Funds

This man was a thief. He had his eye on your phone. It was advisable to stay away from him.

This woman was a wealthy woman. She thought you were her type. If you sat down, she would take the initiative to strike up a conversation. If you got together with her, you could save yourself twenty years of hard work.

This...

Guo Yuan walked through the departure hall, various prompts constantly sounding in his mind.

He would have sat down without a second thought if he did not know what the people before him were like, but now that the narration had told him everything, Guo Yuan naturally would not go looking for trouble. Wearing his backpack, he found a seat with no one nearby, then took out his phone and opened the fund page in Alipay.

As expected, it was another sea of miserable green.

Guo Yuan had invested nearly twenty thousand yuan in funds, but now he had just over ten thousand left.

Guo Yuan had first gotten into funds in 2020. Funds had risen ferociously that year; even Guo Yuan, who had been abroad, had heard about it. You could make money buying liquor and medical funds with your eyes closed.

Back in December 2020, Guo Yuan saw on Moments that his best friend Shi Ze was making several thousand yuan every day from liquor and medical funds. He was tempted too and followed him into the pit.

He poured in all the money he had earned from nearly half a year of working at a convenience store.

Then, just a few days later, the funds began to plummet, and he and his best friend were trapped together.

After Guo Yuan returned home, his best friend told him that he had only gotten into it because he had seen other people making money.

After two years of exploration—or rather, losing money—Guo Yuan had summed up two lessons: first, when even someone who had never touched funds wanted to jump in, it was time to run. Otherwise, just wait to be fleeced!

Second, every year at the beginning of the twelfth lunar month, it was time to prepare to run. Everyone knew that rural families began slaughtering pigs and dividing up meat after Laba Festival. Funds were the same—they started harvesting in the twelfth lunar month. If you did not run, you would definitely be slaughtered.

Previously, Guo Yuan had used all the money he had on hand to buy a house. Although his new book, "White Night Walk," had performed well, the royalties and revenue share had not come in yet. He was already nearly broke.

At one point, he had even been unable to make his mortgage payments, so he had taken on some coding work online to earn money for the mortgage.

That was why Guo Yuan checked his funds from time to time, hoping they might recover a little so he could sell them and cut his losses in time.

Unfortunately, things did not go as he wished. The funds he had bought had not risen once lately; they had kept falling. Guo Yuan had gone from heartache at the beginning to feeling nothing no matter how far they dropped.

The fund you purchased will continue to fall over the next three days. It is recommended that you sell immediately to stop your losses.

Hearing the voice in his mind, Guo Yuan froze for a moment before his eyes lit up. The narration could do this too? Did that mean he could use it to figure out which funds would rise?

Guo Yuan immediately began experimenting, but he soon discovered that the narration only gave prompts for funds he had purchased. It only warned him that a fund would fall, without saying how much it would fall or how.

Even so, by purchasing small amounts of multiple funds, Guo Yuan found one fund for which the narration did not warn him of a drop or advise him to sell quickly.

So Guo Yuan put all his money into that fund.

This should be safe now, right? Guo Yuan thought.

After buying the fund, Guo Yuan opened his email and sent a message to his lawyer in the island nation.

"White Night Walk" had sold two hundred thousand copies since its release in April, already surpassing the sales of "The Locked Room Collector" over an entire year.

Moreover, just a week ago, Guo Yuan's editor had told him that a major television network had taken an interest in "White Night Walk" and wanted to purchase its television adaptation rights.

Compared with a classical detective work like "The Locked Room Collector," a social detective novel like "White Night Walk" was indeed better suited for adaptation into television dramas or films.

As everyone knew, classical detective fiction focused on solving mysteries, suspense fiction focused on atmosphere, while social detective fiction placed greater emphasis on portraying and dissecting human nature, as well as various thought-provoking social issues.

This type of work was the most suitable and easiest to adapt.

Hearing that his work might be adapted into a television drama, Guo Yuan took it very seriously and immediately contacted the lawyer he had long worked with in the island nation.

The lawyer was named Hu Wenhao. He was Chinese and ran a law firm in the island nation, where he had an excellent reputation among the Chinese community.

He had helped settle all the contracts for "The Locked Room Collector." With that prior cooperation as a foundation, Guo Yuan simply entrusted "White Night Walk" entirely to him.

As Guo Yuan's representative, Lawyer Hu naturally learned right away that "White Night Walk" had caught the television network's eye.

Over the past week, Lawyer Hu had gone through several rounds of negotiations with the network.

According to Lawyer Hu, the revenue share the network offered Guo Yuan was below average for the industry.

Generally, veteran writers who had won awards received an eight to ten percent share from television networks, which was the highest tier.

If they were willing to be credited as a script editor, they would receive an additional one to two percent.

The second tier was for veteran authors who had not won any major awards, who generally received six to eight percent. Such authors could likewise receive an additional one percent for being credited as a script editor.

Authors with less experience but major awards could generally receive a second-tier share as well.

The third tier was for authors with less experience, no major awards, but works that had many fans. They could generally get a three to five percent share, and there was no additional reward for being credited as a script editor.

The last tier was a fixed two percent share. These works were discovered internally by the television network, and neither the authors nor the works had much popularity. Whether they could become hits was entirely up to fate. Moreover, after such works were adapted, their authors often were not even qualified to be credited as script editors; the network could adapt the work however it pleased.

Logically speaking, given Guo Yuan's current circumstances, he should have easily received a second-tier contract. But the network felt that his experience was too limited and that his work did not have enough fans, so it was only willing to offer him a third-tier contract.

Naturally, Lawyer Hu would not agree to that. His agreement with Guo Yuan gave him three percent of the work's earnings. The less money Guo Yuan received, the less Lawyer Hu would earn as well.

Therefore, Lawyer Hu had been arguing his case with the television network during this period.

Guo Yuan himself was more inclined to get the work adapted as soon as possible. That way, with the boost from a film or television adaptation, his popularity could rise even further, and he could sell more copies of his books.

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