After several days of racking his brains, Li Xingkong had come up with quite a few ways to make money, but each presented him with all sorts of problems:
He had thought about dealing in antiques like the protagonists in other stories, but he lacked the necessary knowledge. Counterfeiting techniques were advancing by leaps and bounds these days, so he had better not court death in that field. Every purchase would be a loss. As for things like stone gambling, he didn't even know which way the door opened, and it took startup capital too. With the few measly coins he had, he'd be lucky to buy a couple of mosaic tiles.
Starting a company would take a considerable sum just to put the initial framework in place. The little he had wasn't even enough to throw into the water, and he didn't think he could turn a steady profit in a market full of scheming and deception. Although he had products to offer, products weren't king in modern society. He had to get into the right circle before his voice would count.
All his abilities were in his head right now, but he had graduated from college and been working for years. He had no real way to get hired by a research institute as an outside candidate. Besides, even if he did, did he expect to make money at a research institute? Wasn't that a pipe dream too? Wouldn't he have to work under an adviser for a few years first? If the adviser took his hard work into account, maybe he'd be listed as third author on his own research.
Sell the advanced knowledge from the system's courses? The idea had tempted him for quite a while. But how could someone who looked perfectly ordinary to outsiders, a man whose family had been poor for three generations, suddenly produce technology others had spent decades researching?
Most likely, the very first day someone bought the technology, he'd be taken in for tea before the money even arrived. Having tea was a minor matter, but if he were placed under surveillance and protection, how could he cultivate immortality?
Buying lottery tickets wasn't very reliable either. Over the years, sports lottery jackpots had repeatedly been revealed to have gone to a single person. Who knew if there was something fishy going on...
After thinking it over and over, he concluded that in today's society, it really was hard to do business without capital. To start from scratch, one either needed a benefactor's help or deep reserves of capital to weather trial and error. How could an ordinary person have either?
Just as Li Xingkong was fretting over it, his WeChat notification sounded. He picked up his phone to see who had messaged him. Li Xingkong had been fairly quiet at school, and with all his passion devoted to the system's classes, he'd made hardly any acquaintances at school or work. As a result, his WeChat could go ages without making a sound.
When he opened the message, he saw it was from his high school class monitor, Wu Yan. Come to think of it, he was one of Li Xingkong's few old acquaintances.
"Bade? I heard you went back to your hometown?" That short message brought Li Xingkong's high school days back to mind.
He had only half mastered the Hibernating Dragon Technique, so he would toss and turn for half the night without getting to sleep. On top of that, he had a great deal to read, and he had been unbearably sleepy in high school.
When ordinary students fell asleep in high school classes, they would wake up after a few periods at most. He was different. Before the teacher even arrived, he would go stand beside the podium of his own accord. He stood through nearly every class, but even that couldn't keep the sleepiness at bay. As soon as the teacher opened their mouth, he would fall asleep.
Once, he fell asleep without leaning against the wall and crashed bodily onto the podium. He gave the Chinese teacher, who had been walking around below the podium while reading the text aloud, quite a fright.
Later, people even discovered that he was asleep while running morning exercises at five thirty. League of Legends had been all the rage at the time, so he ended up with the bizarre nickname Bard, the Wandering Caretaker-Bade. It referred to the peculiar sight of him still walking down the road while his brain had long since fallen asleep.
"Yeah, I only got back recently. Where are you working these days?"
The memories flashed past, and Li Xingkong replied to the message. He had gone to Queyue for college and stayed there to work after graduating. Counting it up, he hadn't seen this bunch of old classmates in person for seven or eight years.
"Ah, I'm still at home studying for the exam. Haven't made it ashore yet. How are you settling in after coming back?"
He had heard in the year they graduated that their old class monitor was studying for the civil service exam. It had been almost three years, and he was still preparing. That was enough to show how important the civil service exam was to people from Hedong.
"Don't remind me. I've just been cooped up at home since I got back. An unemployed drifter, haha," Li Xingkong said self-deprecatingly.
"Ah, same here. Whenever I see family or friends, I tell them I'm studying for the exam, but really I'm just unemployed."
Their old class monitor's family was fairly well-off, and they were very supportive of him. As for why Li Xingkong knew so much, the class monitor's mother had been his homeroom teacher. How could he not know?
"Ah, everyone with a job is so busy these days that they can't even come back for the holidays. How about a few of us get together? It happens to be a holiday, so a few more people can make it."
"Sure, I'm free anytime. Who can come this time?" He couldn't make heads or tails of things by thinking on his own anyway, so he might as well take the next few days to see some old friends.
"Six or seven, I think. They're all from our circle, no one else," Wu Yan said.
There had been a lot of people in their high school class, and everyone had belonged to circles of one size or another. After graduation, only the few within each little circle had stayed in touch. They had forgotten the names of most of their other classmates.
"Sounds good. It's been a long time since we last met." Maybe seeing more of his classmates would give Li Xingkong some inspiration for his grand money-making plans. He was worrying about it anyway, so he might as well hear what others had to say.
"Then it's settled. Next Monday, meet at my place, and we'll go out to eat. My treat." Their old class monitor fixed the time on the spot.
As an "unemployed drifter," Li Xingkong naturally had plenty of time.
"See you then." He quickly agreed.
Li Xingkong lived in the countryside, so getting to the city where his high school was meant a fairly long train ride.
On the appointed day, he got up early and left before six, heading straight for the train station. Fortunately, though his village was small, it had a large grain depot, so the railway ran through it. Otherwise, getting to the city would have been very difficult.
Hedong was basically surrounded by mountains. In ancient times, that made it easy to defend and hard to attack; in modern times, it meant there was no prospect of development.
Although winter hadn't arrived yet, the morning wind was cold enough to freeze his hands. Li Xingkong tugged at his clothes and hurried into the station. Since it was Monday, a workday, the station was nearly empty. He quickly bought a ticket and darted onto the train. Once aboard, he looked around the carriage and found he was the only person in it.
Getting to enjoy having a carriage all to himself for two yuan put Li Xingkong in a much better mood.
The train traveled over mountains and across rivers for more than an hour before finally emerging from the little village surrounded by peaks. Li Xingkong had taken an interest in the scenery and watched it all the way.
The land rose and fell along the route, mountains everywhere: big and small, near and far, stretching into an unbroken expanse. Every now and then, he could see two or three little houses, only for the moving train to leave them hidden behind the mountains in the blink of an eye.
"System, how long would it take me to get to the city after reaching Qi Refining?" After traveling this whole way, he couldn't imagine how many days it would take him to get out on foot.
"If you'd only just reached Qi Refining, you wouldn't be as fast as the train." The system's virtual figure sat in the seat across from him.
"Once you reach the middle stage, you'll be faster than the train. Provided you know the way, though."
"Then I'll definitely reach Qi Refining soon, right?"
Li Xingkong looked out the window. The train had already covered most of the journey and was only a few steps from its destination.
"You're only this far from Qi Refining now," the system said to Li Xingkong, raising a hand and holding its fingers a tiny distance apart.
"You're probably going to say I'm just a billionth away, aren't you?" Having spent so much time online, Li Xingkong was all too familiar with the joke about "a tiny bit" and "a billion bits."
"It really is a tiny bit, but let me give you an example." The system smiled slyly. "It's like you left home this morning to catch the train and only realized when you reached the station that you'd forgotten your ID and hadn't bought a ticket. But it's still early, and you have plenty of time before the train leaves."
"I hope so." For now, all Li Xingkong could do was hold on to a good hope for his future.
Weren't he and his old class monitor much the same? They had worked hard for many years for an elusive hope. Who knew how things would turn out in the end?