"A scallion pancake, with a fried egg, bacon, and black pepper sauce, please," Bai Jingyuan quickly recited the words he had silently repeated several times in his mind.
"Alright, that'll be five yuan in total. Scan here." The scallion pancake vendor flashed a hearty smile, revealing his pearly white teeth. "Young man, our chicken strips are also delicious. Would you like to add one to your scallion pancake?"
"...How much?" Bai Jingyuan hesitated.
"It's only two yuan and fifty cents!" the pancake shop owner replied.
Bai Jingyuan immediately dismissed the idea, "Thank you, but no need."
After receiving the scallion pancake and taking a bite, Bai Jingyuan felt his empty stomach soothed. He sat on a stone bench by the roadside, eating the pancake while watching the students in school uniforms carrying their backpacks.
For a moment, he felt envious, but he quickly realized that what he envied was not their ability to go to school, but their youthful and energetic appearance and their carefree attitude without worrying about the future.
Bai Jingyuan always thought he was a jinx because he had been extremely unlucky since childhood.
After giving birth to her, her mother suffered from severe depression. After taking medication, she became extremely overweight, and her father gradually stopped coming home at night. Her resentful mother blamed everything on Bai Jingyuan, and beat and scolded him every day.
The father's mistress gave birth to a son, so the father decisively asked the mother for a divorce. That night, the mother attempted suicide by cutting her wrists, and even tried to take Bai Jingyuan with her. She was saved because a neighbor noticed something was wrong and called the police in time.
The stepmother was worried that Bai Jingyuan would take away her children's affection, so she naturally didn't treat him well. The younger brother, instigated by their mother, often deliberately bullied Bai Jingyuan. The father always tried to smooth things over, but in reality, he favored the stepmother and his younger son.
Bai Jingyuan himself couldn't stand this life of living under someone else's roof. On the day he turned eighteen, he ran away from home with his ID card. Ironically, his father called him three times the next day, but Bai Jingyuan didn't answer, and his father didn't call again.
In the end, Bai Jingyuan couldn't help but call back his father while crying, telling him that he wanted to sever ties with him. His father was silent for a while, then sighed. He didn't try to stop him, but instead transferred 10,000 yuan to Bai Jingyuan's bank account.
Bai Jingyuan accepted the money without a second thought, blocked his father and stepmother, bought a high-speed rail ticket that was about to be issued, and began his "wandering" life in an unfamiliar city.
Before we knew it, a year had passed.
Bai Jingyuan lacked education and work experience, and was too young to find temporary jobs as a waiter or milk tea shop employee in stores that were short of part-time workers. However, he felt that this was not the life he wanted, and he wanted to do something he liked.
Finally, in a special experience, a colleague from the milk tea shop had to go on a blind date and asked Bai Jingyuan to participate in a small e-sports competition in the city on his behalf. Bai Jingyuan, who hadn't played games for almost a year, actually won third place in the competition and received a reward of three thousand yuan. This was the beginning of his idea of becoming a professional gamer.
Unfortunately, he submitted many resumes but was rejected by several professional teams. The first reason was his age. Although Bai Jingyuan was not old, there were many fifteen or sixteen-year-olds in the youth training camps of professional teams. Moreover, Bai Jingyuan did not have any "achievements". This is also the reason why Bai Jingyuan later chose to resign and play for the national server ranking.
But there's always a gap between ideals and reality. Even if he gets a national server ranking, professional teams won't look up to him. After all, anyone in a professional team could easily get a national server ranking, and even the gatekeeper could play a couple of games with him.
Bai Jingyuan fell into confusion again and thought of another path—live streaming. Unfortunately, this path was still not easy. Most streamers had companies and guilds behind them to promote their streams, but after looking at a few contracts, Bai Jingyuan was scared by the high commission rates and the oppressive live streaming KPIs, and decided to go it alone.
Clearly, after a month of live streaming, one can only withdraw money twice, and today is the second time.
After finishing his scallion pancake, it got dark. Bai Jingyuan glanced at the time; it was only 7 p.m. He decided to take a walk around the internet cafe before returning. The reason was simple: time spent in the internet cafe was charged, and for a small streamer like him, it was best to choose times with high traffic to broadcast, otherwise he would have a hard time even earning back his internet fees.
On the other side, Gu Qingqiu quickly went home, washed up, and squatted in the living room with her laptop. However, she refreshed the page several times but still couldn't see Abyss Mirror start streaming.
"Is it really going to take until nine o'clock to come?" Gu Qingqiu sighed. If it were before, she would definitely take a shower or watch short videos while waiting for someone. But now she was very proactive in her work and would never miss a single second of getting to know the male lead. She decided that she must enter Abyss's live stream room the moment it started.
At 8:58, Abyss Mirror started its live stream.
Gu Qingqiu quickly clicked into the live stream and sent a comment while the screen was still black.
[Autumn: Good evening, Jingzai. What did you have for dinner?]
Bai Jingyuan was stunned after setting up the equipment. He hadn't even had a chance to post a live stream update today, and Autumn had already entered the live stream room. Could it be... that he had been waiting for him to start his live stream?
Thinking that Autumn had given him a gift worth thirty yuan today, Bai Jingyuan replied, "Good evening. Tonight... I had some hand-pulled pancakes."
Hand-pulled pancakes? A 19-year-old boy only ate hand-pulled pancakes for dinner? Is that enough? He'll probably be hungry tonight!
[Autumn: Anything else?]
Bai Jingyuan: "...That's all. The scallion pancake was pretty good."
Gu Qingqiu didn't know how to respond. She felt there were only two possibilities: first, Abyss Jing was on a diet, so he ate very little at night; second, he didn't have the money to eat better food.
However, Gu Qingqiu quickly ruled out the first possibility, since the male protagonist of the world has always had a great physique and doesn't need to eat less at night to lose weight.
If you don't have money...
This was a bit of a dilemma. Although Gu Qingqiu felt a little sorry for him, she thought she had to consider his pride and was also afraid that her rash actions would scare him.
After posting his start-up announcement, Bai Jingyuan started a ranked game. When he was engrossed in the game, he rarely paid attention to the chat messages and the number of viewers in the live stream. After the game, as usual, there were fifty or sixty people online in the live stream, and there were three or four comments praising his skills.
Bai Jingyuan quickly scanned the list of online users in the live stream. He was a little disappointed when he didn't see the user who had asked him to help him gain followers that afternoon, but he quickly recovered.
After all, these kinds of users can't just watch one person; they're all jumping around between different Chinese server live streams, picking whichever streamer is available to promote their fans.
Thinking about this, Bai Jingyuan felt a little regretful that he had missed this small business opportunity because he was looking for food out of hunger.
And at this moment...
[User Autumn fed me 1 Coke]
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