Chapter 33 — Two Fronts, One Ambition (Revised)
Two contracts sat on Li Ming's desk the way two temptations sit in a man's wallet: one for a riverside flagship for the Italian chain, one for another Patriot Burger at a cinema district.
He smiled and signed both.
Patriot Burger wasn't new — not by a long shot. It already had eleven noisy, gilded outlets scattered across the province. This next one would be number twelve. He liked the number: it sounded like a trend, not a fluke.
Buying, Not Renting
From that morning onward, the rule was simple: buy when you can.
Every property proposal arrived with a short note in Li Ming's handwriting: Purchase — pay premium. Lease offers were treated like polite suggestions and rarely accepted.
The finance team hissed into calculators; the legal team rewrote purchase clauses; the operations people cheered quietly. Ownership meant control, and to Li Ming, "control" had always been a useful-sounding excuse for spectacular spending.
Parallel Expansion
Maps and charts cluttered the conference room: red pins for Italian locations, blue pins for Patriot Burger. The pattern looked deliberate now — not random dots but long lines of supply and demand.
"We're building two networks," Wang Jie observed.
"Two armies," Li Ming said. "One that fries, one that simmers."
He bought the riverside two-storey for the Italian flagship — an ostentatious place with a show kitchen and a mezzanine that nobody needed but everyone admired. Opposite the cinema, he secured the burger corner, paying a premium so high the owner congratulated him on his own good fortune.
Cold Storage No. 2
Outside the city he signed for twenty acres for a second regional cold-storage hub. Officially: a logistics node to reduce spoilage. Unofficially: another glorious sink for receipts, cranes, and imported racking systems.
The first trucks rolled in wearing the Horizon Group livery. The second hub would mean longer routes could be handled in house — more control, more costs, and (in Li Ming's hopeful calculation) more glorious losses to log.
A Small Supply Nudge
Mid-month a reliable cheese supplier announced a short "plant upgrade," and another told them freight was being prioritized for big national clients. The plant chiefs shrugged with professional calm; the procurement team swore a little in the stairwell.
Li Ming's immediate reaction was predictably theatrical: "Arrange exploratory visits to a local dairy co-op. I want options."
He used the word options because it sounded like planning. In his ledger it read: Buy options = burn money faster.
Staff Readings
At a late-night meeting, Zhang Wei tapped a pen on a map. "With the hubs and the properties, we could scale into neighboring provinces faster than anyone expects."
Li Ming smirked and said the joke line he'd cultivated — "We're just making creative losses." — but the room buzzed with excitement. To his managers, the buying was a bold expansion; to Li Ming, it was artful incineration.
Outside, the city lights reflected on the riverside building's glass. Inside, Li Ming stared at the pile of deeds, trucks and invoices, and thought: if one chain could spin this out, what two could do together?
He didn't know it yet, but the property purchases, the second hub, and the dozen Patriot Burger outlets were beginning to interlock: the supply network smoothing out the rough edges he'd intended to keep. The more receipts he signed to burn, the more he was unknowingly building the skeleton of a competitive empire.