I'm Just Getting Your Luck - Chapter 1
“Taming Your Caretaker: A Guide”
The spring breeze, still tinged with the bitter cold of winter’s end, once again swept through North City.
Inside the Sanbing Street police station, a young girl sat nervously on a chair. She clutched a cup of hot water in her hands, her nose red from the cold, still not recovered. “Ah-choo!”
A young police officer refilled her stainless steel cup and placed it on the table in front of her. “How many is that this month?”
“The eleventh,” someone answered. “Just yesterday, we caught three who climbed the wall in a group, then couldn’t get down, and had to call us to rescue them.”
What kind of nonsense is this?
The older officer sighed and handed a tissue to the girl across the table, who was still sniffling. “You’re so young and pretty. Why are you so dead set on him?”
“You make it sound bad! Our Mr. Zhou is a rising star in the tech world. His company is thriving. He’s handsome too! And—he regularly feeds stray cats in our neighborhood. So kind-hearted!”
“I bring you buns all the time, and you never say I’m kind-hearted. Ingrate,” the old officer muttered, then straightened his notebook. “Name?”
“Ying Yu.”
“How do you write that?”
“‘Ying’ as in ‘welcome’, and ‘Yu’ as in ‘wealthy’.”
“Nice meaning.” The officer smiled briefly, then asked more seriously, “Now tell me why you trespassed into the Jadeite Villa District and loitered around Mr. Zhou’s home.”
“I didn’t exactly trespass. Nobody stopped me when I went in,” Ying Yu muttered defensively.
Her ash-blonde hair covered half her face, revealing only her soft round features. Her nose was bright red from the cold, and she looked completely harmless.
At a glance, her golden hair might make one think she was a foreigner, but her eyes were deep black, and her clear northern accent made it obvious she had grown up in the arms of Mother China.
The older officer pulled up the surveillance footage on his computer. After just two seconds, he sat up straight, nose practically pressed to the screen, replaying the beginning at 0.5x speed five times.
In the footage, the seemingly docile girl in front of him climbed the six-meter-high wall by scaling decorative bars in the blink of an eye. One flip—whoosh—she landed in a flawless 360-degree drop.
She even landed on all fours, and within a second stood up, dusted off her hands, and walked away.
What the hell?! Who could even stop you?!
The old officer found his voice after a moment and adjusted his glasses. “Are you in special forces or something? Did you hurt your legs?”
“Special forces?” She only knew of the patrol teams in the Demon Control Bureau.
Ying Yu innocently knocked her legs. “Not hurt. Just numb from sitting too long.”
Suddenly remembering something, she looked up, her large round eyes glimmering. “You said his surname is Zhou? What’s his full name? Can you contact him? I really need to find him!”
“Are you asking me or am I asking you?” The officer was speechless. “You don’t even know his full name and you camped out at his door for three days?”
“I waited because… because he’s my fated partner! I must find him and dual-cultivate to change my luck!”
“Dual-cultivate? Fated partner?” The officer felt like he’d been left behind by the times. “You mean, you believe you two are destined by the heavens to be together, right?”
In human terms, yes.
Ying Yu nodded seriously.
“Oh, so in a sea of people, you laid eyes on him, and after a few fateful encounters, you decided he’s the one, and you’ll stop at nothing to find him?”
“How did you know?!” Ying Yu looked shocked. She had only ever told Cat Sis.
The officer scoffed. “Everyone who ends up here says the same thing.”
Ying Yu whispered, “Officer, can you help me find him? I really have something important to tell him.”
“And your relationship with him is…?”
Ying Yu swore with conviction: “Nothing yet. But there will be.”
“…”
This isn’t a bank, miss. No emotional loans here.
At the police station entrance, the officer practically pushed her out.
“Girl, do you know how many people get dragged in here for this nonsense every day? My workload’s tripled because of people like you. Go home, and don’t do this again.”
The glass doors of the station closed tightly. Though the midday sun had come out, the wind still carried a sharp chill.
Just as Ying Yu tried to go back inside, Long Qiuqiu rushed up from behind and pulled her away. “You silly thing, do you even know who you’re trying to find?”
“Zhou Chenyi. The most famous young entrepreneur right now, works in navigation systems. The officer just said it.”
Ying Yu sulked, pulling her scarf up to cover most of her face, only her eyes peeking out. “Cat Sis, Plan A failed. I stayed outside his house for three days and didn’t even catch a glimpse. But I did smell his scent.”
Ying Yu unhappily swished her fox tail, which she couldn’t reveal in the human world.
“He was on a business trip the past few days. No wonder you didn’t see him.”
Long Qiuqiu showed her a tablet, pointing to the #ZhouChenyiReturns hashtag trending on Weibo.
The feed was full of his airport photos. There were more fans than any celebrity, and reporters even tried to interview him.
The man stood tall at over 1.8 meters, very eye-catching in the crowd. He had a suit jacket draped over his arm, lean muscle visible beneath his shirt. He looked like a refined villain, except he wore casual sneakers.
If it weren’t for the suit, people might’ve thought he was just a college student.
The crowd around him swelled like a snowball rolling downhill. Zhou Chenyi adjusted his sunglasses, frowning with clear irritation.
