Chapter 48: Quietly Altering the Feng Shui

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Chapter 48: Quietly Altering the Feng Shui

“Also, instead of putting a screen by the door and making people wonder what you’re doing in there, it’d actually be better to put a low cabinet there. It serves the same purpose without creating quite as much of a sense of privacy, which makes it more suitable for a place like this.”

After all, you couldn’t put a screen everywhere. There were jokes about bosses and secretaries everywhere, and sometimes a screen only made people more curious about what was going on behind it. The qi flowing in through a main entrance and the sha qi created by a road rushing toward a building were actually manifestations of the same principle: when a large amount of qi converged, the area directly affected by it would suffer the consequences. Just as Chen Yuan had previously used a screen and a Taiji circle to deal with the road sha at his shop, a low cabinet could also effectively obstruct this kind of sha qi. It simply hadn’t been particularly suitable for his shop.

A low cabinet, however, was much more appropriate than a screen in Yu Shenliu’s office. After all, feng shui had to be adapted to the circumstances.

Looking around, Chen Yuan found nothing else out of place in Yu Shenliu’s office. The positions of the filing cabinets and such were fine too. Chen Yuan looked up at the ceiling.

This office certainly fit Yu Shenliu’s usual style. Unlike some people who treated their offices like palaces, he hadn’t gone overboard with the decor. The ceiling light was merely a somewhat more refined ordinary pendant lamp; Chen Yuan saw no crystal chandelier. And there were no exposed beams running through the room that he could see.

Living beneath a beam was a major feng shui taboo. Modern people often assumed that modern buildings didn’t really have beams, but that wasn’t quite true. At least from a feng shui perspective, they were actually quite obvious. Before a ceiling was finished, it was divided into a series of sections, and the raised parts between those sections were considered “beams” in modern feng shui. They exerted a suppressive effect on the people beneath them.

However, judging from the layout outside, Yu Shenliu wasn’t sitting beneath a beam either, so there was nothing more to say about that.

“That should be about it. As for using any other ritual tools, I don’t think there’s much point.”

Chen Yuan had never approved of using special objects to alter one’s fortune. Whether it was wearing a luck-enhancing bead or hanging a compass, he considered such things rather pointless. Feng shui was really only meant to make minor adjustments to one’s fortune. With Yu Shenliu’s kind of fate, making his fortune any better would simply be too much of a good thing. And when things became too full, there was nowhere for them to go but down.

Deliberately making major changes to the feng shui and triggering one’s accumulated blessings ahead of time to give someone an extraordinary run of good fortune would only mean having to repay it later. That was why Chen Yuan had kept things simple when arranging Yu Shenliu’s office. He hadn’t deliberately created an exceptionally auspicious layout; he’d simply made sure there were no harmful influences and that the qi could flow freely, leaving the space comfortable and unobstructed. With a good environment combined with Yu Shenliu’s own fate and efforts, things would naturally go smoothly from there.

“That’s basically it. Anyway, unless there’s a reason to, it’s better not to keep adding this or putting that here and there. Sometimes randomly placing things can actually do more harm than good. And it’s fine to keep things like the printer off to one side. Just don’t sit too close to them.”

With that, Chen Yuan finished his explanation and sat down beside Yu Shenliu.

“Come to think of it, I’ve always found this strange. I thought people like you would actually have a feng shui master take a look when arranging your offices, even if you didn’t talk about it openly.” After all, this was something tied to their careers. Plenty of people claimed not to believe in such things, yet they would still secretly seek help from these forces.

“Heh.” Yu Shenliu chuckled, then got up and took a cup from the cabinet nearby. He personally made Chen Yuan a cup of tea and handed it to him. “You’ve been talking for so long. Have some tea and rest your throat.”

He seemed inexplicably attentive, but Chen Yuan was so accustomed to this sort of treatment that he didn’t think there was anything unusual about it. He took the cup, blew on the tea to cool it down a little, and took a small sip.

