The director

Chen Miao's decision to enter this line of work had certainly been inseparable from this "family business," but he had never imagined he would inherit it.

So when he heard Elder Uncle's words, Chen Miao's first instinct was to refuse.

It was both resistance to this sudden arrangement and anxiety over his own lack of ability.

"Elder Uncle, I can't do it."

Chen Weiyi seemed to have anticipated his answer. He smiled and said, "Don't be so quick to refuse. Hear me out first."

"I decided to make you the funeral home's director back when you chose to study funeral services."

Chen Miao froze. That had been five or six years ago. Elder Uncle had been considering this for that long?

"So you don't need to worry that this is some spur-of-the-moment idea."

"As for why I want to hand the funeral home over to you, I think you can guess."

"Your cousin has hated the funeral home since she was little. She's thrown plenty of tantrums over it. Even now, she won't tell people outside the family what we do for a living."

Chen Weiyi gave a helpless smile.

"But that's understandable. Outsiders do consider this line of work unlucky. Yet precisely because of that, I've been able to earn more in this business than most people in Tianmen County ever could."

"Now your cousin is old enough to be thinking about marriage, and I don't want to put pressure on her in that respect. Do you understand what I mean?"

Understanding dawned on Chen Miao.

That was true. Even if his cousin's boyfriend didn't care what her family did, his parents and elders might not feel the same way.

It certainly wouldn't be good to create unnecessary obstacles to his cousin's relationship.

But...

"Elder Uncle, I'm afraid I won't manage it well and will squander everything you've worked so hard to build."

Chen Miao spoke honestly, but Chen Weiyi waved a hand.

"There's only so much involved in running a funeral home. You said yourself that once our customer numbers drop to a certain point, they won't drop any further. All you need to do is keep following the existing model."

"As things stand, the funeral home makes around three hundred thousand yuan a year in total profit. From now on, you'll give me a hundred thousand each year, and the rest will be yours. If the annual income ever drops below two hundred thousand, you won't need to give me a share. And if it really does close down... you don't need to worry about that, either. I've saved up quite a bit over the years, and I still have other properties and storefronts bringing in rent. You don't need to worry about me being unable to support myself."

"And even in the worst case, if I have no one to look after me in my old age, I'll still have you, won't I?"

Chen Weiyi was smiling as he said this.

"Over the next month, I'll go over everything about the funeral home with you. You can also try your hand at some of the work. I think a month should be enough."

Chen Miao wanted to say more, but Elder Uncle cut him off.

"That's enough. If you run into a problem later, it's not as though you can't ask me. Could you really bear to see your cousin being snubbed by her in-laws?"

"Have you forgotten how good she's been to you?"

Chen Miao opened his mouth, then said nothing more.

After returning to his office, Chen Miao sat in a daze.

Elder Uncle's sudden plan had thrown his mind into turmoil.

Going from a monthly salary of four thousand to an annual income of two hundred thousand was no small leap.

In his line of work, he would normally need at least another five to eight years to become a veteran funeral rites specialist before he could earn that much.

With this one move, Elder Uncle had cut five to eight years off his path!

Not to mention that from now on, he wouldn't have to answer to a superior at all. That was the sort of working life young people dreamed of.

And just like that, he had attained it.

Chen Miao was only twenty-four. Naturally, he was thrilled and excited.

But just as he had told Elder Uncle, he was worried he wouldn't manage the place well.

Still, things had already come to this. His worries wouldn't make anything better, and pointless internal strife would only make things worse.

"Since I'm here, I might as well settle into it."

Chen Miao's gaze cleared.

Just then, a message from Elder Uncle arrived on WeChat.

Chen Miao opened the files on his computer and began reading information about the Tianmen Funeral Home that he had never examined closely before.

Once he focused on these documents, he shut out all outside distractions.

"Iceheart" was taking effect without him even noticing.

In this state, it took Chen Miao only an hour to finish reading the material on the Tianmen Funeral Home and gain some understanding of it.

Combining that with the stories Elder Uncle had told him before, Chen Miao could more or less reconstruct how the Tianmen Funeral Home had been built from nothing.

Nine years ago, the site of the Tianmen Funeral Home had still been a patch of wasteland. Although the location was good, no one had had the nerve to build a facility there—until Elder Uncle came along.

At the time, Elder Uncle had a sum of money on hand.

It was no small amount. As for where it had come from, all one could say was that Elder Uncle's family had been lucky.

Elder Uncle's wife's family had no sons. She and her two sisters had inherited a property in the center of Tianmen County from their elders. When redevelopment came to Tianmen County, the three sisters split the compensation payment.

Using that compensation and their existing savings, Elder Uncle's family bought another home and a storefront in Tianmen County.

Who could have guessed that less than two years later, those properties would also be slated for demolition?

And that wasn't all. During that time, Elder Uncle happened to get some inside information about a factory where a friend worked and put a hundred thousand yuan of his spare cash straight into the stock market.

Once that hundred thousand became four hundred thousand.

Elder Uncle didn't dare get greedy. He cashed out immediately.

And so the demolition compensation and the money he had made on stocks all remained in his hands.

The more money he had, the more temptations there were.

Fortunately, Elder Uncle and his wife both kept clear heads. Unlike some other households that had struck it rich through demolition compensation, they weren't lured into rigged gambling games and stripped of their money.

