Chapter 100

Shao Ping wasn’t just there to hand out wedding candies—he also wanted to invite Jin Yannan to be the witness at their wedding, along with the four show guests and the cameraman who had been following their group.

He explained a bit sheepishly, “Mainly because Fangfang doesn’t have any family from her side, and I’m worried she’ll feel embarrassed. So I took the liberty of asking the production team to stand in as her family. I’ll take care of all the food, lodging, and travel expenses, and you don’t need to chip in with any cash gifts—just come enjoy a nice meal and bring some cheer to the occasion…”

“Oh come on, we’re all old friends now—talking about cash gifts makes it sound like we’re strangers!” Wei Sheng’s eyes lit up as he immediately nudged Jin Yannan. “Jin-jie, I remember our show still has quite a bit of budget left, right? Why don’t we, as the production team, officially stand in as Qin Fang-jie’s family and prepare a dowry for her? Doesn’t have to be much—it’s the thought that counts, and it’ll make things lively~”

Great idea!

Jin Yannan’s eyes sparkled as she gave Wei Sheng an approving look.

Since they were stepping in as the bride’s family, just showing up with a cash gift and having a meal felt a bit off. Instead, they might as well spend a little and, in that role, prepare a dowry for Qin Fang. No matter the actual value, the presence of a dowry would show her in-laws that she had her own family backing her.

Being a woman herself, Jin Yannan understood this even more deeply than Wei Sheng. When a woman gets married, the support and blessing from her own family can be incredibly important.

Thinking of this, Jin Yannan couldn’t help but regard Shao Ping in a new light. For a man to go to such lengths for a fiancée who hadn’t even officially married into his family yet—clearly, Qin Fang had chosen well.

With the invitations delivered and candies handed out, Shao Ping happily went off to prepare for his and Qin Fang’s wedding banquet.

Completely unaware that, as an online writer, he had already gone a whole week without posting a single update…

Back when he wrote full-time at home, Shao Ping would sometimes build up a small stockpile of drafts. But after starting his job at the Street-level Elderly Care Center, his daytime schedule left no time to write, and once his backlog ran out, he started publishing updates with no buffer at all.

Then, after he and Qin Fang “made things official,” Shao Ping—now with other motives in mind—began spending more and more of his evenings tagging along on her part-time jobs, trying to spend more time with her and understand her better.

Even though he could earn hundreds of yuan an hour writing, he was perfectly happy to be Qin Fang’s unpaid helper. Sometimes they’d get home too late, and he wouldn’t have time to write that day’s update—so he’d just let it slide. Oof~

Readers who’d been stood up time and again had initially congratulated the author when he announced he’d found a new job in the real world, cheering him on. But once they realized the job was interfering with his updates, their patience ran out, and the comment section filled with complaints.

But possessed by love, the author not only kept posting inconsistently—this particular night, he actually posted in the middle of a current update—

Readers took a closer look—and aha! No wonder he’d gone from daily updates to constant gaps—he’d fallen in love!

Wait, “getting married to the girl I like”? Weren’t they reading a pure romance channel? Could it be that the author they’d been following all this time was actually a guy?

What left readers utterly speechless was—how could someone who wrote pure romance sneak off to get married through an arranged date? Seriously?

“What’s wrong with being a guy? Can’t guys write pure romance too?” Shao Ping closed the backend of the site, looked at his bank balance, and fell into deep thought.

When he was single, he could live off his writing. But now it was different—he had a wife, and two smart, adorable daughters! Tong Tong and Xuan Xuan were so bright—they were definitely college-bound in the future. He had to start planning early, for their future and for the retirement of him and Qin Fang.

The money he had set aside for retirement clearly wasn’t going to be enough.

Shao Ping wanted to take some of that money and start a business.

In his time working at the elderly care center with Qin Fang, even though many seniors said the center was well-run, he had seen its shortcomings from the inside.

The community-run elderly care centers, organized by the government, mainly provided basic, affordable services, aimed at the average retiree. Anyone wanting higher-end services would have to go to a much more expensive elder care hospital.

Those could cost over ten thousand yuan a month—way beyond what most families could afford.

But Shao Ping realized that many of those so-called “premium eldercare services” offered by these hospitals—like regular full checkups, health regimens, specialized care for incapacitated seniors—weren’t things elderly residents needed every single day.

Inspired by the show, he suddenly thought: maybe there’s room for institutions that provide customized services—something between the community care centers and the expensive eldercare hospitals.

Just like how many local governments outsource certain services, they could set up a custom service agency that worked in partnership with community centers. It would take over services those centers couldn’t provide.

For example, care for incapacitated elderly. Shao Ping had crunched the numbers—if an elderly person lost all ability to care for themselves and their children couldn’t take care of them, sending them to a professional eldercare hospital would cost at least ten thousand yuan per month. Just a standard hospital room alone could cost several thousand.

