Year-End City, Horseshoe Town, a small flower shop in a secluded corner.
Flower merchant Lao Liu drove his horse cart out of the alley with difficulty. The place was rather cramped, making access inconvenient. Among the flower shops of Year-End City, it was as small as they came. The only thing that drew him here to buy stock was the owner's reasonable pricing: flowers of the same quality cost ten to twenty percent less than at other shops.
Clearly, the Flower Shop owner was using her own courtyard and hired very few people, giving her quite an advantage in costs. Of course, the price of doing things this way was that expanding the business would be difficult.
The owner did not seem to care much about that, either?
Year-End City had a number of Small Flower Shops like this, run purely as a hobby rather than for a livelihood. Their owners were perfectly content to break even, and flower merchants were most willing to call on them for stock. This one, for instance, did not even have a name, only a delicate beauty of a proprietress. One glance told you she had come from somewhere important. That bearing of hers...
Little Six, his assistant, sat beside him on the cart shaft, his thoughts still scampering like monkeys and galloping like horses. Never in his life had he seen such a beautiful woman, and the young fellow could hardly calm himself. From the moment he had entered the shop to work until now, his head had been buzzing. He could not even make sense of what his uncle was saying.
They had barely left the alley before he could not resist asking, "Uncle, that lady seems to run the whole flower shop by herself? With only two aunties helping her?"
Lao