On the morning of Friday, December 11, Lu Cheng asked for leave and did not go to work, so he took a flight to Guangzhou alone.
This time, mother Rao Yuqiu did not go with her. Jiang Qiuyun didn't go either, saying she had to go to class and thought it was too far.
Lu Cheng got off the plane and found the hotel he had reserved. It was only 2 p.m.
Manager Li Hong had already arrived first and helped him go through the competition procedures and get his number plate, competition clothes and timing chip.
Li Hong looks very young, about 26 or 27 years old, with a round face and short hair. He is 1.6 meters tall and has a medium build. He is wearing a casual shirt, jeans and light makeup on his face.
Lu Cheng saw another number plate in her hand, so he asked, "Is there another athlete who signed the contract?"
Li Hong nodded and said with a smile: "Yes, I will also participate in tomorrow's competition, named 'Hu Qikun'!"
Lu Cheng glared: "Huh? It's that bastard!"
Li Hong was stunned: "What? Do you know him?"
"This person is unreasonable."
"Teacher Huang has signed him for more than two years! Why is this untrue? Tell me, when did he provoke you?"
"When I was participating in the Hangzhou Horse Racing, someone tried to trip me up; when I was participating in the Xiamen Horse Racing, I was hit by someone, but I was fine and the other person fell down. I now suspect that that person was hired by Hu Qikun!"
"Do you have any evidence?"
"The Xiamen police may have evidence. It seems that the person took over the matter and did not tell Hu Qikun, otherwise he should be suspended."
"Forget it if there's no evidence. You weren't hurt anyway."
"Haha, I'm in a good mood and too lazy to talk to him."
Lu Cheng glanced out the window and said, "It's still early, I want to go out for a walk. Sister Li, do you want to come with me?"
Li Hong smiled and said: "Okay, where are you going? Anyway, I have nothing to do, so I'm here to serve you. Hu Qikun has benefited from you. If he was the only one competing, I wouldn't come to Guangzhou."
She helped Lu Cheng negotiate his first endorsement of 3 million yuan. "Oriental Sports Agency Co., Ltd." takes a commission of 7%, which is 210,000 yuan.
In addition to the guaranteed salary, she and Huang Guangjing also received a certain amount of commission.
For every business she makes, she gets 15% of the company's profits. 15% of 210,000 yuan, which is just over 30,000 yuan. This is income before taxes.
For Li Hong, this is the first income he got from Lu Cheng. If she can talk about Anta's business, her results will be more objective.
The premise of all this is to have excellent athletes, and she is lucky to be able to sign Lu Cheng.
She also wanted to urge Lu Cheng to keep running good results, and even if he couldn't win the Guangzhou Marathon championship, he would still strive for the top three.
Because of this, she came to Guangzhou in person and followed Lu Cheng as much as possible to prevent him from being young and indifferent, going out to spend time and drinking alone, or failing to participate in the competition in time due to various changes. It was only 2 o'clock in the afternoon. It would be too boring to stay in the hotel to rest! Since Lu Cheng wanted to go out, she dutifully followed him.
The two took a taxi from the door of the hotel.
Lu Cheng told the driver: "Go to Hualin Jade Street."
Hualin Jade Street stretches for more than 500 meters from Xilaizheng Street on Xiajiu Road in the south to Xinsheng Street on Changshou West Road in the north. It is the largest jade trading place and jade distribution center in Guangzhou.
After getting off the car, Li Hong asked with a smile: "Do you want to buy a bracelet or a ring? For whom? Is it your girlfriend or your mother?"
Lu Cheng smiled and said, "Just take a look, but you won't necessarily buy it."
He wanted to use jade slips as a carrier of runes, but he didn't know how much jade would be used, let alone what kind of jade was suitable. Now that he was here, he wanted to see more.
Although Guangzhou is not the largest jade distribution center in China, it is still much better than cities such as Xiamen, Quancheng, and Hangzhou.
Hualin Jade Street has hundreds of jade shops on both sides of the street, with thousands of jade and jewelry stalls. Among them, the Hualin Jade Building is the largest, with nearly 400 stalls. There are also more than 200 temporary stalls in the street, mainly concentrated in the green corridor in the center of Hualin New Street and Hualin Temple Street. These outdoor jade stalls are located on the same street as the jade shops on both sides, which complement each other and form the unique market style of Guangzhou.
Lu Cheng walked around and looked around, mainly looking at whether there were raw stones in the store, not the finished products.
He didn't even bother to look at the explicit information because the price/performance ratio was too low.
He walked into a gambling stone shop and found that there were many gambling stones in the store, as well as a bunch of fist-sized scraps.
Without saying anything, he touched the larger rough stones one by one.
As he studied "The Great Witch Chant", his perception of jade improved a lot. As long as he stretched out a finger and touched the original stone, he would feel a strange feeling. If there is good jade, the feeling will be stronger; if it is poor jade, the feeling will be very weak.
The materials in this shop were very poor. After touching over a hundred rough stones, he only had a slight feeling for two, which was incomparable to the time in Hangzhou. It seems that the owner of the stone gambling shop in Hangzhou is not just talking about it. He may have really married a Burmese woman and saved the country by going through a curve to get better-quality jade.
Lu Cheng picked up a rough stone weighing five to six kilograms and asked the store owner: "How can I sell it?"
The shop owner replied: "Thirty thousand for one kilogram."
Lu Cheng dropped the stone, turned around and walked out.
Not far away, he entered another stone betting shop. This company has fewer rough stones, only about fifty pieces in total, but they are all very large, with the smallest one weighing over thirty kilograms, and the largest one weighing two and a half tons!
Li Hong followed him and saw him reaching out to touch again, and persuaded: "Do you like to play this? I heard that gambling on stones is very risky. One knife will make you poor, one knife will make you rich, and one knife will sell you money!"
She thinks Lu Cheng is interesting and different from ordinary young people.
If you are an ordinary college student, you go to shops and movie theaters, and walk on the street with your girlfriends. Some people go to bars, disco, and ballroom dancing.
There are some college students who like to gamble on stones, but few pay attention to large rough stones.
She knew that Lu Cheng had just received a signing bonus and had received large bonuses from the first two marathons, so she was afraid that he would use all his funds to gamble. There is nothing wrong with gambling on stones, but the fear of losing the bet is the psychological imbalance.
So she couldn't help but advise: "Just buy a small stone and play with it."
Lu Cheng spent a few minutes touching more than fifty stones, picked out a 70-kilogram rough stone, and asked the owner of the shop: "How to sell it?"
The boss was a middle-aged woman with a plump figure and a dark complexion. She glanced at it and replied: "1.6 million."
Lu Cheng said: "It's so expensive? It's much more expensive than the one next door!"
The woman sneered and said: "There are all brick materials over there, pulled here by the whole truck. I carefully selected the good materials from the Longken mining area, but the purchase price is too different!"
Lu Cheng said: "This stone has nothing to show for it. The shell is black and it doesn't look attractive. There is also a big crack here..."
"Why didn't it show up? You can't see it with the naked eye. You need to use a strong light to look carefully." Seeing that Lu Cheng didn't even have a flashlight, she thought he was just a stick. He was too young to spend a lot of money to buy rough stones.
Lu Cheng said: "I can only offer 1 million."
"No, we won't sell it for less than 1.5 million! These days, good jadeite is becoming more and more scarce, and so are good rough stones!"
"Cheaper, 1.5 million is too expensive."
Seeing that he was determined to buy it, Li Hong couldn't persuade him, so he helped negotiate the price.
The female boss refused to lower the price too much.
In the end, Lu Cheng spent 1.45 million to buy the rough stone.