“See that? The guy you’re targeting is a very influential human. Look at those lips—thin. Never a good sign. And look at him—not even two kilos of meat on him. You really want to curl up in his arms? You sure?”
Long Qiuqiu tried to warn her childhood friend just how hard it would be to ‘conquer’ a man like that.
Her little fox had a round baby face—clearly no match for this calculating man.
“When we first enter the human world, we’re supposed to pick a caretaker. But you picked him…” Long Qiuqiu hesitated. “Maybe you should reconsider?”
Ying Yu had grown up without anyone to care for her. Long Qiuqiu, two years older, had taken on a big-sister role and always lumped Ying Yu in as “us cats” despite her being a fox.
“But he said he’d take care of me,” Ying Yu whispered. “And… he touched my tail.”
In the demon world, there’s a legend—whoever touches your tail is your destined partner. Being with them raises your luck stat.
The Nine-Tailed White Fox holds supreme status in the demon realm, but Ying Yu was an outlier—the only one with just one tail.
She had yellow patches on her ears, forehead, and paws. From birth, she didn’t fit in and was abandoned by her clan.
Her textbooks were always the damaged ones. Her bike tires constantly went flat. Even walking, she’d get pooped on by crows…
She was notoriously unlucky, and Long Qiuqiu knew how much this idea of luck meant to Ying Yu.
“Cat Sis, the day I met him, something amazing happened.”
“I got accepted to the Demon Control Bureau. Everything was done. But the day before I was supposed to start, they told me the spots were full. I had to wait another year. Turns out, the Fox King’s cousin, Cheng Lianhua, took my spot.”
“But after I met Zhou Chenyi, the bureau called me again. They said there was an opening—I could be a substitute.”
“What position?”
“Lost and Found Department Manager!”
“…?”
Long Qiuqiu’s expression twisted. “You seriously think that’s good luck? They created an entire department just for a lost and found box?”
“Of course it’s good luck! The two geese in that department treat me really well!”
And if just a tail touch improved her luck that much, then what if he touched her every day? No more keys breaking in locks ever again!
Ying Yu sneezed, determinedly opening the livestream feed. Zhou Chenyi had already left the airport and gotten into a car.
He finally appeared!
Ying Yu readied herself for action.
“What are you doing now?”
“I’m going to wait at his house again!”
“You’ve already been blacklisted by his neighborhood’s security. The gates are electrified! You want to be turned into roasted fox?!”
Long Qiuqiu, with three years more experience in the human world and already settled in a human home, sighed.
As Ying Yu’s childhood friend, she turned off the [Stubborn Servant] homecoming alert and grabbed her shoulders. “Since you’re this committed, I’ll help you one more time.”
She whispered instructions in Ying Yu’s ear, then handed her a book. “And remember—don’t lie under car tires! One wrong move and your head’s cracked open. Humans say cats have nine lives, but foxes don’t. Be careful.”
“And take this.” She shoved a book titled “Exploring the Universe” into her hands.
Ying Yu opened to the first page.
“Taming Your Caretaker: A Guide”—a collector’s edition.
—
In the backseat of a BMW, Zhou Chenyi finished replying to emails and casually opened an Ultraman cartoon for his young nephew.
“Lame.” The precocious Zhou Fan snatched the tablet, complained, then logged into a streaming app to watch the latest action movie—Huluwa vs. the Demon King, English dubbed.
What a cultural mash-up.
“I’m lame?” Zhou Chenyi smirked and knocked the kid on the forehead with a sharp knuckle.
“Ow! That hurt! What was that for?!”
“Helping you open your chakras. So your mom won’t bug me to tutor your math anymore.” Zhou Chenyi stretched his neck, his voice hoarse, and said to the driver’s seat, “Sis, I’ve got a mountain of work. Just take him to your meetings.”
“He’s got school, genius. Can’t just skip it.” His sister, Zhou Buping, glanced at him via the rearview mirror. “I went all the way to the airport to pick you up, and now you won’t even help take him to school?”
“I have a driver. I’d have gotten home faster without you,” Zhou Chenyi sighed, watching as she took another wrong turn.
Forget it. Not even a top-tier navigation system could help someone who mixed up left and right and was overconfident.
He clicked his tongue and pulled Zhou Fan’s collar. “Don’t glue yourself to the screen. You’ll need glasses.”
The kid hugged the tablet tightly. “You don’t wear glasses and you still don’t have a girlfriend.”
“If I had a girlfriend, you wouldn’t score 100 in math.”
The car pulled into the underground parking garage of Million Corp. After dropping them off, Zhou Buping drove off.
Zhou Chenyi got swamped with work. It wasn’t until 10 p.m. that he remembered he had brought a growing six-year-old who needed sleep.
“Where’s the kid? Where’d he go?”
His assistant replied, “He said he has a football test tomorrow, so he went to practice.”
Zhou Chenyi paused, a bad feeling rising. “Where’s he practicing?”
“The underground garage.”
Ding. The elevator doors opened.
As Zhou Chenyi stepped out, Zhou Fan’s panicked cry echoed through the garage:
“Uncle! Uncle, there’s someone here! I kicked her and knocked her out!”