But having that much money sitting idle didn't feel reassuring, either.

Who knew whether they would ever get another demolition payout?

They couldn't just live off their savings until there was nothing left.

So after holding on to that money for six months, Elder Uncle chose to invest it in the funeral services industry, which was still undeveloped in Tianmen County.

If his earlier windfalls had been down to luck, then the Tianmen Funeral Home was the product of Elder Uncle's vision and nerve.

The site of the Tianmen Funeral Home was over a kilometer from the edge of Tianmen County's urban area. It was classed as suburban industrial land, so the rent wasn't quite so expensive.

But it was still far from cheap. The annual rent alone was two hundred thousand yuan!

Back then, Elder Uncle signed a ten-year lease right away. That meant the land alone would cost two million over the next decade, not even counting the fixed annual rent increases stipulated in the contract.

Back then, that was an astronomical figure. Even if Elder Uncle poured every yuan he had into it, it wouldn't be enough.

But Elder Uncle hadn't been frightened off by those numbers.

Once he secured the land, he began building the funeral home.

Constructing the funeral home itself was manageable; a hundred to two hundred thousand yuan would cover it. But that wasn't where the biggest expense lay.

First came the hearse. A domestically made van that met the requirements cost around two hundred thousand yuan.

With limited funds, Elder Uncle hadn't bought a new vehicle. Instead, he spent a hundred thousand modifying a secondhand van.

Next came the refrigerated cabinets and the cremation furnace.

Smaller funeral homes generally wouldn't install refrigerated cabinets or a cremation furnace. Instead, after taking on a client, they would rent the use of cold storage and cremation equipment from another funeral home.

That reduced the funeral home's earnings somewhat, but it also greatly lowered the initial investment.

Yet none of the counties around Tianmen County had a properly equipped funeral home at the time. They all rented equipment in the city, too.

And the city's funeral home was a three- or four-hour drive from Tianmen County, making it a considerable hassle.

So after calculating his available funds, Elder Uncle spent a hundred thousand yuan on two secondhand refrigerated cabinets with six compartments each!

He bought two because Elder Uncle figured that if the Tianmen Funeral Home had refrigerated cabinets, other small funeral homes nearby might stop going all the way to the city.

That way, rental income would provide another means of recouping his investment.

With the same idea in mind, Elder Uncle spent another three hundred thousand yuan on a secondhand cremation furnace.

Thus, although the Tianmen Funeral Home was small, it had all the essential facilities.

Time proved how farsighted Elder Uncle had been. Even now, some funeral homes were still unwilling to pay for a major piece of equipment like a cremation furnace.

Over the years, Elder Uncle had earned back the cost of the equipment through cold-storage rentals and cremation services alone.

Of course, since the cremation furnace was fairly old, its subsequent maintenance costs were substantial. He had even installed an emissions purification system later to meet environmental standards.

But all that came afterward. Once the funeral home was up and running, those things were no longer a problem.

Just like that, Elder Uncle had poured nearly a million yuan into the funeral home in those six months!

To do so, he had even mortgaged the family's storefront and taken out another two hundred thousand yuan in loans to ease the financial pressure.

At the time, outsiders had found it utterly outrageous.

Even those who had gambled away all their demolition compensation sneered when they saw what Elder Uncle was doing, saying, "He might as well have lost it playing cards."

Under those circumstances, Elder Uncle had stubbornly endured the gaze of outsiders waiting to laugh at his failure and gotten the funeral home up and running on the right track.

After the first year, operations at the funeral home began to go smoothly.

Those who had kept watching Elder Uncle's family went from waiting for a good laugh to marveling at their success.

Although some still considered the funeral business unlucky, that hadn't stopped Elder Uncle's family from joining the ranks of Tianmen County's wealthy through the funeral home.

Even those who looked down on Elder Uncle's family could only greet them with smiles when they met.

What family didn't have to face birth, aging, illness, and death?

When the time came to make arrangements, they would have to deal with them eventually.

That was the history of the Tianmen Funeral Home.

After reviewing the relevant information about the Tianmen Funeral Home, Chen Miao also understood the issues he would have to face.

Maintaining the refrigerated cabinets and cremation furnace, servicing the hearse, purchasing funeral supplies, negotiating business, recruiting staff, and so on.

Although dedicated staff handled all these tasks, as director, he would still need to coordinate them.

As for the approaching expiration of the land lease, he didn't need to worry about that. Elder Uncle had his own connections, so it wasn't much of a problem.

Thus, what Chen Miao needed to do over the coming month was first familiarize himself with these matters.

If he merely acted as a hands-off boss, he would have to accept the risk of being deceived.

Elder Uncle had been director for nine years and knew all these matters inside out. As the future director, he naturally couldn't do any worse.

After checking the time, Chen Miao had a meal, then continued studying the relevant material.

Toward evening, he went to the cold storage again.

They were still recruiting a cold-storage attendant, so in the meantime, he had to keep watch there.

Before entering the cold storage, however, Chen Miao always checked the Notes on Achieving Divinity in the Mortal World to confirm whether there was any danger.

After all, everything that had happened so far had been connected to the cold storage.

He just didn't know whether there might also be problems in the cremation room and the ashes hall.

Chen Miao felt that he would need to add a few more stops to his daily rounds from now on.

If he could discover dangers ahead of time and resolve them, all the better.