# Chapter 038: The First Regulatory Notice
A little after four in the afternoon on December 5, the visitor who was setting up the website sat down in front of the Xinyu counter again.
This time, there was only one work computer. He urged the other company over the phone to hurry up and finish delivering that batch of machines. After hanging up, he told Xiaoyezi what today’s work would involve: organizing the current Q&A materials and having his successor check and use them, for 60 yuan; then setting aside another hour to teach him how to get people to deposit funds, and make an actual payment himself, for another 60 yuan. The money hadn’t even been paid yet, but Junzi had already cleared the desk farther inside.
Xiaoyezi worked on the first task while the young man sat beside her, finding the materials they would continue using tomorrow. Whenever the visitor took a call, he always went to the doorway. If someone asked him something he couldn’t answer right away, he drew a circle in the margin and waited for them to come back.
Another call came in, and the young man turned to the section about payment. The ending said, “Payment as usual.” He had just read the first few words when the customer came back in from the doorway and raised a hand, telling him not to answer yet.
“They’re saying online that the central bank has issued a notice. Have you seen it? Can we still do this or not?”
The customer took the phone and listened to a few words from the other end. The urgency on his face grew, and in the end he said he’d call back later and hung up. Xiaoyezi stopped what she was doing too and looked toward the repair bench. Ye Yan wasn’t there; that afternoon he’d taken a repaired computer out to deliver. He’d said he’d leave this job for the following hour and come back to check on it.
She wanted to call him back immediately. They’d only recently bought those two PTS, and the wallet information was still on the device he carried with him. At the time, he’d had her switch on the desk lamp and gone over the costs with her, but she still hadn’t been able to change his mind. Now even the customer had heard the news, and she was all the less willing to trust her own hazy memory of it.
She pulled over the computer with internet access and found the central bank notice reposted that afternoon by China Securities Network. The notice was dated December 3, but the webpage showed today’s date. She didn’t stop at the headline; she opened the Q&A with reporters, read a section, then went back and checked it again.
Bitcoin was classified as a virtual commodity, not money with legal-currency status. It did not say that ordinary people were categorically prohibited from trading commodities at their own risk. Another section restricted related business by financial and payment institutions, with separate requirements for pricing, exchange, payment, and settlement. She had just been about to lump everything her father owned together under “not allowed,” but after reading this, she crossed out the words she’d written halfway.
Wu Chunhua had been next door. Before coming over, she’d called Junzi to ask whether the two items could be settled that evening. She’d put her own transaction sheet last, hurried to finish the calculations, and come over with even her bag strap still in disarray. When Xiaoyezi saw her, she first thought of asking her to call Ye Yan back to the shop. But the young man was already pressing for an answer he needed that evening, so she moved the two pages about the notice in front of Wu Chunhua.
When she arrived, the young man was about to call back. Before she’d even put down her bag, the customer said it was only a matter of teaching someone how to use it, and he wasn’t even borrowing Xinyu’s account—so why did they still have to wait over sixty yuan?
She looked at the two pages, then asked Xiaoyezi what they had actually planned to do during the following hour. Xiaoyezi clearly repeated what the customer had said, without reducing it to some vague “computer training.”
“Cancel the following hour.” Wu Chunhua crossed that item off the appointment sheet. “We’ll go ahead with handing over the information. We won’t help set up deposits or walk anyone through an actual payment, and we won’t schedule similar guidance in the future.”
“I’ll do it myself. He’ll just explain from beside me. You won’t even agree to that?” The customer pointed at the young man. “Tomorrow someone else will be answering the phone, and the people calling won’t wait for me to come back.”
“That’s why we can’t give that answer as it stands.” Wu Chunhua turned the old draft toward him, without raising her voice. “Ordinary people holding it and trading at their own risk is one thing; what services a payment institution can provide is another. You’re asking me to teach him how to complete a payment. We haven’t verified whether that route still works as before. Today, we can hand over the information and its source clearly. We can’t guarantee the payment.”
The customer looked at the words “as usual” and said nothing right away. The young man’s phone rang again. It was the same caller as before, so he held the phone out to the person in charge.
The customer took it, said he’d check first, then hung up and pulled the computer a little closer.
“Take down this current draft and keep the old one. I’ll take it back and check it again. First, prepare something he can give an answer from today. Don’t leave him staring at a blank page and making things up.”
At his request, Xiaoyezi took down the old draft on the shop computer and kept it for later verification. She added the source and date of the public notice to the current reply.
