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After suffering the destruction of his family, the closure of the restaurant, and the theft of the recipes, Huo Jiu was expelled from school for skipping classes for too long. Of course, he had no desire to continue studying at the time.

Forced by necessity, Huo Jiu had no choice but to work at restaurants and taverns everywhere. Confident in his superb cooking skills, he believed he could always find a way to make a living. Then, slowly, he could plot his revenge.

Unfortunately, he had been too young and too naive then. The hatred in his heart was written all over his face for everyone to see. Since the Huo Family's enemies had been willing to repay kindness with betrayal and bite the old master back, they naturally would not show Huo Jiu any mercy.

Huo Jiu was driven out of the city and had no choice but to flee far from home. Later, after repeated schemes by his enemies, he could not even find work in a kitchen. Left with no alternative, Huo Jiu could only conceal his identity and flee from place to place, eventually ending up doing hard labor at a construction site.

Yet that experience proved to be a blessing in disguise, allowing him to meet a benefactor. In the end, he made a comeback in the real estate industry.

Huo Jiu spent ten years accumulating capital and carefully laying his plans. At last, he drove his enemies into ruin, leaving their reputations destroyed and their families shattered—he watched the once-arrogant enemy suffer a stroke and paralysis, destined to spend the rest of his life bedridden, needing others to tend to even his bodily needs.

Huo Jiu only felt that his great vengeance had finally been avenged.

Unfortunately, he had already worn his body down over those ten years of revenge. Even though he had driven his enemies' family to ruin, he himself had gained nothing good from it.

Fortunately, he had remained alone throughout those ten years for the sake of revenge. He had no emotional burdens or debts. Even if he truly died, presumably no one would mourn him.

He took the recipes he had reclaimed to the old master's grave and burned them. Then he picked up the cooking skills he had not practiced in years and prepared a fine meal before the old master's grave. He had originally wanted to share a few drinks and chat with the old master. Instead, he was so exhausted that he fell asleep before the grave.

When he woke again, he had become this poor little original host—

Calling him a poor little thing was not quite right, though. It was hard to say whose background had been more tragic. Huo Jiu felt that the only way he had been luckier than the original host was that, after ten years of effort, he had finally avenged his great hatred. Yet the original host had been abandoned by everyone under the control of the plot and died miserably. The family affection and love he had desperately sought had ultimately been nothing but an illusion.

So people could not place their hopes in others. Whether it was family affection or love, one could only receive it if the other person was willing to give it. If they were stingy and refused to give it, or gave it only to take it back, then the passive recipient would forever be powerless.

Like Huo Jiu himself, no matter how carefully he plotted, he could not change the fact that shortly after he was born, his biological parents had put him in a small coffin and secretly left him on someone else's doorstep.

—Nor could he change President Diwu's determination to get him enrolled in school, send him there to study, and even help him with his homework.

"Really, there's no need!" Huo Jiu wiped his face and looked at Diwu Ling, whose expression was blank but whose gaze was firm. He refused weakly, "I don't like studying. You don't need to go through the trouble."

"There are many things in this world that you have to do even if you don't like them." Diwu Ling patiently explained, "Studying is one of them. You're only sixteen this year. If you don't want to study, what do you want to do?"

Besides, how many sixteen-year-olds in this world actually wanted to study? When Diwu Ling had been twenty-five, he had not wanted to work either! Yet here he was, obediently sitting in an office at Turing Group, burying himself in all kinds of documents every day. He even had to work overtime now and then.

Without any overtime pay!

"But I—" He was still in the stage where the plot was reloading and starting over. There was no need to enroll in school and attend classes.

Before he could finish, Diwu Ling interrupted again. "No buts! Children your age should be going to school."

Huo Jiu sighed. His head was buzzing, and it felt as though it were splitting apart. "I don't think studying is of any use to me."

What he had gone through was not something that could be solved just by being good at school.

"Of course, the little bit you're studying now is useless." Diwu Ling smiled.

To persuade Huo Jiu, Diwu Ling turned on the computer and pulled up that day's market trend chart and candlestick chart. "I know you're exceptionally capable, and lucky enough too. You can even win eighty-eight million in the lottery for an entire week straight. But if you studied well and learned how to invest, you could turn tens of millions in principal into returns dozens or even hundreds of times greater."

In Diwu Ling's eyes, Huo Jiu was lucky enough, but he could not live off lottery tickets forever, much less rely on lottery winnings to establish himself in the Su family.

"You're still young. If you don't like these boring numbers, you can learn something else."

Huo Jiu looked at the colorful trend charts on the computer screen, and a faint, inexplicable dread immediately rose in his heart.

He had traded stocks in his previous life too.

Probably every poor person had dreamed of getting rich overnight when they were young. Either buying lottery tickets or trading stocks. Huo Jiu had been no exception.

That year, Huo Jiu was twenty-one. He went from being a construction foreman to founding his own real estate company, taking on his first project and receiving his first payment for it.

With money in his pocket and no idea how to spend it, Huo Jiu followed others into stock trading. It happened to be a raging bull market then, and every day he heard people talking about how many times their profits had multiplied through stocks. When he bought ingredients for the construction site, even the uncle selling vegetables at the market would discuss the broader market and the Shanghai Composite Index with him.

In a moment of impulse, Huo Jiu followed suit, opened an account, and started trading stocks. At first, he put in several hundred thousand. Later, he added several million more, investing up to eight million in principal at his peak. At their most profitable, the gains from the stocks he bought exceeded eight million on their own.

Unfortunately, the good times did not last. Not long after Huo Jiu entered the market, he ran into a massive bear market. Every stock was falling. The stocks Huo Jiu had bought for eight million, stocks whose gains had once exceeded eight million, dropped to the point where they were not even worth one million after barely half a month.

Huo Jiu had been utterly confused. He did not know how those stocks had risen, much less why they had fallen. All he knew was that after messing around in the stock market for nearly half a year, his eight million had become a little over eight hundred thousand. His assets had shrunk by more than tenfold.

The money had come too quickly, and gone even faster.