Qiu Yun clumsily picked up her phone with her left hand to scroll through it, while her right hand hovered in the air, mentally clicking an abacus. In less than five minutes, she had calculated that the original owner owed a total of 163,287 yuan and 36 cents, including small loans. And that was after deducting the 50,000 yuan she had just earned.
“...” Qiu Yun sighed and rubbed her forehead in frustration.
At the Jiang family, her salary was 8,000 yuan a month. Even if she ate nothing and spent nothing, she would need 20 months—nearly two years—to pay it off!
And how had the original owner spent her money before?
Qiu Yun opened the wardrobe and saw it crammed with all kinds of luxury goods: big items like bags, clothes, and shoes, down to small ones like sunglasses, scarves, and brooches.
They looked dazzling and extravagant, but they were all fakes!
That’s right—the original owner was vain and cared too much about appearances. Every luxury item she bought was a counterfeit, and now she couldn’t even sell them second-hand!
—Dingdong.
A dialog box popped up on her phone.
—[AAA Ginza Boutique Sales Girl Jin Mei]: Hey there, little beauty, the JMC crocodile leather bag you ordered last time has arrived! Pay the remaining balance, and you can enjoy your high-end luxury journey~ Kiss kiss~
Qiu Yun fished out the memory of this conversation.
The original owner had fallen for a bag that was all the rage online. Since it was so popular, even the fakes were in short supply. So she’d paid a deposit of 1,500 yuan to a reliable counterfeit dealer named Jin Mei to order one, waiting only for the bag to be made and the balance paid before it could be shipped.
The balance was 6,500 yuan, exactly the month’s salary from her internship.
Echo: Forget it, refund my deposit.
AAA Ginza Boutique Sales Girl Jin Mei: Dear, you’re a regular with us, so you should know deposits are non-refundable~ Also, this bag is selling like hotcakes. If you place another order now, you might not get it for another two months~
After looking up the local laws about ‘deposits,’ Qiu Yun exited the browser and slowly typed back: Without a signed contract, the deposit is not legally binding.
AAA Ginza Boutique Sales Girl Jin Mei: Honey, this is considered an oral agreement by convention, and deposits have always been non-refundable. But if you insist, feel free to take legal action and sue.
After all, it was just 1,500 yuan—no one would spend time and money hiring a lawyer over a court case.
Thinking for a moment, Qiu Yun turned and clicked on another friend’s profile: JMC crocodile leather bag, bought for 8,000, selling for 7,500, brand new, never even received.
This friend was another enthusiast who used counterfeits to keep up appearances. She knew right away that this was someone who had placed an order but couldn’t afford the balance.
Sheep Milk Powder: This bag is super hot! Are you really willing to let it go to me?
Echo: Yeah, you want it or not?
Sheep Milk Powder: Yes, yes, yes! But which salesgirl? Is she reliable?
Echo: Jin Mei. I paid a 1,500 deposit. You give me 1,000 for the spot, and pay her the rest.
Sheep Milk Powder: Jin Mei! She’s pretty decent.
Sheep Milk Powder: [Transfer: 1,000 yuan]
Sheep Milk Powder: Money transferred. I’ll talk to Jin Mei myself.
Echo: Okay, I’ve already told her.
Once the bag was made and could be sold, the seller didn’t care who bought it. The other girl saved 500 yuan, and Qiu Yun recovered 1,000 yuan of her loss.
Ah, a win-win-win.
Qiu Yun accepted the money and glanced at her pitifully empty balance, deciding to sell the fake items in her wardrobe the same way.
But second-hand goods, especially fakes, would be slashed in price by more than half.
—Bang, bang, bang!
Qiu Yun wasn’t the type to lower her standard of living just because she was in debt. Following her memory, she used Huabei to shop online, buying a bunch of things—wooden hairpins, embroidery thread, long and short needles, bamboo hoops, brocade fabric, and so on—marveling at how convenient modern shopping was. Suddenly, a violent pounding on the door jolted her.
Who was so rude?
Qiu Yun instinctively frowned, then remembered she was no longer Auntie Qiu, the highest-ranking staff beneath the lords of the marquis’ mansion.
“Who is it?” she softened her voice and called out.
The knocking stopped, and a female voice snapped, “Listen, Xiao Qiu, you said you had a stomachache and needed to rest. Normally, an hour or so is fine, but look at the time! It’s already five o’clock! Miss will be home in a little over an hour. Are you planning to dump all today’s work on me?”
Qiu Yun recognized the voice—it was Fang Jie, her fellow nanny for the seventh young lady.
“No,” Qiu Yun said, opening the door. “I was just about to come out.”
Fang Jie looked to be in her early thirties, with a slicked-back hairstyle that made her seem capable and sharp.
She was caught off guard when she saw that the woman inside wasn’t wearing heavy makeup. She stared at Qiu Yun up and down, then said in a sour tone, “You’d better be.”
This girl had been around for a week, decent-looking, but she was always loafing and cutting corners—clearly the type who couldn’t handle real work. Yet she was always so good at shirking that Fang Jie couldn’t catch her red-handed.
Fang Jie had already decided she’d give this girl a failing mark on her probation review!
Their Moon Tower was already short-staffed and couldn’t afford such a lazy bum.
The two of them went together to the bathroom in the young lady’s room. Qiu Yun’s task was to clean it before the mistress came home.
The bathroom was huge, decorated luxuriously—about 400 to 500 square feet—with two kinds of massage bathtubs and a dedicated hair-washing station.
After explaining the cleaning requirements, Fang Jie warned before leaving, “I’ll check at five-fifty. If even one thing isn’t up to standard, don’t blame me for reporting you to Assistant Chen.”
Qiu Yun nodded seriously, clutched her cloth, and started working.
Picking up a rag she hadn’t touched in over twenty years, she realized she had gone from being the chief stewardess by the old madam’s side to a third-tier maidservant cleaning the young lady’s bathroom.
But who was Qiu Yun?
Back when famine ravaged her village, at just seven years old, she had sized up the situation and sold herself to a rich family as a maid before her parents could sell her to a brothel.
Once in the mansion, she had clawed her way up, making a dead seamstress’s daughter her godmother, using that as a stepping-stone to become a second-tier maid in the eldest miss’s courtyard, and ultimately becoming a dowry maid who married into the marquis’s mansion, becoming the highest-ranking servant under the masters.
So Qiu Yun was no stranger to surviving in grand households, and she had never lacked the courage to start from scratch!
—Dingdong.
Her phone buzzed again with a debt-collection text.
Qiu Yun sighed and dismissed it. First things first—pay off the debt.
At 5:45.
Fang Jie came up to check on time. She had expected another half-hearted job, but when she lifted the toilet lid, it was spotless; when she moved the aromatherapy holder, not a speck of dust; when she wiped the mirror, it was clean and bright; when she ran her hand along the bathtub’s edges, it was dry and dust-free.
No dust, no water stains, no streaks, no fingerprints. The air had no smell of detergent. All the items carried a faint warmth from high-temperature sterilization, and their positions, angles, and order were exactly aligned with the young lady’s habits.
In the luxury household cleaning industry, unlike other places that only required cleanliness, the standard was to complete every cleaning task without leaving any trace of work, making it seem like everything was brand new every day.
And now this bathroom—it was the industry standard for cleaning work, practically perfection itself!
