In his rented room, Li Yuan tossed and turned, unable to sleep. All sorts of thoughts surfaced in his mind. From beginning to end, he had only one goal: to make money. With money, he would have everything. Money could solve the vast majority of his problems. In his previous life, he'd had his fill of the contempt and mockery that came from being poor.
It was past ten in the evening, and just as Li Yuan was about to go to sleep, his phone suddenly vibrated. It was a text message from Bai Weixi.
"Li Yuan, I'm really sorry about today. I've always considered you my best friend. I did in the past, I do now, and I will in the future... No need to reply. Good night!"
After reading the message, Li Yuan was seething with rage. Damn phony girl, still trying to PUA me.
His fingers flew over the keypad as he typed furiously, "Bai Weixi, you phony girl, you slag! We're done. You go your own way..."
As he typed, Li Yuan suddenly felt a sense of resignation. What would such a reply accomplish besides making him look like a clown? Would it make Bai Weixi feel even a hint of regret? Not at all. It would only show that he couldn't let go.
Pressing the delete key, Li Yuan backspaced through the text, erasing it letter by letter. He was about to block Bai Weixi's contact as well but suddenly felt the action was too childish.
"Don't miss a good girl; don't waste time on a bad one." I'll keep her contact for now and just pretend I didn't see the message. Once I'm rich, I'll have her crawling back to me, and I mean literally crawling...
Li Yuan silently vowed to himself. He wasn't magnanimous enough to simply let go of his first love, a woman he had pursued for seven years, over a single text.
Once I make my first pot of gold from the sports lottery, how should I continue making money? Should I start my own business or invest in the stock market? Long-term holdings in Apple, Maotai, and Tengxun wouldn't be bad, but it's a long way from achieving financial freedom quickly. We're in a global financial crisis right now, and the entire stock market is on edge. The market won't start rising until after 2010... Right! In my previous life, I heard an associate professor at the academy mention that he bought a stock in June of this year that defied the market trend. It skyrocketed several times over in less than a month, netting him a fortune. He boasted about it for years... I could give that a try. It's 2008 now. If I were to return to my old trade—my part-time job in my previous life—and write web novels, that could be a viable future. I started by writing fanfiction and am extremely familiar with several works that are guaranteed to become massive hits. In the future, becoming a renowned Great Writer and making tens of millions a year isn't impossible... As for starting a business, I have no experience. But with my foresight, once I have sufficient funds, I might be able to get a piece of the pie in industries like the internet, short video, or gaming. However, it's very easy to get fleeced...
That night, Li Yuan was lost in his rambling thoughts until three or four in the morning. Only when he couldn't stay awake any longer did he finally slip into dreamland. He hadn't set an alarm, so he slept until after ten in the morning.
Turning on his phone and connecting to the mobile network, he saw Old Wave Sports was providing a live text commentary for the third game of the NBA Finals. The game, which had started at 9:00 AM, was just beginning its third quarter.
Li Yuan felt a knot of anxiety in his stomach. He had been reborn, and he was genuinely afraid that the so-called "butterfly effect" might have occurred. However, he had only been reborn for a day and hadn't done anything earth-shattering. Even if there was a butterfly effect, it surely couldn't have influenced events all the way over with the Americans.
After an anxious wait, the Lakers defeated the Celtics 87-81, pulling one back to make the series score 2-1.
Thank goodness nothing changed. I earned 12,000 yuan today, not bad at all. Li Yuan breathed a sigh of relief, a smile spreading across his face.
First, he went to the sports lottery shop near No. 1 High School to claim his winnings. The owner, a basketball fan in his early thirties, smiled and said, "Hey, handsome, not bad luck. You made 2,400 yuan on that one bet. Want to place another?"
Li Yuan replied, "Of course. Put 6,400 yuan on the Celtics to win the fourth game."
The shop owner frowned and reminded him, "Hold on, handsome, aren't you a Lakers fan? The Lakers have strong momentum at home, and Kobe's playing outstandingly. Why aren't you betting on the Lakers?"
What could Li Yuan say? He couldn't very well reveal that he was a Reincarnator. After this game, most fans were indeed more optimistic about a Lakers victory. The first three games had been evenly matched, with the point differential never exceeding ten. With the next two games on the Lakers' home court, the home-court advantage naturally led more people to bet on them to tie the series.
