"You—!" Bai Jian jabbed a finger at Bai Li, too furious to get another word out.
"Alright, alright, let's just eat!" Wang Xiulian was thoroughly pleased with her son's jab and quickly cut Bai Jian off before he could bite back. The last thing she needed was for her son to end up on the losing end.
The meal that followed was thick with tension.
Bai Jian sat there stewing, and to salvage what was left of his dignity, he launched into his usual performance.
One moment he was bragging about which government office had hired him for last month's construction project; the next he was dropping names of bureau chiefs he'd shared drinks with. He even pulled out his phone and deliberately angled the screen toward everyone at the table to show off his chat history.
"Xiao Li, if you ever run into trouble out there, just come to your big cousin," Bai Jian said, steering the conversation toward Bai Li as he took a sip of his liquor.
"Society isn't like school — it's all about connections and relationships."
"You've had your nose buried in books so long your brain's gone stiff. You don't understand how things work. Take your job hunt, for example — if I put in a word for you, getting you onto a construction site to mix concrete would be a piece of cake."
Bai Li's father, Bai Weiguo, frowned deeply at this. He set down his chopsticks and said in a low, firm voice, "Xiao Li's job is none of your concern. He knows what he's doing."
"Ah, Second Uncle, I'm just trying to help." Bai Jian wore the expression of a man convinced he alone understood the world. "College graduates are everywhere these days — a dime a dozen. Isn't that right, Xiao Li?"
He lobbed the question directly at Bai Li, his eyes full of provocation, waiting to see how he'd squirm.
In Bai Jian's mind, Bai Li was just a fresh graduate — fifty thousand yuan in savings would be his absolute ceiling. Standing before a successful man like himself, the kid was destined to look small.
Bai Li unhurriedly picked up a piece of food with his chopsticks, chewed it slowly, then dabbed his mouth with a paper napkin.
He didn't even glance at Bai Jian. Instead, he turned to his parents and said in a perfectly casual tone, "Mom, Dad — I quit my job."
"What?!" Wang Xiulian and Bai Weiguo exclaimed at the same time.
"You quit?!" Bai Jian lit up as though he'd just caught someone red-handed. "I knew it! Couldn't hack it in Shanghai, could you?"
"No worries, no worries — coming home is fine! Come work with your big cousin. I'll make sure you eat well and live well!"
Bai Li ignored his chatter and continued speaking to his parents: "Modu's pace is just too hectic. I was getting tired of it anyway. Besides, I've got something else going on now — I can make over ten thousand a day without much effort."
"Huh?!" Wang Xiulian stared at him, completely dazed.
Bai Jian, meanwhile, hadn't even registered what came after "I quit." He raised his glass triumphantly. "Ha! Second Uncle, Second Aunt, don't you worry — you've got me."
"Xiao Li, listen to your big cousin. Show up at my construction site tomorrow. With that build of yours, you'd be great at mixing concrete!"
Watching his parents' anxious faces and his cousin's smug, self-satisfied smirk, Bai Li decided the moment had come.
He took out his phone, screen lit up, and let slip what seemed like a casual, offhand complaint: "The main thing is, that job just didn't pay enough. Wasn't worth it."
Bai Jian let out a scornful laugh. "What — think the eight thousand I was offering you is too little? Young people these days, always reaching for the sky. You think money just blows in on the wind?"
"That's not it," Bai Li said.
He set his phone face-up on the table, screen pointing right toward Bai Jian.
He sighed, his tone carrying the faint, almost theatrical air of someone burdened by success: "It just doesn't feel challenging anymore. Work your fingers to the bone for a month, throw in all the bonuses and allowances, and you're looking at maybe twenty or thirty thousand. Not even as much as what I made messing around these past couple of days."
That single statement carried an enormous amount of weight.
The smile on Bai Jian's face froze instantly.
His eyes dropped instinctively to Bai Li's lit-up phone screen.
Balance: ¥303,950.00
Today's earnings: ¥9,000
Three hundred thousand… three thousand… nine hundred and fifty yuan.
Bai Jian's eyes went wide as saucers. He counted again and again, terrified he'd misread the decimal point.
Ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, hundred thousands…
No mistake — over three hundred thousand!
His head rang like a thunderclap had gone off right above him.
