Chapter 11 10. The Little Matter of Making Money
Zhang Luo spent the afternoon classes drowsy and half-asleep.
His reason told him to listen properly, but sleepiness was like incense smoke, seeping into every crack.
“First year is crucial. If you lay a solid foundation in first year, you’ll have hope of getting into a key class when classes are divided in second year.”
Teacher Chen, who taught chemistry, always liked to offer a few words of guidance in the gaps during class.
Hearing it only made Zhang Luo even sleepier.
But in truth, Teacher Chen wasn’t wrong. The selection mechanism for the key classes was based on every grade-wide unified exam in first year, calculating an overall ranking and taking the top few dozen from the top down.
As soon as chemistry class ended, Zhang Luo turned his head to look at the sun already beginning to sink in the west outside the window, and a trace of worry rose in his heart—
This wasn’t what he had expected.
Wasn’t rebirth supposed to mean coming back full of fighting spirit, cheating his way smoothly forward?
How could a trivial little thing like wanting to sleep in class still happen?!
“Hey, Zhang Luo, what are you spacing out for? Let’s go!” His deskmate Xu Da looked excited. “Soccer!”
Zhang Luo came back to his senses.
“Oh.”
He got a little excited too.
That tiny bit of worry was immediately tossed to the back of his mind.
Who cared about all that? There were still three years of high school. Play soccer first!-
Playing soccer was truly exhilarating!
He was drenched in sweat.
When Zhang Luo sprinted across the field, he genuinely felt as if he were flying.
Light as a swallow, a horse treading on a flying swallow—
Ah, no, it should be a foot sending the ball flying.
Zhang Luo even scored a goal.
That was enough to make him feel great.
“Not bad, kid!” Xu Da slapped the back of Zhang Luo’s head and said with a laugh, “That goal today was pretty damn brilliant!”
Zhang Luo said, “If you hadn’t passed it to me, I wouldn’t have been able to score.”
Xu Da had been waiting to hear exactly that. As soon as Zhang Luo said it, the smile on his face instantly grew even brighter.
“Let’s go!”
Zhang Luo walked to the side of the field, picked up his schoolbag, and shouldered it.
Covered in sweat, all he wanted now was to hurry home and rinse off.
The group of soccer buddies scattered like monkeys.
-
Zhang Luo went straight home.
He was the only one at home. His dad was helping out at his mom’s canteen; the two of them wouldn’t be back until around ten at night.
The government canteen his mother had contracted was trying to commercialize this year—
So-called commercialization meant serving as a canteen for the bureau at noon, then taking outside orders in the evening and doing table meals.
At this time, the Xuyang City Health Bureau wasn’t like it would be later, with access control set up at the entrance. It was still in the period of “my front door is always open.”
The reason his mother had thought of commercialization was to earn a little more money.
Many years later, his mother only told him about it by accident during a casual chat. In truth, the family didn’t have much money. His father and mother both lived on fixed wages—even his mother, though she had contracted the canteen, was paid by headcount. It wasn’t as if more and more customers could appear, which meant her income was also a fixed wage. Especially in his second year of high school, when the canteen’s commercial operation lost quite a bit of money, his mother had even gone to his maternal grandmother and asked her to agree to be a fallback for his university expenses—
In case the family really couldn’t come up with his university tuition for the time being, she would ask his grandmother for support.
It was also because his grandmother agreed without the slightest hesitation that his mother continued persisting with the operation the following year despite the losses. In his third year of high school, she really did earn over a hundred thousand, giving him a relatively less embarrassing university life.
At the time, after Zhang Luo heard it, he had merely given an indifferent “Oh” and said, “So that happened too.”
In truth, the matter had affected him quite a bit. He hadn’t slept well that night. Because he had never realized any of it before. When his mother started the commercial operation at the canteen, he had asked whether the family was short of money. After all, because the canteen was responsible for breakfast and lunch, his mother basically had to get up at five in the morning and start working, then wouldn’t come back until ten at night. It was too tiring.
His mother said, “It’s not like I’d be doing anything if I were idle anyway, so I might as well. There are only four private rooms. How tiring could it be? At most, it’s four tables. If we really were short of money, I’d do it on weekends too. It’s fine to do it on workdays, but weekends can’t interfere with my card games.”
He had actually believed her at the time.
But in reality, his mother later also said that it wasn’t that she didn’t want to do it on weekends. It was that if she did, on one hand she would have to pay the Health Bureau extra rent, and on the other, the chefs’ pay on weekends was much higher than usual. And she had no way to guarantee there would definitely be customers on weekends. Even if there were, with only four private rooms, she could do at most four tables. After calculating the costs, it was better not to do it at all.
In truth, this thing had only been allowed because at the beginning no one thought it could actually succeed, nor had they anticipated what would happen later.
By his third year of high school, the business of the canteen’s commercial operation had gotten better and better, with more and more repeat customers. There were also more and more unfamiliar people entering and leaving the Health Bureau compound. In the end, out of concern for appearances, the Health Bureau put a stop to the commercial operation that had finally gotten off the ground and refused to let them continue.
His mother was so angry she cursed for a whole week, saying, “They’re just jealous!” and “Those damned bastards!”
-
Zhang Luo made his own dinner.
He ate a little something casually.
But this matter, which had suddenly come to mind, made Zhang Luo start pondering and calculating whether he should think of some way to earn money, so that later, when his parents ran into financial trouble, they wouldn’t have to stretch every coin while tightening their belts and still keeping him in the dark.
The more they refused to let him know about something like this, the worse it felt when he found out afterward.
Zhang Luo had experienced it.
Buy lottery tickets?
Forget it. He didn’t have that kind of ability, remembering winning lottery numbers from more than ten years ago.
If one really had to say, the thing that made money most easily was money itself—yet he happened to have none.
Was there any business with no startup capital that could help him accumulate his first pot of gold?
Start a livestream and sing or perform? Sorry, this era didn’t have livestreaming, and the internet speed couldn’t keep up.
Use information gaps to buy and sell things? Not to mention he didn’t know how; even if he did, he had no initial capital.
Do self-media? These days, the only self-media was blogs.
And ad monetization hadn’t reached self-media yet.
Zhang Luo was worried.
Then, right at that moment, he saw a copy of Story Club on the bookshelf.
Uh—
Take the road of a literary giant?
Zhang Luo sucked in a breath of cold air.
Seriously.
He was actually daring to dream this sort of dream now.
Zhang Luo quite liked reading novels. But he had never written one; he simply liked reading them. When he was little, he read wuxia and Story Club. When he grew up, he read online novels. At first, when he didn’t have much money, he read pirated copies. Later, after becoming a corporate drone with only himself to feed, he started paying to read legitimate versions.
From Tang Jia San Shao to Chen Dong, from Tian Can Tu Dou to Wo Chi Xihongshi.
There were always people arguing endlessly over who could better represent web novels. But the fact was, as a reader, who cared who represented web novels? He had basically read books by all these authors.
But asking him to write—he didn’t have that ability.
Zhang Luo patted his own face.
“Stop dreaming. This isn’t something you can copy just because you’ve been reborn.”
Besides, in this era, two of them had already debuted, and the other two were already on the road to debuting soon.
For other reborn people, making money seemed to be a tiny matter as easy as sprinkling water.
Why was it that for him, even after being reborn, making money was still such a worrying matter?
Recommendation for an older completed entertainment-industry novel~