The lottery shop owner shook his head. "So you're a Celtics fan. For the fourth game, the odds for the visiting Celtics are 2.6. Are you just betting on the win?"
"Yeah, just the win."
After that, Li Yuan went to four other sports lottery shops, claiming his winnings and placing new bets at each one.
I invested a principal of 20,000 yuan in today's game at odds of 1.6, for a net profit of 12,000 yuan. Now I'll use 32,000 yuan as the principal to place bets at six different shops. With odds of 2.6, I'll have 83,200 yuan—principal and profit included—the day after tomorrow. This way of making money is really fast. No wonder there are so many gambling addicts.
The results of the game wouldn't be out for another two days. With his errands done, Li Yuan headed to an internet cafe to check on the stock market and novel websites. Next to No. 1 High School, only about two hundred meters from his rented room, was the long-established Sunny Internet Cafe.
Li Yuan slapped a 50-yuan bill on the counter and said generously, "Boss, get me a computer and a bottle of Sprite. Keep the change on my account."
The county's internet cafes at this time were dreadful compared to the modern ones of the future. The air was thick with the mixed stench of sour body odor, cigarette smoke, and instant noodles. Some night owls who had gamed all night were fast asleep right at their stations.
Li Yuan found a secluded corner near a wall and logged onto QQ. In this era, there was no WeChat; chatting with friends was done through text messages or QQ. As a high school student, he rarely used it. While you could log into QQ on a phone, not many of his classmates even had one.
He opened QQ to find no new chat messages, only a few notifications from the class group. In his previous life, he had gotten used to WeChat and abandoned QQ for years. He only started using it again after facing setbacks at work and turning to part-time writing. When he saw his current QQ signature—"I'd trade a lifetime just for you to turn back to me once"—he couldn't take the cringe any longer. He promptly deleted all his past signatures, posts, comments, and everything else.
So damn idiotic!
Li Yuan first opened a stock market website and searched for the stocks the associate professor from his memory had mentioned. They were already listed but hadn't begun their surge yet, though they were on an upward trend. According to the professor, they were set to soar at the end of June.
Good, I still have time.
In his previous life, he had also bought stocks after starting work, hoping to make money. But like most small-time investors, he ended up losing his shirt. He had invested tens of thousands of yuan and was left with almost nothing. Very few people actually made money; otherwise, that associate professor wouldn't have spent years boasting about making several million.
After comparing various data and looking up information on opening a brokerage account, he had a plan. Once the NBA Finals were over, he could invest some money to test the waters. The associate professor probably wasn't lying.
Besides the stock market, the thing he valued most was online writing. This was the wild growth period of the industry. Any writer from the future with a few years of experience could come back to this time and quickly become a hit. The various genres hadn't fully emerged yet, and the competition was nowhere near as fierce as it would become. Most importantly, the country's economy was advancing rapidly, housing prices were low, and there were plenty of wealthy people willing to spend money on entertainment.
He smoothly logged into Yuandian Web and followed the prompts to create an author account. In his previous life, after his hopes for a career in public service fizzled out and he decided to coast, he had started writing web novels part-time. Although his success wasn't remarkable, the income was decent—seven or eight thousand a month, which was more than his main job's salary. He had been envious of some online writers he met in author groups; some were still in college but were already earning tens of thousands a month. It was a stark contrast to his own college days, which were spent playing video games, basketball, or chasing girls, never once thinking about making money.
What should I write? Fight Break, Douluo, Swallowed Star, Covering the Sky, Eternal Life?
The fame of the Five Greats of the Central Plains was immense. He had read all these books and knew that they would all be adapted in the future, each earning its author tens of millions in revenue. He had even written fanfiction for them.
Fight Break created the "trash to treasure" and "broken engagement" tropes. With over a billion views, it was the single book that catapulted Potato to god-tier status. Douluo goes without saying. That one book stayed popular all the way to 2023, spawning an entire series and making its author the richest web novelist. Dong's Covering the Sky... "Walk the path to the heavens, step on the celestial song, cover the sky with a flick of a finger." The aura of the Great Emperors is just off the charts. I'm just afraid of inviting an inauspicious fate in my later years if I write it. Then there's Swallowed Star, the first fanfiction I ever wrote in my past life. City Lord Luo's respectable character is incredibly likable. Eternal Life has a massive scope and a vast amount of content, which actually makes it the hardest to get a handle on.
Which one should I write?