At that moment, inside the bathhouse changing room.
"Mmm… ahh… that felt so good. After a nice soak, I think I'll sleep like a log tonight."
Fang Qiu wrapped herself in a bath towel and padded over to the changing cabinet, arching her back in a long, luxurious stretch and letting out a contented little sigh.
The towel clung snugly to her snow-white skin, tracing every graceful curve of her figure. When she stretched, the snowy peaks at her chest strained against the fabric as if threatening to burst free entirely.
"Bathing alone when there's hardly anyone around really is the best, isn't it."
Fang Qiu opened the cabinet and pulled out a small bottle of milk she'd stored inside.
She had bought it on the way over, from that Mondstadt drinks shop — one of their newly developed products.
In the anime from her previous life, there was always that scene — the heroines would finish their bath and then drink milk, every single time.
So she wanted to try it too.
And so, Fang Qiu planted one hand on her slender waist, tilted her head back, and tried to down the whole bottle in one go — glug, glug, glug.
She only made it halfway before her mouth was completely full. Milk dribbled from the corners of her lips, trickled down onto the snowy expanse of her chest, and kept going.
She stopped in a hurry and wiped her chest and the corners of her mouth clean with the towel.
"Trying to chug it standing like this really doesn't work," she muttered, embarrassed. "I'll have to go rinse off again in a minute."
She laughed it off awkwardly — at least no one had seen. That would have been mortifying.
With that, she slowly finished the rest of the milk at a sensible pace.
When it was gone, Fang Qiu stuck out the tip of her tongue and licked the last traces from her lips.
Mm. It tasted pretty good.
Drinking milk after a bath gave her an inexplicable little rush of energy.
Anime never lies.
She resignedly headed back into the bathing area, rinsed off the milk-splattered spots, then returned to the changing room, got dressed in the clean clothes she'd brought, and walked out of the bathhouse.
The streets of Liyue had grown quiet. Only a sparse handful of pedestrians drifted here and there beneath the dim, scattered lantern light.
Fang Qiu was just about to head home when two girls came walking toward her from the other direction.
"Oh, those two junior sisters."
She recognized them immediately.
The moment they spotted Fang Qiu, they recognized her too — and their faces flushed scarlet on the spot. After all, this white-haired beauty had now witnessed their boisterous roughhousing not once but twice.
Fang Qiu tactfully looked away and continued walking home.
Along the way, she also caught a glimpse of that strikingly beautiful young legal expert she'd seen by the roadside earlier. The girl's eyes were red and swollen — it was impossible to tell what had upset her so badly, but she had clearly been crying hard.
Poor thing.
Of course, they didn't know each other, and Fang Qiu was hardly the type to go striking up conversations with strangers, so she simply watched the girl walk away and left it at that.
Once home, since her hair was still damp, Fang Qiu didn't go straight to bed.
Sleeping with wet hair was a surefire way to catch a chill. It also caused headaches.
With a constitution as frail as hers, if she wasn't careful, she was practically guaranteed to come down with something.
So she tied her white hair up loosely, changed into her nightdress, made sure the doors and windows were all shut, then scooped Tingyu out of the cat bed and burrowed into her Jumpy Dumpty — her big, fluffy comforter.
Tingyu grumbled a little at first, but settled down quickly enough, curling up in the space between Fang Qiu's knees and her flat little belly, and drifted peacefully off to sleep.
Satisfied that Tingyu had behaved, Fang Qiu idly stroked the cat's soft fur with one hand while turning her thoughts to the matter of her next book.
She had planned to take it easy and be a proper Salted Fish — but there was only so lazy she could afford to be.
After resting a little longer, it would be time to start writing again.
She hadn't been to the bank to tally her assets properly, but a rough estimate put it somewhere around four million Mora, give or take.
That was more than enough to live out her days without a care in this little rental apartment — eating, lazing about, and never lifting a finger until she peacefully expired of old age.
But she was no mere weed by the roadside. Mora was something you could never have too much of.
The main thing was, just a few days ago she'd gone to inquire about the price of the new generation of pleasure yachts.
Good lord.
The price was absolutely obscene.
In the millions.
And not fishing boats or anything like that — these were proper luxury vessels, the kind that would have been called yachts in her previous life, fitted out to the highest possible standard of interior design.
The latest generation had streamlined every sailing operation to the utmost simplicity. You just sat in the helm and could control everything from there — raising and lowering the sails, adjusting the angles, all of it — with a touch.
Apparently they'd incorporated a great deal of Snezhnayan high technology.
The quality was genuinely impressive.
The price tag, however, was genuinely terrifying.
So a few million Mora really wasn't nearly enough.
But what could she do about it?
She didn't know the first thing about running a business.
She had absolutely no doubt that if she marched into the commercial arena with her four million Mora, within a month she'd be lucky to have four Mora left. She'd be bankrupted down to her last pair of undergarments.
So writing was the only option.
"Come to think of it, I wonder how Miss Ningguang's preparations are coming along."
Fang Qiu let out a quiet sigh and gazed out the window, where the night was deepening by the moment.
"I'll go ask in a few days."
She pondered.
If Ningguang worked quickly, she could ride the wave of the Sword and Fairy film release and launch the next installment in the series at just the right moment.
Whether that would be Sword and Fairy 1 or Sword and Fairy 4, she hadn't decided yet.
If there was still some time before the release, she might consider writing something else entirely first…
Well, she could also just be a Salted Fish for a while longer. Drift through life. Let the days pass.
But if Ningguang moved too slowly, there was another problem to worry about.
Other merchants, once they caught wind of Ningguang's commercial intentions, might rush out competing films and get them to market first. And even if the Sword and Fairy film that Ningguang and she produced was head and shoulders above anything the competition put out, the impact would be diluted. The shock and awe of its debut simply wouldn't hit the same.
Still, thinking it through carefully — given Miss Ningguang's efficiency, she probably wouldn't be that slow.
Besides, any competitive move Fang Qiu herself could think of, someone who had fought her way to near-total dominance of the commercial world would certainly have thought of too.
After all, when she'd first gone to negotiate a cultural and entertainment partnership with Miss Ningguang — starting from novels as the entry point, then branching out into other forms of entertainment, like films, music, comics (well, comics it seemed Inazuma already had, and she was pretty sure that was even written into the contract she'd signed), as well as animation and merchandise — eventually having all of those works feed back into the novels and form a complete entertainment loop…
When she'd laid all of that out, Ningguang had barely looked surprised. Just slightly caught off guard.
And that slight surprise had more to do with the fact that Fang Qiu was the one proposing it — not with the content itself.
Which meant Miss Ningguang had likely already thought of all of it on her own.
When you considered that what she was describing were the most cutting-edge commercial strategies from her previous life, and Ningguang had arrived at the same conclusions independently — it said everything about just how formidable Miss Ningguang truly was.
For now, there was nothing to do but wait and see.
Fang Qiu stretched lazily, gathered Tingyu up, and set her down on the Jumpy Dumpty.
Her hair was just about dry. Time for sleep.
Ignoring Tingyu's indignant protests, Fang Qiu dove under the covers.
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