Chapter Five: The Love He Repaired

In its first week, Original Image Studio booked three months of work. Lin did not rent an office tower. He divided projects into color, detailed retouching, and rights verification, hiring freelancers who had been underpaid by large agencies. Every source image received an offline backup and a paper proof. Every client signed a document defining the boundary between presentation and deception. Rivals joked that Lin had opened a retouching company afraid to retouch. Seven days later, Hengyao’s honest image made the emerald’s natural fracture its signature, and first-day preorders exceeded ten million yuan. No one laughed after that.