Rich Guys, Send Me 50

I spent a bit over ten yuan on a Didi ride back to Changhe Residential District.

I picked up a recently ordered package from the Cainiao Station near the entrance, then lugged the bag back to my rental room at a leisurely pace.

The room was only a little over ten square meters. It had a small cabinet, a one-and-a-half-meter-wide bed, a small table, and a tiny bathroom that had been added later.

The place had been divided up from a three-bedroom apartment with a living room. It was so cramped that even turning around was a struggle.

And Chen Jue was paying 2,300 yuan a month for it!

He had to pay one month's rent as a deposit and three months upfront. The water and electricity were more expensive than residential rates, too, so nearly 30,000 yuan of income went into the landlord's pocket each year.

When he first moved here with Taisheng Company, Chen Jue remembered that it had been two years ago. Even then, the rent had already been 2,000 yuan a month. At least the company's monthly rent subsidy, along with his housing fund, had helped cover it.

Later, to celebrate Hang City hosting the Asian Games, they'd claimed they were improving the city's image, and the rent had gone up by another 300 yuan.

Chen Jue had to pay that extra 300 himself.

There was nowhere to go and complain about things like this.

All the landlords in Hang City seemed to have agreed over a private game of mahjong to raise their rents in unison. It was more outrageous than oil prices.

If you didn't rent, no problem. There were plenty of other people who would.

The area was full of industrial parks and companies, with plenty of jobs. Every day, fresh batches of college graduates came out of the universities, ready for the landlords to fleece.

Normally, when Chen Jue got back to this cramped little room, he would have flopped onto the bed feeling depressed and scrolled on his phone for hours, or opened his laptop and played a few games to pass the time.

He'd numb himself with the mental dopamine from short videos, NetEase Cloud Music, and games.

But tonight, he'd gone to the park and tried Stone Skipping. The fun of that little recreational activity had put him in a much better mood.

Everything even seemed a little more pleasant than usual!

Character: Chen Jue

Strength: 0.77

Constitution: 0.91

Spirit: 1.05

Skill: [Stone Skipping Lv. 1 (5/200)]

Free Attribute Points Available: 0.00

(Character Evaluation: An ordinary office worker. Your body is in a severely subhealthy state.)

"This Attribute Panel really is amazing!"

"If I raise my attributes a little and level up the skill, could I make any old stone skip dozens of times?"

Chen Jue glanced at the Attribute Panel and decided he could find himself a different kind of fun this weekend.

This cramped rental room was suffocating. If it came to it, he could go back to the park and spend a couple more days Stone Skipping.

Getting out more was better than lying around like a corpse in his room.

But before that, he had to deal with the problem he was facing right now.

After all the exertion tonight, Chen Jue felt exhausted. His entire right arm, especially, had gone completely limp.

He'd spent so long sitting in an office and rarely exercised hard. He'd pushed himself too much all at once, going past what his arm could handle.

It had only been half an hour, so the soreness wasn't too bad yet.

Chen Jue figured that by the time he woke up tomorrow morning, he'd have trouble even lifting his arm.

He knew this sort of thing well. He'd run into it a few times before, while moving house or going on company outings.

After carrying too many heavy things or walking too many steps on a hike, his muscles and joints would ache so much the next day that he wouldn't want to move.

It was the kind of pain that flared up whenever he touched or moved them, and it took more than a week of rest to recover.

Having been through this before, Chen Jue knew what to do.

He was nearly thirty now. When he had minor health problems, he usually had to deal with them himself.

First, he took a hot shower in the bathroom and changed into loose clothes.

He soaked a towel in scalding water and applied it to his whole arm.

Then he took two bottles of Yunnan Baiyao spray from the cabinet, which he kept on hand. He sprayed the white medicine first, then the medicated spray.

After that, Chen Jue used his left hand to massage his right arm.

To be on the safe side, he even went out of the complex and bought two boxes of pain-relief patches from the pharmacy by the entrance. The pharmacist said they improved circulation, relieved pain, and relaxed the muscles and tendons.

Each box had five patches, and he covered all the swollen spots on his right arm.

