Getting Something for Nothing

I'm unemployed.

After an old woman stole from me, I happened to run into a garbage System that forcibly bound itself to me, claiming it would give me ten times my money back. Turns out it just hands out cash.

I said, fine.

But after I joined a city survival show, I could only use one yuan out of every hundred yuan I got in livestream tips. The conversion rate was 1 percent, so I was even poorer and had to pinch every penny.

But when I thought about the life of lying flat that awaited me, I put up with it.

I'm very dedicated, too. Every day, I'm either urging the chat to send money or on my way to doing so. They act stingy and hope I'll get caught, but in practice they send me money to make it easier for me to get by.

I get it. I understand the chat's intentions.

So all the more reason for me to rake in another big haul to repay them :) <- grinning maliciously

P.S.:

1. The main story is in third person, set in a fictional modern reality-show world.

2. The story is entirely fictional, with no basis in reality and no intended parallels.

3. Romance and career get equal attention.

[Check out my upcoming novel! Please add it to your collection!]

[Discipline Mimicry]

From a young age, Zhu Jiudu has moved through circles of power and wealth. She is the military academy student everyone on screen envies and admires.

But one explosion leaves the gifted young woman with brain damage, reducing her abilities to below an ordinary person's. A diagnostic expert once bluntly declared that there was no chance her condition could ever be reversed.

After all, she is Zhu Jiudu, the person her classmates lamented had been "unlucky enough to be born in the same era as them," a byword for honor and glory.

What is she now?

Better to die than live on in humiliation.

Zhu Jiudu knows this all too well.

Under the weight of countless stares, she wanders through exam zones like the fungal city in the Lower City, the nuclear wasteland buried in a blizzard, and the abandoned fjord city. Sometimes she argues with the air; other times she covers her ears and runs around wildly.

Everyone says she's crazy. Only she knows they're right.

Why do other people's school subjects turn into cats and dogs, or even little people?!

It's bad enough that they call her stupid every day. Every subject even turns into a teacher and sets her all kinds of hard problems, determined to get her back to her peak and even surpass it. They're going to be the death of her! T T

Gan Guanying doesn't know that his "distant relative" is Zhu Jiudu.

He also doesn't understand why his parents' expressions changed so drastically when they learned her name.

Once he moves into Zhu Jiudu's home, everything becomes clear.

He never meant to take anything from her. He only remembered the days when he lived in District Twenty.

Back then, when he was hungry, he picked up discarded vegetable leaves; when he was thirsty, he drank dirty water.

It was Zhu Jiudu's dazzling, free-spirited face on the screen and the stories about her everywhere that made him think someone could actually live like that.

But later she died in that nuclear blast.

Only Gan Guanying knows that the deleted contact information and the shared bedding in the rented apartment both prove she is still alive.

-If the long-abandoned red window opens onto a green wall-

-Will you come back?-

Reader's guide:

1. Her golden finger is a group of master teachers from every academic discipline, each offering exclusive tutoring!

2. Back on the path to becoming a genius.

3. A heroine who is warm on the outside and cold within.

4. Concrete Core style, a stark aesthetic rooted in industrial concrete.

5. Angsty, living under one roof, military academy machinery.

Core idea: Live well.