Lin Xiaobei fell flat on his face, landing on the wet sidewalk. He struggled to his feet and discovered the culprit: a watermelon rind, a damn, bright green watermelon rind.
"Today must be the unluckiest day of my life." He rubbed his aching knee and muttered.
First, the convenience store owner had fired him that morning for "sneaking a taste of soon-to-expire bread." Heaven knows, all he'd done was smell it!
Then he'd discovered that the ATM had swallowed the last 87 yuan and 60 cents in his bank account. And now, in full view of everyone, he'd put on a "watermelon-rind gliding" performance.
"What are you looking at? Never seen a handsome guy fall before?" Lin Xiaobei yelled at the onlookers, then limped over to a bench by the road.
Just then, a golden flash caught the corner of his eye.
Lin Xiaobei turned and saw a brand-new hardcover book on display at the newsstand beside the bench: Financial Tycoon: The Dark Night Overlord. Its gilded title gleamed in the sunlight.
"Huh? Isn't this the novel I've been following every day?" Lin Xiaobei's eyes lit up. "They actually made a hardcover edition!"
A twenty-year-old working stiff at the bottom of the social ladder, Lin Xiaobei had only one source of entertainment: reading web novels on his phone.
Financial Tycoon was the novel he followed most avidly. It told the story of how the protagonist, Lu Chen, rose from a low-ranking employee on Finance Street to build a business empire.
The first few chapters were great, but the later plot seemed to fly by at 800x speed. The style also abruptly changed from a time-travel business novel to a science fiction one, with several global crises appearing, leaving me completely bewildered and thinking it was about to end. Looking at the table of contents, it's only halfway through! 🍉 However, the romance is quite good ❤️. It's just that the pacing is too fast. No major flaws.
The pacing is so fast, haha! It feels like so many things happened before I even finished reading, and now three years have passed. But both male leads are really good characters. Keep up the good work, author! I hope you can write even better next time.
Good heavens, how did this story go from a business war novel to a world revolutionized by super AI generating self-awareness, and then to humanity evolving beyond the physical constraints to become digital life forms?