Chapter 25: Compass

It was late, and Qin Qing was already preparing for bed.

A new message popped up, tagging her in the “VIP Customer Group No. 1,” which she had long muted. Lu Yang actively managed this group, and generally, members wouldn’t contact her directly unless it was something important.

[Zheng Yi: @Qin Qing @Sang Sangyang Teacher Qin, Teacher Yang, can I share your contact information with others?]

Zheng Yi explained that she had posted online and shared screenshots of some netizens’ comments in the group, conveying their requests.

The screenshots she posted showed a long list of private messages.

[Sang Sangyang: Hehe, I have no problem with that, but I think these kids’ parents are more interested in Teacher Qin’s Precise Positioning Service.]

[Sang Sangyang: I can assist Teacher Qin and get a little something out of it.]

[Qin Qing: So many! Are these all cat-finding requests? Do cats love running away from home so much these days?]

[Zheng Yi: There are dog-finding requests too.]

[Alpha Lu: No, I understand why they’d look for Senior Sister, but what’s with Sang Sangyang?]

[Alpha Lu: @Sang Sangyang Are you also Senior Sister’s colleague?]

[Sang Sangyang: I wouldn’t dare. Teacher Qin is in the lead; I am nothing.]

[Qin Qing: Zheng Yi, give them Sang Sangyang’s contact information. Sang Sangyang can communicate with them and then compile a list of addresses.]

[Zheng Yi: Some parents already included addresses when they messaged me privately. I’ll start organizing the ones I have.]

Qin Qing then created a small three-person chat group to discuss this matter.

More than ten people had already provided addresses, some local, some from out of town. One was not far from Qin Qing’s rented apartment, about three kilometers in a straight line.

She asked Zheng Yi to give her that family’s contact information directly.

The call was answered almost instantly.

When Qin Qing introduced herself, the other party was not as eager and enthusiastic as Zheng Yi had described. After a brief chat to understand the situation, they agreed to meet at the entrance of the residential complex.

The other party was a woman, around 30 years old. She shared the same surname, her name was Qin Fanghao.

Without even looking at the System Panel, Qin Qing knew she was clearly in a sub-healthy state, her exhaustion almost crushing her.

She had heavy shadows under her eyes, bloodshot eyes, and dry, peeling lips. She was wearing wrinkled loungewear.

Qin Fanghao greeted Qin Qing weakly and said straightforwardly, “I have no money left. Can I pay by credit card? The young lady online said your fee is 2,000 yuan per service.”

She spoke very directly, seemingly not embarrassed by her destitution, or perhaps she had no extra emotions left to spare for Qin Qing, a stranger.

Qin Qing: “Let’s find the cat first.”

She saw that the cat was still alive and not far from their current location.

Qin Qing followed the cat’s location shown on the map, and Qin Fanghao followed her without even a single questioning remark. Her eyes were vacant, her steps unsteady, like a walking corpse whose soul and body hadn’t fully merged.

When they reached a part of the residential complex with no streetlights, Qin Fanghao mechanically turned on her flashlight.

Then she mechanically stated, “This old residential complex used to be resettlement housing, and now it’s mostly rented out. There’s basically no infrastructure. When my cat first went missing, I didn’t know there were teams specifically for finding cats. I only found out about this profession after seeing that young lady’s post.”

Qin Fanghao’s tone was flat: “I posted a comment asking for help, but she probably didn’t see it in time. In my anxiety, I searched online and found many such companies. Their quotes usually start at 4,500 yuan. My cat had been missing for 48 hours, and there were no surveillance cameras in the complex. When they heard these conditions, they directly refused to take the job. Only one company was willing to come and take a look after I increased the price to 6,000 yuan. But it was useless.”

The night in the old residential complex was eerie, with the outlines of houses and trees haphazardly pieced together, tall and short. The dirty pond emitted the stench of moss and aquatic weeds.

Qin Qing stopped at a fork in the road and looked to the right.

