg.
She took the old Tang Dynasty rule that "the sale of burial plots must be registered with the government" and put it into a new twist... Back then, in Chang'an, people had to register their burial plots with the market office, pay a deed tax based on the transaction amount, and the government also had to stamp the deed with a red seal. There were many rules to follow.
Zhen Xiaosi can handle it all. She has upgraded her service to a "one-stop shop for the underworld": when customers buy a burial plot, they first have to walk through a long corridor filled with bamboo slips of the "Tang Code Commentary" and listen to the guide dressed in Tang Dynasty ruqun (a type of traditional Chinese dress) explaining the "Ten Commandments for Buying and Selling Burial Plots in the Tang Dynasty". Finally, they take out a gold-embossed state-owned contract with the vermilion seal of the "Great Tang Underworld Real Estate Bureau" printed on it. Even the signature has to be done with a replica of a Tang Dynasty gilded pen.
What's even more ingenious is the bundled service she created, like a delicate carving knife, meticulously sculpting the thousand-year-old Tang Dynasty funeral customs and refining them into a business magic cube that can turn wealth into money. In an era when funerals were conducted according to the "five degrees of mourning system," she keenly seized the business opportunity and launched the astonishing "Tang Dynasty Noble Funeral Package."
Stepping into the shop displaying sample sets is like entering a miniature Tang Dynasty fantasy. The shop window is filled with a dazzling array of paper-mache funerary objects. A tri-colored camel with mottled glaze stands tall and neighs, and the next moment there is a graceful Hu female musician figurine carrying a full load of silk across the Western Regions, her eyes full of affection, and the pipa and konghou in her hands seem to be flowing with music.
The most ingenious item is the miniature Tang poetry recitation box. With a gentle press, poems such as Li Shangyin's "Night Rain to the North" and Du Fu's "Spring Night Rain" are slowly recited in the rhythmic ancient tone, revealing a magnanimous attitude towards life and death between the lines.
Moreover, she meticulously designed immersive scenes featuring various famous figures from the Tang Dynasty. Here, death is no longer a cold end, but a poetic transformation—the deceased seem to have embarked on a new journey, to drink and sing with Li Bai, to appreciate the misty rain of Wangchuan with Wang Wei, and to continue writing legends with ancient sages in another time and space.
If customers accept the hefty price of the premium package, they can unlock the astonishing "Xuanzang's Journey to the West Salvation Service"—where monks draped in Tang-style robes hold tablets engraved with Sanskrit, and a high-ranking monk from ancient times chants sutras in an AI-synthesized voice of Xuanzang, the voice echoing across millennia in both the realms of the living and the dead. Her business acumen has long transcended the boundaries of time and space…
In the morning mist of Zhuque Street in Chang'an, the apricot-yellow signboard of "Chang'an's Long-Established Funeral Shop" always shines through three seconds earlier than others. The world sees it as just an ordinary funeral shop, unaware that behind the vermilion doors lies a hidden door; the creaking sound of the hinges turning is like the clinking of Meng Po's soup bowls on the road to the underworld.
Pushing open the door, you are greeted by the unique cool fragrance of the underworld's commercial street. The paper money and ghost money in the paper offering shop glow with a ghostly blue light, much like the moon that is about to sink in a deep pool. The smart urn is engraved with gilded scriptures, and when you get close, it plays the "Rainbow Feather Dress" melody from a thousand years ago. The tinkling sound hits the bluestone slabs of the underworld and shatters into a pile of the glorious Tang Dynasty.
On the other side of the underworld, the golden signboard of Zha Si Real Estate dazzles on the banks of the River of Oblivion. Beneath the gilded plaque of "Zhongnan Mountain Yin House Villa Area," Ox-Head and Horse-Face, dressed in brand-new round-necked robes with red silk wrapped around their horns, hold up gilded floor plans and stroll across the Bridge of Helplessness.
The advertising slogan is exquisitely written—"Adjacent to the pagoda forest of eminent Tang Dynasty monks, enjoying the feng shui benefits of the twenty-four solar terms"—every word is a gem, more captivating than the parallel prose of literati in the mortal world. In the underworld, wandering ghosts clutch ghost money, forming a long, winding line like the endless drizzle of Qingming Festival.
Unfolding the ledgers of Zhenzong's business empire, the figures for the burial economy are nothing more than a few scattered duckweeds on Qujiang Pool, easily shattered by the waves. On the left, the sales of "Tang Dynasty Funerary Artifacts NFT" are soaring, like the eaves of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, one layer higher than the next; on the right, the server of "Rebirth Primordial Universe Chang'an City" roars day and night by the Bridge of Helplessness, with the login interface filled with densely packed queues of little figures, so crowded that even Meng Po's soup pot can't move its feet.
That day, the judge, ordered by King Yama to audit the accounts, his blue face and fangs gleaming with frost, froze when he opened the ledger printed on imitation Tang Dynasty Xuan paper. His vermilion brush hovered in mid-air, hesitant to fall, finally letting out a long sigh, the ink dripping and spreading across the blank space of the Book of Life and Death:
"If we had known that this girl could turn the tomb land tax from the Zhenguan era into this commercial fantasy spanning the realms of the living and the dead, we should have written in vermilion ink on the Book of Life and Death, 'This woman's business talent is truly rare in the Six Realms and Five Elements!'" The handwriting was so vividly red that it seemed like love beans sprinkled into the Meng Po soup, burning everyone's eyes with tears...