All that bragging about making twenty thousand a month, all that talk about his new BMW — it all sounded like one enormous joke now.
That secondhand 3 Series he'd just bought had cost him barely over fifty thousand. His watch was maybe ten thousand. He made twenty thousand a month, but spent over ten thousand just on schmoozing and keeping up appearances. What was left in his pocket amounted to a few thousand — and he still had several thousand yuan on his Huabei he hadn't paid back yet.
And here was Bai Li, sitting right in front of him, with over three hundred thousand just sitting in his account?!
Then he remembered what Bai Li had said — that with his new gig, he could make over ten thousand a day without breaking a sweat.
How was that even possible?!
Bai Jian's face cycled through red, then white, then a sickly green, and finally settled into a deathly gray.
His cheeks burned as if he'd been slapped across the face in front of everyone, over and over again.
Bai Li's parents leaned over to look as well, and they too were struck speechless by the string of digits on the screen.
They exchanged a glance, their eyes filled with shock and disbelief.
Bai Li, however, acted as though nothing of any significance had happened. He pocketed his phone and leisurely sipped his soup.
"Oh, right — Cousin." He looked up as if something had just occurred to him.
"You were saying something about your BMW?"
"I noticed a 3 Series parked downstairs when I came in. Looks like it's from about seven years ago."
"That's not yours, is it? You'd better make sure someone didn't sell you an old car as a new one — that thing's only worth a few tens of thousands now."
Those words were the final straw that broke the camel's back.
Bai Jian's lips trembled. He couldn't get a single word out.
The room seemed to spin around him. He wished the floor would crack open and swallow him whole.
He couldn't sit at this table for one more second.
"I… I've got something urgent at the company. I have to go!"
Bai Jian shoved back his chair and made for the door.
"Hey, dumbass cousin, don't leave yet — you haven't finished eating!"
"Hey, dumbass, you made a mess on the floor and you're not even going to mop it up before you go?"
But Bai Jian had already lost every shred of face he had. He couldn't bear to stay another second, and fled in a complete rout.
Bai Li watched his panicked, scrambling retreat and called a few more parting shots after him, feeling a satisfaction he couldn't quite put into words.
It was only out of respect for his parents still being in the room that he held back — otherwise, Bai Li would have had a few choice words about Bai Jian's entire family tree.
"Xiao Li, what… what on earth is going on?"
Wang Xiulian snapped back to her senses, took her son's hand, and her voice was trembling.
Bai Li had already prepared his story: "Mom, you know how I was always tinkering with internet stuff back in school, right?"
"Well, I've been working on a project with one of my professors. We got lucky — someone bought the project out, and this money is my share of the payout."
It was half-truth, half-fabrication — enough to explain where the money came from without sounding too outlandish.
Sure enough, the moment they heard it was a legitimate project done under a professor's guidance, Bai Weiguo and Wang Xiulian both let out a long breath of relief, quickly replaced by delight and pride.
"My son really has made something of himself!" Wang Xiulian's eyes grew red with emotion.
Bai Weiguo said nothing, but the deep furrow between his brows had smoothed away. He raised his glass and drained it in one go, his face full of quiet pride.
After dinner, Bai Li returned to his room, lay down on his bed, and stared up at the ceiling, lost in thought.
Now that he had the System, his life was only going to get better from here — but he needed a goal to work toward.
He thought of his parents, who had worked so hard for him all their lives. Then he thought of people like Bai Jian, who looked down on others the moment they had a little money.
With Chinese New Year still two weeks away, an idea took shape in his mind:
[By the first day of the Lunar New Year, he would buy a nice house and a nice car, and have a solid amount of savings — enough to make all those snobbish relatives green with envy.]
Just imagining the looks on their faces — envious, desperate, and utterly powerless — was enough to make him grin from ear to ear.
With his goal set, and having barely slept the night before, Bai Li decided to take a nap.
By the time he woke up, it was completely dark outside.
Just then, his phone buzzed.
He picked it up — it was a WeChat message from Chen Tingting.
He tapped the voice message and played it. Her voice came through with the lazy warmth of someone freshly awake, laced with deliberate playfulness:
"Hey big bro, we just woke up — the room is so warm and cozy…"
"Are you done with what you had to do? We want to take you out to dinner~"