Yet many elderly people who lived alone still owned their homes. If their children lived far away, they’d worry that a live-in caregiver might abuse the elder when no one was around. There had even been a case in the news years ago—of a nanny who specialized in caring for elderly living alone. Every time she took on a job, the elderly person would pass away within a month or two.

According to the tradition in that line of work, when a nanny cared for an elder to their final days, the family would give a bonus in gratitude—like a red envelope, to “ward off bad luck.”

Turned out this nanny had killed for that envelope.

Other nannies all preferred to choose healthy and easy-to-care-for elderly clients, but she specifically targeted seriously ill, bedridden incapacitated elderly. Taking advantage of times when their children weren’t around and avoiding surveillance, she would go to great lengths to torment the elderly until they were abused to death. Then she’d collect her “consolation” red envelope and move on to her next victim…

The reason wellness and elder care hospitals attract so many wealthy clients is primarily because, compared to private care, institutions provide oversight and regulation. Some nurses might treat elderly patients with emotional neglect or be rough during injections, but they would never dare to kill someone outright.

Back to the main point—Shao Ping’s proposed investment is in a company that sits between wellness hospitals and community elderly care centers, offering personalized elder care services.

His plan was to recruit a group of vocational nursing graduates or unemployed individuals with some nursing background, train them centrally, and then, like modern housekeeping services, dispatch them to provide one-on-one home care for incapacitated elderly who already have housing.

This way, since the elderly would be living in their own homes, they’d first save several thousand yuan each month in room and board fees. Plus, since most incapacitated elderly are bedridden, a cleaning service once a week would suffice, costing very little.

Calculated this way, if the elderly purchased personalized care services from their company, the total cost would be only about half of what a wellness hospital charges, and they could still live a dignified life in their own homes.

Most importantly, the caregivers dispatched to serve the incapacitated elderly at home would be more professional than social workers at community centers, and under institutional supervision. Even just for the sake of maintaining the business, the company would strictly supervise and manage to ensure the safety of the incapacitated elderly.

The Shao family had strong local connections. One of his relatives worked at the subdistrict office. After consulting privately, Shao Ping learned there was indeed market demand for this kind of business. Plus, both he and Qin Fang had relevant experience, so there was no need to expand too rapidly.

Just like the production team, they could start with one subdistrict and slowly scale up after proving results.

This time, inviting Jin Yannan and Wei Sheng to the wedding was partly sincere gratitude for the show bringing him and Qin Fang together—he wanted the crew to share a glass of celebratory wine.

But Shao Ping also wanted to ask whether, once their project was up and running, the crew could film their organization too. After all, Shao Ping hoped to prioritize job opportunities for struggling university graduates during recruitment.

“That’s totally doable!” To his surprise, Jin Yannan agreed immediately. “Perfect timing—our show plans to revisit Haitangyuan Street Elderly Care Service Center next year. If your project is operational by then, we’ll definitely include it in the coverage!”

The idea itself sounded so meaningful.

Just think—two unemployed individuals find jobs at a community elderly care center, meet and fall in love through their work, and the man heals a woman once deeply hurt by a scumbag. Then, after discovering the shortcomings of the community care system, they quit their jobs and start their own business. Not only do they fill the gap in customized elder care, but they also create employment opportunities for jobless graduates and stay-at-home moms.

This is exactly the original purpose of their show!

To truly address the challenge of employment in today’s society, relying solely on traditional industries that are already struggling won’t cut it.

What’s needed is more people like Shao Ping—constantly exploring the unmet needs of emerging sectors and finding breakthroughs in these sunrise industries.

Just like Shao Ping’s vision: There are 187 towns and subdistricts in J City. If their company could cover all elderly care centers in the city, and each location had just 200 living-alone incapacitated elderly needing one-on-one services, that would be 200 jobs per district.

Multiply that by 187, and this one area of customized elder care could generate nearly 40,000 jobs!

And that’s not even counting the additional staff needed to keep the organization running—customer service, oversight, procurement, delivery, etc.

In other words, if Shao Ping could truly build this project, in just a few short years it might grow into a massive service enterprise with tens of thousands of employees!

Unbelievable! If his company really reached that scale, he’d definitely become President Shao!

Which would make Qin Fang the Chairwoman’s Wife!

People once thought Qin Fang was unlucky in life, but it turns out she’s destined to marry into power!

A fortunate woman never marries into misfortune—the ancestors weren’t wrong.

One wonders what expression Qin Fang’s ex-husband would have when he hears that the woman he kicked out didn’t end up homeless, but instead became the Chairwoman’s Wife. Tsk, that’s really something worth seeing.

Jin Yannan indulged in a bit of schadenfreude and rushed off to find the planning team to write the script.

Meanwhile, the full episode of the latest The Wage Earners program sparked another wave of heated discussion online…

(End of Chapter)