The most dissolute couple in the capital

Cui Qingyi was reclining on the chaise longue, flipping through account books.

It's called flipping, but it's really just looking at the total number.

Manager Xiao reviewed the accounts, Su Xin looked at them once, and Aunt Guan looked at them again. If there were still major mistakes after the three parties reviewed them, then she was really unlucky.

As long as the numbers keep rising, the details don't matter.

Su Xin brought in a plate of candied fruit and said in a low voice, "Your Highness, Aunt Guan has arrived."

Cui Qingyi raised her eyelids.

"Please come in."

When Aunt Guan entered, she was carrying a brocade box in her hands. She walked very slowly, as if afraid of bumping or damaging the contents inside.

After bowing, he carefully placed the brocade box on the table.

"Your Highness is well. This was sent by Her Majesty the Empress."

Cui Qingyi sat up straight and reached out to open the brocade box.

The inner layer of the brocade box was lined with thick cotton, and a bottle lay steadily in the middle.

The entire bottle is crystal clear; light passing through it casts a small, flowing iridescent pattern on the table. Its smooth, water-like surface, devoid of any patterns, only amplifies its preciousness through its pure transparency.

She had seen this thing in her past life.

That was the most magnificent antique shop in the capital, run by a Western Region merchant with a high nose and deep-set eyes. At the time, she had always assumed these were imported goods from the Western Regions, but now it seemed…

"This is..." she said, feigning ignorance.

Aunt Guan smiled and said, "This thing is called glass. Her Majesty said that the cosmetics from Chenxiang Pavilion are now famous. Although the counterfeiting has been suppressed, it is hard to guarantee that there won't be a second or third time. Rather than guarding against thieves every day, it is better to cut off other people's thoughts at the root."

She pointed to the glass bottle: "This is extremely precious, more transparent than ordinary glass. There's no other workshop in the world that can replicate it. It's perfect for the finest cosmetics from the Agarwood Pavilion. Even if someone has extraordinary skills and can imitate a few scents of the perfume, they could never create such a crystal-clear bottle. The difference between real and fake is obvious at a glance. Secondly..."

Aunt Guan paused, a hint of merchant shrewdness in her eyes: "Things are valued for their rarity. This bottle itself is a priceless treasure; if it contains perfume, then it's not just selling cosmetics."

Cui Qingyi held the bottle up and looked at it in the sunlight streaming in through the window.

Sunlight streamed through the bottle, casting a faint patch of light on her palm. The bottom was uneven, and when she touched it with her fingertips, she found the three characters "Chenxiang Pavilion".

How could it be made so exquisitely!

"Aunt Guan," Cui Qingyi's smile grew even gentler, "Please convey to Her Majesty the Empress that I am grateful for Your Majesty's guidance. However, I have a question: how is the glass production capacity?"

Aunt Guan replied, "We can only supply ten of these high-quality pieces a day, and twenty of the less pure ones can be supplied daily."

Thirty...

"I understand the situation."

Aunt Guan smiled and said, "Her Majesty said that the Princess Consort's monthly donation of such a large sum to the orphanage is also out of concern for Princess Zhao. Her Majesty is returning the favor by sending some glass as a token of appreciation; the Princess Consort need not thank us."

Cui Qingyi smiled: "Your Majesty loves me dearly, and I cannot be ungrateful. With this glass as a guarantee, the price of cosmetics in Chenxiang Pavilion will naturally rise several times over. Therefore, we will give Your Majesty an additional two percent of our monthly profits, as a way of covering the cost of purchasing this rare glass bottle."

Aunt Guang smiled, thinking to herself, "This Princess Liang really knows how to handle people."

Originally, the glass was intended as a token of gratitude for the support provided by the orphanage. Cui Qingyi's additional contribution of two percent was clearly intended to use the cost of this glass as a token of appreciation, thus keeping the donation itself pure.

Given the rarity of glass, these two cents are not only not expensive, but are actually a loss for the Queen in terms of friendship.

But from the Queen's perspective, once glass was developed, it was essentially just sand that had been fired. How much was it worth? What was truly valuable was the technological barrier! Now that the technology had been developed, exchanging a bunch of worthless sand bottles for a continuous stream of "two-tenths profit" from Chenxiang Pavilion, which even increased dramatically due to price hikes, was no different from building a money-printing machine.

What's even more ingenious is that this deal effectively tied the Liang Prince's Mansion to Princess Zhao's cause, paving the way for her future political achievements.

Wonderful, wonderful!

Both parties in the transaction felt they had made a huge profit.

After Aunt Guan left, Cui Qingyi took the glass bottle to the incense room.

After opening the shop, Li Chengjing's interest in tinkering with cosmetic formulas intensified, and he was now considering making more essential oils with different flavors.

Essential oils can be mixed into cosmetics or used alone, and they are easy to produce in large quantities, making them ideal for mass distribution.

"Your Highness." Cui Qingyi placed the bottle in front of him.

Li Chengjing looked up and sat up straight with a "whoosh," holding the bottle in both hands as if it were some rare treasure, turning it over and over to examine it.

"What is this thing?! It's transparent! Completely transparent! You can see everything inside!"

Before Cui Qingyi could explain, she saw Li Chengjing stuffing a plate of rose petals into the bottle.

Red petals fall into the transparent bottle, their vibrant color appearing as if they were a sealed flame through the crystalline walls.

"Beautiful!" Li Chengjing's eyes lit up. "Qingyi, look! This is a million times more beautiful than any white porcelain or celadon! If I put my face cream in it, the color and the layers would be amazing."

"For example, the essential oils we often sell, the ones with a little bit of gold powder, just imagine, stored in this, when the sunlight shines on them..."

King Liang indeed had his own insights into aesthetics.

"This is called glass, a gift from Her Majesty the Empress." She sat down. "The workshop can only produce ten high-quality pieces and twenty ordinary pieces each day."

"Only thirty?" Li Chengjing's expression shifted from ecstatic joy to conflict. "Then I..."

"So," Cui Qingyi took the bottle back from his hand, "I'm thinking that from now on, the incense products of Chenxiang Pavilion will be divided into three categories: top-grade, rare, and fine. The top-grade will be made of fine glass in ten portions, the rare will be made of ordinary glass in twenty portions per day, and the fine will be made of Ding kiln white porcelain in fifty portions per day. The quantity is limited and will be sold out on a first-come, first-served basis."

Li Chengjing was taken aback: "Not even a hundred portions in total? Cosmetics are consumables, doesn't that mean... many people can't buy them?"

Cui Qingyi looked at him and smiled slightly.

Li Chengjing suddenly realized: "What about the price? Will it go up?"

Cui Qingyi held up three fingers: "The price of top-quality items is tripled."

Lee Seung-kyung took a deep breath.

He counted on his fingers: "A bottle originally sold for one hundred taels... tripling that is three hundred taels... even if the three are priced differently, if we take the average price, I'll earn..."

Li Chengjing got stuck while calculating, so he decided to rephrase it.

"Three thousand taels for a single day's worth of top-quality items?!"

Cui Qingyi smiled and said, "This is just our turnover. We donate half of the profits to the orphanage, and the other half goes to my sister-in-law to cover the cost of buying the glass. After adding labor and other costs, the actual amount we receive is not much."

Li Chengjing replied with a grin, "That's still quite a bit! Anyway, it's money I earned myself, oh no, it's money we earned ourselves, so it's different!"