Chapter 13 - Progress

Lin Feng

"Our family have no experience running a business in the hospitality segment. So, i figure we need to start somewhere, right? As long as our chargers are cheap enough, i think our prospective clients will be more tolerant of us making rookie mistakes. That will be different in the premium segment. Let me ask you, if you are staying at a five star hotel paying for a room that cost a bomb, will you be able to tolerate it being given lousy service? It takes a long time to build a good business reputation but only a single mistake can ruin it. We should start while we can afford to pay for the consequences of our mistake." Lin Feng explains.

"Brother, you must have overlooked the issue of manpower, right?" Lin Yi teases.

The remark stunned Lin Feng for a moment before he exclaims, "Shit! I totally forgot about it in my excitement."

"I'm a sword immortal. My talent is wasted sitting behind a receptionist desk and cleaning up rooms. Cousin Fu could probably do it if he is not an alchemist. He can't stop midway refining pills nor is it realistic to expect our customers to wait right till he is done right? As a chef, Brother Wenming could have been a good candidate if not for him being so unreliable. As for you Brother Feng, your muscle strength is best use elsewhere." Lin Yi cheekily comments.

Yang Wenming has been spending more time in recently now that there aren't any high profile or complicated case in his docket. Nonetheless, Lin Yi labelling him as being unreliable is a fair point. Being his best friend, Lin Feng is confident Yang Wenming will go MIA the moment he is assigned a high-profile case. The issue of manpower is something he needs resolve. Now that he put some extra thought into it, he needs to hire enough manpower to address the issue with login time limit as well. He can't have a business than opens for five days than closes for business for another five days, right? At the very minimum, he will need at least two staff to cover all twenty four Earth hours.

Aside from the manpower quandary that he have yet to find a viable solution, things have been going well so far. Not only have the Lin family secured a decent amount of prime lands in Ovina, he has also secured the nearest island to the settlement for family's future beach resort. The island's geological formation seems to be screaming that it was birthed to fulfil its destiny as vacation paradise for tired souls to recuperate. The island is large enough for the formation of a few small streams ensuring the resort will always have sufficient supply of freshwater. Just north of the island is a small bed of coral reef. Its existence will be additional unique selling point for the beach resort and hopefully will help to attract regular groups of snorkeling enthusiasts.

With plans for cargo vessels to link the three settlements in the western archipelago on the way, Lin Feng's next goal is to secure a tropical island near Ordeso as an alternative resort for those who love sunbathing while enjoying the warm tropical breeze. For the third resort, Lin Feng plans to open a hot spring resort and spa making it the first of many in the resort empire he envisions. He is hopeful that he will be able to find an ideal site near Osir as the southern stretch of the archipelago is a den of active volcanic activities. 

Anyone can dream big. However, it all comes down to execution to realize a dream. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details. His original thought has been far too simple. As long as he has the land and financial resources in place, everything else will work out on its own. Lin Yi's comments woke Lin Feng to the harsh reality of life. If doing business is easy, there won't be so many stories of business failures and the world will have more millionaires and perhaps a few extra billionaires. The team is severely lacking a talent in business management. Lin Fu and him are civil servants. Lin Yi is a first year undergraduate majoring in computer science. Their parents wouldn't be able to offer any valuable advise when it comes to doing business as well. Lin Fu's father inherited their grandparent's farm. His parents are factory workers and also how they met. Lin Yi's parents are also works for the government. Seems like baby or not, Lin Feng will need to convince his eldest cousin sister, Bai Xue and her husband to play when the game enters phase three. Bai Xue and her husband run a small but decently profitable restaurant. On the plus side, they will have a lot of experience keeping customer satisfied.

Now that Lin Feng has an initial plan on getting the needed business expert to helm the family's business interest, he has to somehow figure out how to solve the manpower issue next.

*****

Alexander Smith

It has been one and half months since his two brothers, Henry and Joshua joins him playing . As discussed previously, Joshua has chosen the Undead Sovereign pathway and is now at the proficient stage of the first major realm, a Death Attendant. At the proficient stage, Joshua can now command up to twenty undead but his small army is not a regular army made up of skeleton warriors, the standard first summon seen in most games. In , an undead need to be raised from a corpse and Joshua biggest challenge is getting enough humanoid corpse to obtain skeleton warriors. The occasional players death does generate a small supply of humanoid corpses but it still fell short meeting the needs of the players leading to a premium offered for any humanoid corpse. To make it worse, Joshua finds it a challenge outbidding the older players who have much greater earning potential. 

With the increasing premium some players are offering for humanoid corpses and a supply shortage that won't be going away anytime soon, some enterprising players are turning to all sorts of shenanigan to profit from it. Rumor has it, there was this one player who has the temerity to ask the NPC if he can buy blank body clones from the revival building but was immediately booted out of the game and his account being banned for twenty four hours. This was just one of the many bizarre stories that turned into urban legend within the game.

With a small army of skeletal demonic beasts, Joshua finds them to have limited application out of combat. With the advent of storage bags, players have little need for beast of burden to haul goods. The most widely use of large sized beasts now is in farming. These beasts with their superior strength made them a nice substitute to modern tractors. The presence of such beasts led to a growing demand for all sorts of modern agriculture equipment like modern plow, cultivator, harvester, seeder and planter. Nonetheless, it has also proven Henry's comment to be true. An army of undead have other applications aside from being good for combat. Despite the shortage, Joshua has still managed to obtain two skeleton warriors for himself. The two skeleton warriors are rather versatile and can accomplish almost all instructions given provided said instruction are not overly complex. 

Henry on the other hand didn't choose the Mage pathway in preference for the Runic Sage pathway. The pathway's eight major cultivation realms are Initiate, Runic Apprentice, Runic Journeyman, Runic Master, Runic Grandmaster, Runic Sage, Runic King and Runic Emperor. It is one of the few pathways player who has not much interest engaging in combat and focus solely on pursuing the peak of the production class favors. It needs to be pointed out that although the cultivators in this pathway mostly have lousy combat skill, they are not sitting ducks when caught in battle. As a matter of fact, cultivators in the Runic Sage pathway are usually so excessively armed to the teeth that nobody sane will intentionally pick a fight with them. Given sufficient time, they can easily create stacks of talismans, stashes of scrolls and a slew of magical equipment for their personal protection. Henry has already proclaimed that he will be building himself a suit of armor in the future that can rival the might of the armor invented the billionaire protagonist in a popular superhero comic.