Investment Life

Chapter 3

3 - A Distant Reality

　　Time passed by quickly and the final exams were over in the blink of an eye. This time, Chen Yuanming didn't go mingle with that group of garbage anymore [1], but instead concentrated on studying his textbooks for a few days. Now, he was no longer that same youth with only a mind full of meaningless self-pride. There's barely any fairness in this world anyway, if one wants doesn't want to be discriminated against by other people, then one must come up with something that just can't be overlooked by others.

　　After answering the last test paper and checking over it twice, he finally exhaled a breath and left the exam room. After the final exams were over, there's a two-day vacation while the teachers marked the test papers. Since the top students never missed their responsibilities of helping with the papers, Chen Yuanming started his winter vacation early.

　　During the last two days when he was studying, he had spent all his efforts on organizing and combing through his memories. Although now he has already accepted his identity as a reborn soul, the memories in his brain were still too complicated. More importantly, Chen Yuanming couldn't determine whether the information in his head was accurate or true. In the current year, newspaper stands were still a rarity. Newspapers, magazines and the like were only available through a direct subscription. No newspapers could be found, there was no TV at home, and it wasn't even possible to listen to news on time using a radio. It really wasn't easy trying to match up the memories in his head to the current times. Without this assurance of reliability, he would rather spend some more time on making sufficient preparations.

　　In the early morning of the second day after the exams were over, without saying anything to anyone, Chen Yuanming took the house key and two dollars that had been painstakingly saved up, and walked out of the door.

　　It hadn't snowed yet this winter, and the entire city appeared as if it was shrouded grey. The main roads in the city currently only consisted of a single lane, and usually only bicycles used these roads. Occasionally, a cable car or two could be seen passing by lazily. The 3, 4 story high residential buildings by the roadside still appeared brand new and bright, having probably been built sometime in the past two years. L City could be considered as a well-known heavy industrial city in the Midwest. In addition to the manufacturing plants, other factories and industries such as steel mills and copper processing plants were also crowded around the industrial districts. In the early 1990s, when large state-owned enterprises had not yet fallen, the city still glowed with a sense of pride and grandeur.

　　But to Chen Yuanming, the city seemed strange and foreign. In another life, after graduating from junior high school, his grades were not satisfactory. In the end, he did not attend high school and instead chose to go to a vocational school to study factory work. After two and a half years of studies, he used his connections to enter the workforce directly. However, the year of '94 was when the country's economic market underwent many reforms, and in the following years the benefits of factory work began declining. After working for less than a year, he resigned resolutely and went on to ride the wave towards the North [2]. After that, he drifted around, moving bricks, driving cars, and even selling computers. When the stock market began fluctuating around 2003-4, he began to study stocks, and even specially studied at a night school. In '05, he entered the market, starting from the very bottom, and tried again and again for two years before breaking through with some results.

　　In that other life, the first half of his life was full of depressing hardships, the latter half was full of exuberance, and there were barely any opportunities to carefully observe the changes happening around him. Now that he's observing the city from a completely unfamiliar perspective, he's realised that his impression of his hometown was so poor that all he could remember of it was his deep-rooted love for snacks from his adolescence. With a sigh, Chen Yuanming turned around and left the municipal government building, which at this time had not yet been relocated and whose door did not yet have a newspaper stand beside it [3], and walked towards Guangzhou Market that was just a few stops away.