Qin Fanghao: “That’s the abandoned parking lot of the complex. No one cleans it; it’s full of trash.”

Qin Qing walked in.

Inside, there were randomly piled dusty cabinets, stools, children’s toy cars, costumes, and other miscellaneous items.

It was a perfect setting for a horror movie.

She struggled to climb over these obstacles, and inside a rusty iron gate, she found the weak kitten. The kitten was stuck there, unable to move, covered in dirt, its rear end smeared with feces and urine, smelling terribly.

Qin Fanghao didn’t mind any of that. At this moment, she seemed to regain her soul, rushing forward with emotional excitement.

Together, they rescued the kitten. Its meow was barely a whisper, and its hind leg was dangling, probably injured during its struggle.

Qin Qing looked for a plastic bag nearby, intending to put the cat in it for Qin Fanghao, but when she turned around, she saw that Qin Fanghao had already embraced the thin, dirty cat.

Qin Qing accompanied her to a nearby Pet Hospital. The doctor’s preliminary examination said it was starved, and its leg had a fracture requiring surgery. Other than that, there were no immediate problems.

The doctor asked indifferently, “Are you going to save it? The surgery fee is 4,000 yuan, plus hospitalization, it’ll be at least 6,000 to 7,000 yuan. It’s just a domestic cat. Even if it’s saved this time, it might be difficult to raise later if its stomach and intestines are damaged.”

Qin Fanghao didn’t hesitate: “Save it, save it, I’ll pay with my credit card, please, doctor.”

Only then did the doctor’s tone soften, and his movements became gentle. He even asked the kitten’s name and called its name to soothe its emotions.

How big was that change? Probably from looking like a butcher to looking like a kindergarten teacher.

While the kitten was undergoing surgery, Qin Fanghao thanked Qin Qing profusely. When she was about to pay, Qin Qing said, “I’m a private account, so I can’t accept credit card payments.”

“I’m sorry, I’ll find someone to borrow money from right away and transfer it to you.”

Qin Fanghao scrolled through her phone contacts. After a long while, she suddenly hugged her phone, squatted down, and cried.

As she squatted on the ground, she looked as thin and small as her cat, a tiny ball.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” she mumbled incoherently, “I can’t even find anyone to borrow money from. How did it come to this? How did I live my life like this?”

Qin Qing knew she didn’t need an answer; she was just using a breaking point to vent her emotions.

“I consider myself a hard worker and I don’t spend money recklessly, but after paying for utilities and a meager living allowance for my parents each month, I don’t have much left. I’m 30 years old, still without a house, a car, or savings, living paycheck to paycheck. I don’t even have a single person I can call a friend. I had some good friends in school, but now we’ve basically lost touch.”

“The cat was a stray I picked up. It might not live better with me than it did as a stray. It has never eaten high-end cat food, nor does it have many toys, freeze-dried treats, or snacks like other people’s kittens. It doesn’t even know what cat treats taste like. To save on cat food expenses, I feed it one homemade cat meal every day. Why did I pick it up in the first place? If I hadn’t taken it home, maybe it could have lived a good life with other kind people.”

“By picking it up, I’ve only turned it into another me. There isn’t a happy cat in this world because of my kindness.”

“It used to be a stray and loved playing outside. Sometimes when I got home from work, I didn’t feel like moving, so I wouldn’t take it out for a walk. This time, I hadn’t taken it out for two consecutive weeks because of overtime. It secretly slipped out when I was rushing out for work early in the morning, and I didn’t notice…”

She just needed to vent.

Qin Qing didn’t interrupt. After she finished speaking, she only offered a suggestion: “Have you ever thought about changing your current hard and hopeless job and doing something else? Maybe you have some special Talent in other areas that hasn’t been discovered because your time is consumed by work and overtime.”

Qin Fanghao’s eyes were numb, and her voice was sarcastic: “It’s useless. What else can I do? What I need more now is Stability in my job and income. I still have to pay back money.”

