As soon as the words left her mouth, another spinning wheel appeared before Liu Yue.
The check-in roulette had segments of varying sizes—she couldn’t even spot where the segment representing one hundred billion, a million times the base amount, was with her naked eye. But this wheel’s segments were evenly distributed, from 10% to 100%, all of uniform width. It seemed the probabilities were equal.
She tapped to start, and the pointer stopped at the 60% mark.
Sixty percent of one hundred thousand—that would be sixty thousand.
No sooner had Liu Yue worked out this math problem than she received a notification on her phone: sixty thousand yuan had been deposited into her Alipay account.
Her eyes widened. She checked her balance over and over again, confirming that each time she looked, there really was an extra sixty thousand yuan in her account. She couldn’t help but bury her face in her blanket and laugh.
If she weren’t in the dormitory, worried about disturbing others in the dead of night, she would have sung at the top of her lungs and danced a little jig.
For a single cent, she’d received goods worth one hundred thousand yuan and sixty thousand in cash. The pie really had fallen right into her lap! She was the luckiest person in the entire world!
Remembering that midnight had already passed, Liu Yue quickly performed her check-in for January 2nd.
This time, her luck wasn’t as good—the multiplier she drew was only one times. So tomorrow—no, today—her spending task would be ten thousand yuan.
Having just spent one hundred thousand yuan in five minutes, the task of spending ten thousand within twenty-four hours seemed like a piece of cake to her now. She could handle it easily.
She planned to get a good night’s sleep first and think about how to spend the money after waking up.
That was the plan, but she couldn’t fall asleep.
The sudden binding of the Spending System had filled Liu Yue with immense excitement, and sleep was simply out of the question. After failing to drift off, she turned on the dormitory lights and started browsing Taobao again.
Looking at the thirteen bottles of SK-II Facial Treatment Essence awaiting shipment, Liu Yue suddenly felt a twinge of toothache. When would she ever finish using all of these?
But there was no helping it—she’d already bought them. The system terms stated that refunds after purchase would go directly back to the Black Card. If the refund happened on the same day, she could spend the money elsewhere. If it happened on a later day, the money would be forfeited, and her cashback earnings would be deducted as well.
So, she’d just have to use them up slowly herself… She wondered if, given her relationship with her roommates, she had the authority to gift them a bottle each under the system’s rules.
Liu Yue asked the system this question. The system said no, and told her that the criteria for such determinations were also influenced by her current financial situation.
Even with the sixty thousand in cashback from yesterday added in, Liu Yue’s savings were still far from the six-figure threshold. She wasn’t at the point where she could casually give away items worth over a thousand yuan.
Well, the system really was quite rigorous.
Since she couldn’t sleep no matter how she tossed and turned, Liu Yue chatted with the system, asking where its money came from and who was depositing funds into her bound Black Card.
The system told her that because she was an orphan, it had “found” her biological parents for her—mysterious wealthy tycoons residing in the United States and Hong Kong, respectively.
Liu Yue was startled. “Are they really my parents?”
“Of course not,” the system replied in her mind. “I performed a minor genetic modification on your body, solely to pass DNA testing.”
The system continued, explaining that this “couple” was merely a tool to funnel money to her. They could provide her with a legitimate source of funds, and she neither needed to meet them nor would it be easy to do so.
Liu Yue breathed a sigh of relief. Good—they weren’t her real parents.
She had been adopted as a child, and her adoptive parents had treated her well. Though they had passed away, she wasn’t the type to yearn for parental love from others.
The system said, “If you need, I can help you find your real parents.”
Liu Yue shook her head without a moment’s hesitation.
“I don’t need that. And if you do find out, don’t tell me,” she said firmly. “When I was abandoned, I was a perfectly healthy baby girl.”
Liu Yue was twenty-one years old. When she had been abandoned, it was already the 21st century.
After the millennium, society had developed rapidly, and ordinary people’s lives had gotten better and better—no longer the era when people had to scrimp and save for every meal. She had been a healthy child, with all her limbs intact and no congenital diseases. Was it really hard to guess why she’d been discarded?
No matter how her biological parents were doing now, Liu Yue wanted nothing to do with them. Since they had thrown her away back then, their lives from now on would have nothing to do with each other. It was best if they never crossed paths again for the rest of their lives.
Seeing Liu Yue’s stance, the system didn’t bring up the matter again.
It merely reminded her: “You may choose to keep your current household registration, or you may choose to relocate to either parent’s place of residence.”
The system was, of course, referring to the two residing in the United States and Hong Kong. But Liu Yue felt her mainland Chinese resident status was perfectly fine and saw no need to go through all that trouble.
She was almost done with university anyway, and she had no plans to pursue a graduate degree. Foreign nationality held no meaning for her, and she had no desire to settle in the United States.
Liu Yue continued scrolling through Taobao, and the algorithm recommended a three-in-one charging dock for an Apple phone, watch, and earbuds. It did look more convenient than juggling three separate cables, and her dorm room didn’t have that many charging ports anyway.
