Chapter 8: The Essence of Haggling
Everyone had a pretty good time at dinner.
Everyone except Lin Wan.
Oh, and the over-imaginative Zhang Qin, who found the food tasteless as well. Her mind was entirely consumed by the thought of Lin Wan swapping fiancés with her, and she was at a complete loss as to what to do.
If Lin Wan knew what Zhang Qin was thinking, she would definitely use an axe to crack open her stepsister’s skull to drain out the excess water and take a good look at what a love-brain actually looked like.
Her head was entirely filled with men!
Could she not spare a thought for her career?
Lin Wan lay in bed, recalling the plot of the original book.
Liang Qianjin was a local thug. Even after entering the factory, he didn’t work properly and slacked off every day. No matter how diligently Zhang Aimin tried to teach him, he refused to learn. He sneered even more at the production safety rules and regulations.
While working, he caught sight of a female comrade from the factory office entering the workshop. Smitten, he went over to flirt with her, completely neglecting the machinery under his hands.
His arm got dragged into the machine. Instinctively, he grabbed onto the female comrade. As a result, not only could he not free himself, but he also dragged the female comrade into the machine with him. Both of them died.
This was a major workplace safety responsibility accident.
To secure compensation for his wife’s nephew, the factory director pushed the entire blame onto Zhang Aimin. As the master, Zhang Aimin was disciplined and stripped of everything, demoted all the way down to sweeping restrooms.
The Zhang family’s economic situation instantly plummeted to rock bottom.
Later, because the original host failed to drug Guo Xuyang and refused to marry any of the fish in her pond, someone happened to be looking to buy a job. To scrape together the money for the original host to buy that job, the stepfather was sweet-talked into helping someone steal discarded factory parts just once…
Guo Xuyang eventually dug this up. Zhang Aimin had stolen only that one time, but it resulted in him claiming his lunchbox and exiting the stage forever.
“System, you said this is a parallel universe version of me. To be honest, am I really this awful in a parallel universe? Reading the original novel’s text makes me want to beat myself to death!”
The poker-faced system figure bounced out: [Novels undergo artistic processing. They originate from life but elevate above life.]
Lin Wan understood.
This world was a real world and the blueprint for the novel. But novel writing, after all, involved exaggeration and secondary creation. Reasonable! She could understand it!
“System, three minutes. I want all the information on this Liang Qianjin!” Zhang Aimin was Comrade Huang Guixiang’s money bag; nothing could be allowed to happen to him!
She could tell Huang Guixiang to stop Zhang Aimin from taking the apprentice, but that would only treat the symptom and not the root cause. If Zhang Aimin refused, he would offend Factory Director Tao and find himself wearing tight shoes at work in the future!
Therefore, Lin Wan decided to find another way.
The poker-faced figure’s voice was cold and ruthless: [A single query deducts five hundred points. The host’s current points balance is insufficient. Please work hard, host. The more mail you collect and receive, the more points you earn.]
Lin Wan’s fists hardened.
She earned one point per mail collected or delivered, but querying a single person cost her five hundred points. Even a daylight robbery wasn’t this fast!
“Fine then, I won’t go to the recruitment exam. Let’s just slack off!”
Jokes aside, she was a talent forged with her own life under the double oppression of demanding clients and a garbage company! She knew the logic that if you take one step back, you take steps back all the way. In negotiations, whoever cowers loses!
The poker-faced figure: “…”
Lin Wan looked at her fingernails and said slowly, “I guess you need me to do missions to earn points, and these missions are related to collecting and delivering mail. What will happen to you if I just slack off? If I slack off, do you have enough energy to sustain yourself? When a human dies, their soul scatters; when a system dies, it becomes a bunch of garbled code and vanishes into thin air… If we die, we die together. I’ll bet on whether you still have enough energy to re-bind with someone else!”
How could there be such a thing as a free lunch in this world? Once she calmed down, Lin Wan figured the system must be after something by helping her! No one wakes up early without profit on the line!
Lin Wan decided to bluff the system.
If she won the bet, she would seize the initiative. If she lost the bet, it would be a perfect opportunity to test where the system’s baseline lay.
“Don’t try to trick me with that whole routine about getting electrocuted or having my life erased if I fail a mission! Let’s see which of the two of us can actually afford this gamble!”
The system: “…”
It fell into a brief silence.