Qin Qing said no more. She told her to transfer the money when she had it.

Since she was already out, Qin Qing contacted two other families in the same city. It was late at night, and she was almost mistaken for a scammer.

One family’s cat hadn’t run away; its owner had simply shut it inside a cabinet when getting a blanket in the morning, and it hadn’t made a sound. The whole family had searched all day, but when Qin Qing opened the cabinet door, the cat was inside, snoring. It made the owner cry with frustration.

The other family’s cat was simply a free spirit. When found, it was mingling with a group of stray cats. It even tried to run away when it was about to be caught, completely unwilling to go back. It cried loudly as if it were about to be slaughtered.

By the time they finished around 2 AM after a half-night of commotion.

She couldn’t sleep when she got back. Yang Sang had already organized the communicated basic information into a table and sent it over, including the cat’s basic information, the circumstances of its disappearance, and the family’s address.

Zheng Yi’s post had a local tag, so most of the requests were from local parents, accounting for about 60%, with 30% from within the province, and 10% from other provinces.

Tonight’s rescue made Qin Qing realize that this was a market. And where there’s a market, there’s demand—lots of orders. A high volume of orders meant frequent use of the panel.

Previously, Qin Qing had tested the panel by leaving it untouched for a month. It had stayed completely silent, not reacting at all. But what if she cranked up the usage—used it frantically every day? How would it respond?

The main issue was that the panel was too quiet, leaving her always on the passive end. She had to keep finding new angles to test and probe it.

Testing the panel was one thing, but she also had a real responsibility to the people coming to her for “fortune-telling.”

Take the cat-finding case—it was also a time-sensitive service industry. Unlike other services, this wasn’t something that could be scheduled in advance.

Like with Qin Fanghao’s cat: if she had arrived any later, it might have starved to death behind that iron gate simply because no one had found it in time.

And Qin Qing was just one person. If she wanted to tap into this market, if she wanted to use this opportunity to experiment with the panel, what she alone could accomplish was extremely limited. Even if she ran herself ragged, she could only handle a few cases a day—barely any different from her usual frequency of using the panel back at Baiyun Temple.

But aside from her, there was no one else who could even see the panel. And even she could only use it if the service requester was within 50 meters.

This was practically an unsolvable problem. Should she give up this chance?

Setting aside the current flood of cat-finding requests, she couldn’t think of any other high-demand situations where she could justify using the “fortune-telling” excuse.

As for whether handling multiple cat-finding cases in parallel could overload the panel—well, that was something she’d have to test to find out.

But how could she run a multi-threaded panel operation?

Who could help her?

She didn’t sleep all night, and just as she was about to drift off in the early morning, Qin Qing suddenly remembered the transplant feature she’d been rewarded with when the panel last upgraded. She jolted upright in bed.

She pulled up the function, read through the details carefully, and grew a little excited.

Maybe this wasn’t such an impossible problem after all.

At the crack of dawn, Qin Qing headed out and bought something.

She was going to run an experiment.

Exhausted from an all-nighter, she still called Yang Sang over. Before they met their first client of the day, she handed him an item she’d already set up.

It was a bronze-colored object—square on the outside, round within. The disk was covered in intricate markings, Bagua diagrams, and tiny inscriptions of constellations, heavenly stems, and earthly branches. In the very center was a spirit level with a leveling bubble, and above it, a magnetic needle pointing north.

“A compass!” Yang Sang’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.

That’s right. It was a Luopan compass.

You couldn’t easily find this kind of thing in ordinary shops. She’d visited several places before finally getting one at a funeral supply store.

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Bagua diagrams are symbols made of eight trigrams used in Feng Shui and Daoism. Each trigram represents a natural force like heaven, earth, fire, or water, and helps understand energy flow and balance.

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A Luopan is a traditional Chinese Feng Shui compass used to determine directions and energy flow. It features a magnetic needle and markings like Bagua, constellations, and Chinese calendar elements. It’s used to align buildings or objects with auspicious energy.