Then she checked the price… What? This thing costs 1,098 yuan? Even if it’s from Apple’s official flagship store, that’s daylight robbery!
Liu Yue was about to swipe past it and search for a cheaper alternative when she remembered she was bound to the Spending System.
Anyway, this ten thousand yuan had to be spent one way or another—she couldn’t save it up. So she might as well buy the best. She wasn’t short on money now.
That thought instantly inflated Liu Yue’s ego. She gleefully added the charging dock to her cart and tapped into the Apple store.
She also bought a stylus and a two-sided folio case for the tablet, a silicone phone case for the iPhone 16, and a 20W power adapter. Combined with the charging dock from earlier, these items alone already totaled over three thousand yuan.
To be honest, if the daily check-in amount didn’t have an expiration date, Liu Yue really wouldn’t have been willing to buy from the official store. But thinking about how this was all System money, and spending it early meant getting the cashback sooner, she instantly tossed that hint of reluctance out the window.
Liu Yue thought happily to herself—from now on, she needed to get used to her identity as a rich person. Within the System’s spending limit, she’d buy the most expensive of everything!
Checkout, payment. Liu Yue smoothly paid 3,394 yuan, leaving 6,606 yuan for today’s task amount.
She rolled over in bed and drifted off to sleep, completely satisfied.
**
Liu Yue slept until around ten in the morning. After brushing her teeth and washing her face, she happened to see her roommate Wen Huiyi pushing open the door with an exhausted look on her face.
Huiyi greeted her with lifeless eyes, tossed her laptop bag onto the desk, and collapsed into her chair, staring blankly into space.
“What’s wrong with you?” Liu Yue couldn’t help but ask. “You didn’t come back last night—I thought you went out to have fun with friends.”
Wen Huiyi shook her head mechanically. “I was working overtime.”
Liu Yue: “…Don’t tell me you pulled an all-nighter?”
“Yeah, who else has a life as miserable as mine?”
Wen Huiyi grabbed at her hair: “Yesterday was New Year’s Day—everyone was off, including my leader. But that stupid celebrity we’re handling threw a whole bunch of new demands at us, and at the critical moment, they could only grab me, the intern, to communicate with him and figure things out. I’m just %&*￥#@…”
Wen Huiyi was spewing some colorful Chinese, offering her warmest regards to Tencent Video where she worked, her colleagues and supervisors, and the celebrity she was assigned to handle.
Liu Yue patted her shoulder sympathetically. Huiyi was way too pitiful.
There was a time when Wen Huiyi had been a celebrity chaser, fantasizing about meeting stars when she got the internship opportunity. Now she’d gotten her wish, and her rose-tinted filter for the Chinese entertainment industry had completely shattered.
After cursing enough, Wen Huiyi crawled into bed to sleep. Liu Yue didn’t linger in the dorm—she changed her clothes and quietly closed the door behind her.
She hadn’t eaten breakfast, but that didn’t matter to a college student. Lunchtime was right around the corner, and she was going to eat at Banu Hotpot.
This was something Liu Yue had decided before going to sleep. In the past, every time she went for hotpot, she’d have to keep a real-time eye on the bill with every dish she ordered, terrified of going over budget. But times were different now!
She was going to devour tripe, devour fatty beef, devour shrimp paste—order whatever was most expensive, with no spending cap, and turn Banu into an all-you-can-eat hotpot experience!
Liu Yue planned to head to Wanxiang Cheng. Not only did it have Banu Hotpot, but it also had one of the few Heytea Black Gold stores in the country. She wanted to grab their store-exclusive fried ice cream while she was at it.
She habitually opened the map app to search for bus routes, and was about to head down in the elevator when she realized she could just take a taxi instead. No more squeezing onto buses and subways, no more walking after getting off at the stop.
She opened Didi, entered her destination, and instinctively reached for the “discount carpool” option—then remembered she was a rich person now. She still had over six thousand yuan to spend today!
Ahem, it was only her second day bound to the System, and she wasn’t quite used to her new identity yet. She was sure she’d get the hang of it eventually.
Liu Yue scrolled down with her finger. She’d originally planned to pick a classy executive car, but then she noticed there was an even classier option below—Didi’s luxury car service, with an estimated price nearly double.
Discount carpool: 25. Regular car: 55. Executive car: 90. Luxury car: 180. Well, of course she’d pick the most expensive one.
Liu Yue noticed the luxury car service had a customization option where you could set how you wanted the driver to address you.
At that moment, she had no idea what her brain was doing—she typed in “Her Highness the Princess.”
The elevator doors opened, and Liu Yue’s order was placed.
A driver picked it up quickly. By the time she reached the pickup point, a black sedan with a Mercedes emblem was already parked at the curb. A driver in a suit and white gloves bowed to her.
Then he opened the door and said with a beaming smile, “Your Highness the Princess, please get in.”
This pickup point was in Shenzhen University’s residential area, bustling with people passing by. Liu Yue felt like everyone walking past was staring at her.
Liu Yue: …
Can spending money turn back time? This was way too embarrassing!
Author’s Note: