The Versatile Master Artist

Looking at the luxury business car ahead, and the polite driver wearing white gloves.

Gu Weijing quietly stepped back a bit.

”You guys aren’t Brother Hao’s people, are you?”

He asked cautiously.

Gu Weijing still hadn’t figured out what exactly was going on.

He did indeed arrange to meet someone here.

However, the setup was beyond Gu Weijing’s expectations, reminding him of the Myanmar gangster Godfather, Brother Hao.

Yet,

Gu Weijing felt it didn’t quite match.

Brother Hao was certainly wealthy, but many of his underlings were street thugs or soldiers from Northern Myanmar.

They were usually styled as gangster fashion with flamboyant colored hair and large tattoos.

Fierce, indeed fierce,

but compared to the cold aura of the blonde young man staring at him from the Bentley’s back seat in a formal business suit, it fell short.

If described accurately, the difference in demeanor was akin to the meeting of Chen Haonan from a Hong Kong movie and the Terminator from a Cameron film.

Could it be,

the foreign mercenaries under Brother Hao?

Gu Weijing glanced around and found many people staring at him or at the Bentley.

This was a bustling area,

and he was ready to run if things went awry.

”Who’s Brother Hao? I’m a professional manager!”

The blonde young man looked up and down at Gu Weijing for five seconds, finally unable to maintain his cool, expressionless demeanor.

He seemed more baffled than Gu Weijing, handing over a bilingual English-German business card with a look of confusion.

”Meiquan Palace Office, with all due respect, are you... Detective Cat? We did correspond via email three days ago.”

The blonde young man was indeed a tough character.

However,

he was fundamentally different from Brother Hao.

Brother Hao might dismember someone and sell them on the black market when fierce, while he would dismantle a listed company and sell it on the trading market.

The blonde young man was from the Meiquan Palace Office in Europe.

Meiquan Palace Office is one of the oldest modern accounting firms in the world.

With the onset of the industrial revolution,

many financial market investment annual returns in 19th-century Germany and Austria, Paris, London, could easily exceed twenty percent.

While the traditional land investment favored by old Junker nobles yielded an average annual return of around 3.7%, some years not even matching inflation rates.

This led to the decline of old nobility and the rise of firms like Meiquan Palace Office to manage wealth in emerging capital markets unfamiliar to traditional nobles.

The office was initially a standalone one at the Habsburg family’s summer residence, ”Meiquan Palace,” hence the name.

Compared to globally renowned multinational accounting firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, DTT,

Meiquan Palace isn’t famed, because from day one, it was positioned as small and refined, serving only the world’s one in a million Old Money.

Their clientele included prominent figures like Princess Sisi, Austro-Hungarian Marshal Franz Hertendorf, musician John Strauss, and the famous WWI trigger Archduke Ferdinand.

Meiquan Palace Office isn’t merely an accounting institution.

They audit global properties and investments for these Old Money families, handle financial investment matters, and assist with some day-to-day commissions.

Europe has quite a few elite investment banks or offices serving old nobility exclusively, like Rothschild Family Bank, Meiquan Palace Office, among others.

Since entering the field, the blonde young man had heard many odd client stories from predecessors, including an elderly Baron selling their family countryside castle to fund a bicycle trip across Africa, or a wealthy young lady wanting to buy a Porsche prototype car team for the 24-hour Le Mans endurance race... but a client like an ordinary middle school student was a first for him.

Gu Weijing hesitated momentarily, nodded, and got into the car.

He did arrange to sign a contract with someone from the accounting firm introduced by Mr. Tree Sloth after school.

Several days ago, via email, he had a brief coordination with them.

Gu Weijing thought an online signature would suffice, but they expressed that to provide better service, they’d arrange a local representative to meet him.

He diplomatically informed them he was currently in Myanmar.

”It’s alright; we provide global services. If convenient, we could have dinner together.” The accountant from a firm he hadn’t even heard of said enthusiastically.

Diplomat Street is the most beautiful street in Yangon.

[Bistrot 1836] is the most beautiful Italian restaurant on Diplomat Street.

Bistrot is the name of the restaurant, 1836 the year it opened. Back then, an Italian diplomat bought the riverside wooden building by the Yangon River and converted it into a restaurant.

To this day, the wooden sign on the restaurant’s second floor still has the hand-written Italian proverb by this diplomat—”Today’s steak is better than tomorrow’s empire.”

Although the diplomat who uttered this should have been executed, it also underscores the restaurant’s status in Yangon.

Mona and her companions approached the restaurant, looking at its opulent decor and the row of official cars with symbols of various embassies parked outside, she instinctively slowed her pace.

Her family indeed had a good income, but it was her first time at such a high-end restaurant.