Junzi saw off the customer who’d come in to ask about prices. When he came back and saw that the later appointment had been crossed off, he straightened the price list first.
“We can still teach people how to find forms and things like that,” he said loudly toward the door, as though no one thought Xinyu had suddenly become unable to keep working.
Then he picked up the phone and rescheduled an ordinary computer he’d promised to look at that evening for the next morning. The caller wasn’t very happy. He stepped outside the counter to apologize a few times, then came back in and moved the stool away, leaving the young man room to try answering on his own.
Ye Yan got back close to five and went straight to the rack to look for a connector cable he hadn’t brought along earlier. Xiaoyezi heard the door curtain rustle and stood up at once, pushing the page about the notice in front of him.
He read the headline, then bent down and looked over a few more lines. The customer asked whether the webpage could still be opened and whether payments could still be made. Ye Yan tried the page he wanted to check. It loaded, but Ye Yan didn’t click through to the next step.
“The computer and the webpage work. I can look at this. As for the payment side, this machine can’t tell us how to handle that.”
Someone called to him from outside, saying they were still waiting for him to come reinstall the line. Ye Yan coiled the cable and got ready to leave. Xiaoyezi had already reached for the coat hanging on the back of the chair.
She was afraid that once he left, she would go looking for the old buyer on her own to ask for news again. She wanted to go with him. Once the ordinary computer was handed over, at least she could finish reading the original text with him—the part they hadn’t gotten through earlier.
But just then, the young man opened the wrong document. The old draft had already been taken down, and he couldn’t find it under the name he remembered. So he asked the person in charge where the line about payment had gone.
Xiaoyezi put the coat back on the chair. If she went out too, this task would be left to the customer to explain to the next person taking over; they hadn’t even finished handing over what they’d planned to charge sixty yuan for today.
“Look at the original text tonight. Don’t just read headlines other people repost,” she said to Ye Yan, her voice lower than before. “And those two coins of yours—I don’t dare use this notice to claim it tells us everything about them either.”
“I’ll read it myself when I get back.” Ye Yan put the cable in his bag. “Leave the two coins as they are. Don’t add to them. Once you’re done here, I still have to check things on my end.”
She nodded, watched him step outside, then went back and sat down beside the young man.
Before six, the call asking about payment came again. The young man opened the current document first, found the public notice, and gave the caller its source and date. When the caller asked whether paying today would make everything all right, he glanced at the person in charge and said they hadn’t verified the payment route, and that the old “as usual” instruction no longer applied. He asked the caller to wait for confirmation.
The customer stood behind him and didn’t try to grab the phone again. After hearing the reply, he folded the handover sheet into his laptop bag and shut the computer.
He took a fifty-yuan note and a ten-yuan note from his pocket and handed them to Junzi.
“That’s just to settle this sixty.”
Junzi counted the money and entered it in the Xinyu shop’s accounts. The customer picked up his computer, and the young man followed him out of the shop.
Wu Chunhua waited until the door curtain had settled before lifting her bag off the stool. She’d rushed over and still hadn’t taken off her scarf. After standing there for a while, she finally pulled it off and stuffed it into her bag. She rubbed the red mark around her neck, then checked the clock. It was already later than she’d planned to leave the shop.
“A moment ago, I was thinking that if we charged an extra sixty for this kind of job every time, even if it was a small amount, it’d be better than having nothing. I rushed to finish checking the orders on my end during the day, and now that I’m here, I find even this little bit of money isn’t easy to earn.” She looked down at the cancellation mark.
Junzi put the two notes in the drawer without saying that it was enough. The two cancelled afternoons in October remained in the old folder, while the original bulk deployment and maintenance work was still going to another shop.
Ye Yan still hadn’t come back. Xiaoyezi picked up her bag, then put it down again. She found the shop phone, read him the source of the news, and listened as he noted it down at the other end. Someone there was testing a machine, so he asked her to wait. It was a while before he was ready to listen again. She didn’t ask whether he wanted to sell. Once she’d confirmed he had the address, she hung up.
The table farther inside had originally been cleared with plenty of room for the following hour. Junzi brought over a cardboard box that had been sitting under the shelves for a long time, intending to move it up. As soon as the bottom touched the table, dust fell in a ring. He carried it back, then wiped the table clean.
Xiaoyezi moved the stool the young man had used against the wall. A little after six, the table was still empty. Junzi stood in front of the shelves and lifted the lid of the cardboard box. A few old packages were packed tightly inside. He reached in and took out the one on top.