It had indeed intended to issue an emergency announcement just now to scare Lin Wan: Failing to complete the mission within the time limit will result in the host’s life being erased.
Lin Wan was the fourth host it had bound with. It was just its bad luck; the past three generations of hosts it took on right after leaving the factory were all love-brains. They spent every single day consumed by angsty, painful romances and didn’t complete a single mission!
They had caused it to downgrade from a Super Space-Time Post Office to a regular post office, and the time and space it occupied kept dropping lower and lower until it hit this current low-energy era. Let alone upgrading to a higher-level world to become a higher-level system—if the host failed to complete the basic missions this time, it would have nowhere left to drop, its energy would be completely depleted, and it would vanish into garbled code.
That was why it had fished out Lin Wan, who had dropped dead from working selflessly, within its limited remaining time. It couldn’t be helped; it was thoroughly traumatized by love-brains!
[Fifty points.] The system compromised, bringing out its bottom price in an incredibly cold tone.
Lin Wan caught a fleeting glimpse of heartache on its completely expressionless face. It happened so fast she thought she had hallucinated it.
In a stroke of inspiration, a possibility occurred to her, and she opened her mouth to ask, “For that recruitment information earlier, you didn’t mark the price up tenfold to scam me, did you?”
The system remained icy: [Host, please complete missions as soon as possible to earn points. The more points you have, the more system functions can be unlocked!]
It refused to answer her question directly.
Lin Wan was so angry she wanted to scratch it to death! She had just been too thrilled to learn about the job opportunity at the time, so she hadn’t thought to haggle over that part.
As its voice faded, an option popped up in Lin Wan’s mind: [Do you wish to consume fifty points to exchange for all information on Liang Qianjin?]
Lin Wan: “Ten points!” Haggling meant cutting straight to the bone.
However, the system figure vanished decisively, leaving only the selection interface on a ten-second countdown.
Lin Wan clicked ‘Yes’ with a pang of heartache, and fifty points vanished from her wallet instantly. She had earned 338 points earlier and spent 100 points buying the answers, leaving her with 238 points. Now, with another 50 deducted, she had 188 points left.
A file folder dropped into Lin Wan’s hand, with several large printed characters on the outside: Liang Qianjin.
Lin Wan quickly flipped out of bed. Just as she was about to open the folder to inspect it closely, the power cut out.
Sigh…
The electricity supply in the 1960s was just that unreliable! Blackouts were a regular occurrence!
Lin Wan pulled out a flashlight and began reading through Liang Qianjin’s files. It was a thick stack, including direct and collateral blood relations within three generations. It truly delivered value for money!
Lin Wan’s lips twitched. Skipping the section on relatives, she looked only at the detailed records of Liang Qianjin’s recent years.
Holy crap!
This bastard not only collaborated with his scumbag friends to steal scrap iron from the machinery factory, but they also harassed and gang-raped women together! They had even driven a girl to jump into the river and end her own life!
What a pack of beasts!
In this day and age, women didn’t dare speak up if they were assaulted. If they did, they would be labeled as loose women, or even slandered as having seduced the men themselves… Most importantly, at any given time, the investigation process for such cases would cause secondary and tertiary trauma to the victims.
Liang Qianjin and his gang relied precisely on this fact to brazenly lie in wait for lone female comrades in remote areas on the outskirts of the city!
Lin Wan decided to report Liang Qianjin’s gang.
However, she couldn’t expose the situations of the victimized female comrades. She only compiled the detailed records of the thefts committed by Liang Qianjin’s gang and mailed them directly to the relevant authorities through the system.
During this period of crackdowns, the amount they stole alone was enough to send them to the firing squad back and forth ten times over!
Mailing items through the system consumed money but earned points. She mailed out three copies, spending fifteen cents and gaining three points. This made Lin Wan feel a little better inside.
But earning points one by one while spending them fifty or a hundred at a time… The system was far too exploitative!
She didn’t know how long it would take for the relevant authorities to investigate Liang Qianjin after receiving the report. No, she had to have a backup plan!
Ah…
There was still Huo Xiao!
She still had to write an explanatory statement for him!!!
Lin Wan could only huff and puff as she wrote the statement under the beam of the flashlight. Even after transmigrating, she still had to cater to a demanding client. Her current resentment was no less than a vengeful spirit’s.
