Reborn: Making Money with the School Beauty as My Desk Mate

Chen Mo was reborn on the first day of senior year in 2005. The school beauty, Shen Qingyi, sat in front of him. In his desk was a love letter he hadn't yet had the chance to deliver. In his pocket was the eighty yuan his mother had given him for living expenses. Beside the blackboard hung the countdown to the college entrance exam: nine months left to change his fate.

In his previous life, he failed the college entrance exam and headed south to find work. He went from working customer service at Taobao to becoming an e-commerce operations director, only to be laid off at thirty-five and die in a rented room. But few people knew that before entering e-commerce, he'd hung around internet cafes in the county town, run a game studio, built websites from scratch, resold game cards, and written scripts. This time, when he opened his eyes, the first thing he did wasn't study. He asked the school beauty sitting beside him how much the MP3 player tucked beneath her Five Years of College Entrance Exams, Three Years of Practice Exams had cost wholesale.

When others were reborn, they started by taking exams. He started by doing the math. From making fifteen yuan on a secondhand tape player, to pulling overnight shifts at an internet cafe and writing scripts in exchange for a computer that wouldn't shut off, then reselling game cards, building a game guide site, running a network of sites to earn ad-network revenue, opening a Taobao shop selling non-mainstream profile decorations, and taking a cut from web-game distribution deals, Chen Mo had only one principle: make money before everyone else catches on.