Watching Chen Yuan swallow, Yu Shenliu curled his lips into a faint smile. He gathered his thoughts, then sat down close beside Chen Yuan and said, “In this world, there are often more charlatans than people who actually have any real ability. For every genuine master, there are hundreds of fake masters pretending to be one. Some people learned that lesson the hard way before. They wanted to improve their fortune, only to end up causing trouble for themselves. Naturally, certain things became taboo afterward. If it weren’t for the fact that you’re genuinely that amazing, Yuanyuan, these people wouldn’t have had the nerve to let you get involved in some of those earlier matters.”

There was one factor Yu Shenliu didn’t mention: everyone believed that he and Chen Yuan had an unusual relationship, so in the end, they were simply giving him face.

Chen Yuan didn’t think too much about it either. This was Yu Shenliu’s business. He only needed to mind his own little corner of the world.

Now that Yu Shenliu’s office had been arranged, Chen Yuan left the city government before the afternoon work period began. Although Yu Shenliu very much wanted Chen Yuan to stay a little longer, it simply wasn’t appropriate for someone who didn’t work for the city government to hang around during office hours without either handling official business or doing any actual work. That had nothing to do with their relationship. The government still needed rules.

And then, after Chen Yuan finished arranging Yu Shenliu’s office, something rather amusing happened.

Yu Shenliu couldn’t possibly keep the changes to his office a secret. Once he’d had a few people make some adjustments to the layout, practically anyone with the right connections managed to find out what his new office arrangement looked like. Before long, a whole bunch of people started following suit, all in the name of “those above set the example for those below.”

Yu Shenliu’s office arrangement was simple enough that it was easy for everyone else to imitate. What about the green plants? People who only had their own desks rather than private offices obviously couldn’t arrange things exactly like Yu Shenliu had, so they took turns bringing in cacti, asparagus ferns, aloe vera, and the like. Never mind that these plants were said to absorb computer radiation and purify the air—there were plenty of people claiming that this method really was amazingly effective.

Hanging antique calligraphy and paintings on the walls also became fashionable, replacing ordinary pictures of galloping horses and the like. It wasn’t just the ordinary employees doing it, either. Several of the other mayors and Party Secretaries secretly followed suit. Following the crowd might not sound very respectable, but when something was beneficial to oneself, none of that mattered. They were simply being willing to learn from others.

In fact, these people had considered hiring a feng shui master themselves. But they didn’t know whether the others were charlatans, and the only person who seemed trustworthy was Chen Yuan. Yet if they directly asked Chen Yuan to arrange their offices, they had to worry that Yu Shenliu might interfere somehow. After all, they were judging a gentleman by the standards of a petty person. But then they thought about it and figured that if they simply copied Yu Shenliu’s arrangement, there shouldn’t be any problem, right?

Unfortunately, sometimes being too clever only outsmarted oneself. Feng shui was particularly dependent on adapting to the circumstances. Although the other offices weren’t fundamentally all that different from Yu Shenliu’s, they contained different furnishings, and each person was in charge of different areas. Their arrangements therefore needed to be adjusted accordingly, with subtle changes made to strengthen the fortune associated with a particular area.

So their plan of copying Yu Shenliu’s office arrangement in hopes of improving their own fortunes ended in complete failure.

The Party Secretary suffered the most. He almost completely copied Yu Shenliu’s arrangement, but he didn’t know one crucial detail: Chen Yuan had arranged Yu Shenliu’s office specifically according to his current position as a deputy mayor in charge of education. As a result, the Party Secretary gradually found that his authority seemed to be getting weaker and weaker. It was downright bizarre. In the end, he had no choice but to change the arrangement back.

After all that effort had produced absolutely nothing, the Party Secretary couldn’t shake the feeling that Yu Shenliu had seen through what he was trying to do and deliberately tampered with the feng shui arrangement to undermine him. The thought left him thoroughly displeased.

Yu Shenliu, however, had no time to care what the Party Secretary thought. After adjusting his office’s feng shui, he became even busier. There were plenty of things waiting for him to handle, and every single one he completed counted as a political achievement. At this rate, his promotion was practically within reach.

After all, unlike in Chen Yuan’s previous world, although this world also valued the idea of officials being “tempered through experience,” there were still cases of young officials rising rapidly through the ranks. If he accumulated enough political achievements within a year, moving up another step or two would be perfectly reasonable.

But that is getting ahead of the story, so we’ll leave it there for now.

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