Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Inside the opulent banquet hall, Hua Yuling and I were holding plates and picking out food at the buffet when a young man in gold-rimmed glasses, his hair slicked straight back, suddenly squeezed in beside me.
“You two bought your tickets, right?”
The moment he said that, everyone around us turned to look in surprise.
The young man deliberately lowered his voice.
“Don’t worry. I’ll help you keep the secret.
“I’m Sōta. Chinese-Japanese. Want to be friends?”
Sōta casually picked up a tin of caviar and set it on my plate. As he spoke, he lifted an eyebrow at me.
“Why don’t you come sit in my room later?”
When the people nearby saw that, they immediately started exchanging suggestive looks.
“See? I told you there are plenty of gold diggers on this ship.”
“I knew something was off the second those two came aboard. Everyone else is dressed to the nines, but look at them-sweatpants and sneakers. What are they trying to do, play the innocent college-girl card?”
“Exactly. The charity really needs to do better. Next time, someone should suggest to the president that they stop letting every random nobody in.”
I’d heard comments like that so many times over the past few days that my ears were practically callused.
My name is Qiao Moyu. I’m a junior at Nanjiang University, and I am also the only Earth Master successor of this generation.
In ancient times, Earth Master was originally a general term for feng shui practitioners. Later, it came to refer specifically to feng shui masters capable of observing the stars.
As the old saying goes: a first-rate Earth Master reads the stars; a second-rate feng shui master seeks the water’s mouth; third-rate charlatans roam everywhere. Most of those who walk the world now are ordinary feng shui practitioners. In ancient times, those who truly mastered the arts of stargazing and reading qi all served in the Imperial Astronomical Bureau, pledging their lives to the imperial house.
The ancestors of my Qiao family were directors of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau, as well as hereditary masters of the Feng Sect.
This time, I had accepted an invitation from the Shangshan Association to join a cruise traveling from Hong Kong to Egypt.
The Shangshan Association was one of the world’s top charitable organizations. Every year, it organized a cruise and invited wealthy elites and celebrities who had made significant contributions to philanthropy.
Each invitee was allowed to bring one companion. Across all of Asia, only six hundred invitations had been issued in total, with another hundred tickets sold privately to the public.
Because the voyage lasted around twenty days, it was easy for feelings to develop. And since even the least impressive passenger on the ship was a billionaire, those one hundred tickets had become, in many people’s eyes, a gateway into high society.
Hua Yuling and I had naturally been lumped into that category by everyone else.