"It shouldn't hurt as much tomorrow, right?" Chen Jue swung his right arm around and felt that it had eased a little.

Back in the rental room, he boiled some water and drank it.

Then he got into bed, leaned against his cushion, and lay there in comfort for a while.

He usually went to sleep after midnight. Since it was Friday night, there was no way Chen Jue would fall asleep before two or three in the morning.

But his right arm was practically useless, so he had to spend the night as a one-armed man and use his left hand to pick up his phone.

He didn't open Quark or use incognito browsing to visit any of those strange websites.

He was exhausted. How could he possibly have the energy to take care of business?

He opened Bilibili and searched for "Stone Skipping." A whole bunch of videos popped up.

Maybe he'd gotten carried away with it earlier that evening. Now that he was in bed resting, Chen Jue still couldn't stop thinking about [Stone Skipping].

But as soon as he opened a few of the recommended videos with high view counts, he couldn't help exclaiming, "What the hell?!" several times.

After watching them, his otherwise cheerful mood was completely thrown off.

"Someone can make a stone skip over a hundred times?"

"Such an obscure activity even has professional competitors?"

"And there's a world record!"

Chen Jue jerked upright from his pillow in shock, then skeptically clicked through a few more videos.

He realized that the technique and experience he'd pieced together about [Stone Skipping] that night seemed almost laughable compared to what the professionals in the videos could do.

Those experts could casually flick a stone and make it skip dozens, even hundreds of times.

They also had all kinds of fancy techniques: throwing several stones at once, or making them trace intersecting or parallel arcs across the water.

The wildest part was that some stones could even hit balloons moving across the water with pinpoint accuracy!

"This is ridiculous!"

"That's even possible?"

Chen Jue's mouth fell open as though he'd just discovered a whole new world.

After watching a few instructional videos, he compared their demonstrations with his own Stone Skipping technique at White Horse Lake that night and realized just how badly he'd gotten it wrong.

"The best angle for the stone to hit the water is twenty degrees."

"You don't need a running start. You crouch halfway down, turn your body, and throw at an angle." The more Chen Jue watched, the more absurd it seemed.

It was just a recreational activity, yet foreign scientists had conducted specialized research on Stone Skipping. They'd even published analytical papers teaching people how to get better skips and more of them.

Some had even uploaded their papers to the highly prestigious journal Nature!

"Were these people just bored out of their minds? Do they have that much free time?" Chen Jue couldn't help grumbling.

He worked himself to the bone every day. Forget buying a home in Hang City—he was barely scraping by.

When the company shut down next month, he'd have to worry about his income. He'd never had the time to get into things like this before.

If he hadn't suddenly awakened the Attribute Panel, Chen Jue might never have tried [Stone Skipping] as a recreational activity at all.

But with billions of people on Earth, there were bound to be experts in even the most niche fields.

After watching all those Stone Skipping videos, Chen Jue wasn't just shocked and confused; he'd learned a lot, too.

He'd picked up more professional techniques from the videos, and also learned why the pros could throw so far and get so many skips.

It had a lot to do with the specialized stones they used.

The flat stones Chen Jue had picked up at the park could skip, but their shape and weight were nowhere near professional quality.

So after closing the videos, he went to Taobao and specifically searched for the same kind of Stone Skipping stones the pros used.

"Damn!"

"Isn't that the world-record guy in this shop's promotional photo?"

When Chen Jue saw that the first few Stone Skipping stones in the Taobao search results had monthly sales of over 9,999, he realized just how green he still was.

Those professionals weren't doing this because they were bored. They could actually make a living from their [Stone Skipping] skills!

Look at how many of these best-selling stones they were selling. They had to be making several million yuan a year, easy!

Even more ridiculous, plenty of people were buying these crappy machine-cut and polished stones!

He clicked into the reviews. They were for company outings or school activities, and people were buying them by the truckload.

"Each stone costs almost one yuan including shipping."

"You throw it in the water, watch it splash, and hear it plop."

"So am I just too poor, or are there really so many rich guys online?"

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If there are any rich guys, send me 50 so I can buy a pack of cigarettes (covering my face).