Chapter 1
After graduating from college and lingering in Wuhan for another half a year, Chu Fei finally decided to go to Shenzhen.
The reason he made that decision had nothing to do with any other messy excuse. In the end, it came down to four simple words: when you're poor, your ambitions are limited.
They had both graduated only half a year ago, but while Chu Fei was scraping by on less than two thousand yuan a month, his girlfriend Li Ran was pulling in more than four thousand a month, and on top of that, the year-end bonus she had just received was a full 150,000 yuan!
All told, her monthly income worked out to nearly seventeen or eighteen thousand yuan, ten times Chu Fei's.
That was the gap.
And the reason for that gap...
All one could say was that life's opportunities are sometimes completely different. When you meet the right person or stumble onto the right thing, you can suddenly rise overnight.
Unfortunately, heaven loved jokes, so there were always plenty of talented people who never got the chance to shine, just like Chu Fei.
Chu Fei and Li Ran had been classmates. From his freshman year he was already juggling several part-time jobs outside campus, while Li Ran only started looking everywhere for internships in her senior year.
They were both majoring in interior design, but Li Ran was shy and introverted. She tried a lot of places and none of them took her. Then, when she went to interview at an office building, nerves made her get off on the wrong floor and she ended up walking into a company that had never even posted a hiring notice. Somehow, they took a liking to her. Not only did they keep her as an intern, but because she was honest and steady and worked hard, they signed a contract with her and made her a full-time employee after just two months.
But the company Li Ran had blundered into was no small outfit. It was one of the top design institutes in the country. Before that, the minimum requirement for hiring there had been a graduate degree in architecture, and they had never once taken a bachelor’s graduate. Word was that Li Ran was the first and last, and she still wasn’t even from an architecture-related major. Even now, many of her colleagues still called her a legend...
Chu Fei and Li Ran only got together in their junior year, and it was Li Ran who gave him her virginity. Because she was gentle by nature and always acted like a delicate little bird leaning against his side, a lot of classmates envied Chu Fei's luck. But reality was always that cruel, because even the sweetest love couldn't compete with hard cash, and it certainly couldn't compete with rent, groceries, and daily necessities...
When Li Ran first started dating Chu Fei, she was drawn to how hardworking and ambitious he was, believing he had a bright future ahead of him. She never expected that after graduation, Chu Fei would still only be making a little over a thousand yuan, while the men in her company who were only a few years older than her were already taking home at least seven or eight thousand a month, with year-end bonuses starting at three or four hundred thousand. Not only did those people drive to work every day in their own cars, the topics they talked about were either where to go on vacation or which housing development to buy an apartment in. Good looks and height aside for the moment, money was definitely not something they lacked.
And Chu Fei? With a salary that never even reached two thousand yuan, he could barely survive in Wuhan, a city that was neither huge nor small. As for buying a house or getting married, that was nothing but wishful thinking.
Simply put, Chu Fei and Li Ran's coworkers were not even in the same universe...
So, without even noticing it, Li Ran's attitude toward Chu Fei began to change in subtle ways. Maybe she herself didn't realize it, but it was the truth...
She had already started saying heartless things from time to time, and toward Chu Fei she was steadily losing patience. She would always pick fights over the tiniest, most trivial matters, and after arguing too many times, even she grew tired of it. Especially once she learned that Chu Fei wouldn't be getting any year-end bonus or profit-sharing this year at all, she fell silent. But the look in her eyes at that moment was cutting.
So Chu Fei decided to leave. He decided to leave here, leave Li Ran, and go somewhere new to start over.
Truthfully, Chu Fei wasn't really short on money, because his mother had opened a beauty salon in Shenzhen.
Although it was only a medium-sized shop, it employed more than twenty young women, all personally chosen by his mother from the countryside. Every one of them was fresh and pretty, so a lot of Hong Kong men liked to come to the salon, and business had always been pretty good.
During the years Chu Fei was in college, his mother He Peiling never sent him less living money than other people his age, and often more. But Chu Fei had a bit of pride back then, and he looked down on money earned that way, so from his freshman year on he learned to stand on his own feet, making money with his own ability to support himself. He left all the money his mother sent him untouched in his bank card. After four years of saving, it wasn't an enormous amount, but it was definitely not little either!
Back then, Chu Fei was energetic and driven, and he had even joined the student council...
On top of that, he was tall and had decent looks, which gave people a very sunny impression. So in the second half of his freshman year, Chu Fei had a girlfriend who was very beautiful and also a model. Two people both over six feet tall walking together really did make people envious. But what a lot of people didn't know was that Chu Fei had actually been the one being pursued.
Chu Fei's ex-girlfriend was named Zhang Qian, and she was the class monitor in the Fashion Model Department of the Academy of Fine Arts.
Only, by the time she got together with Chu Fei, she was no longer a virgin, so the two of them were together for only a year and a half before drifting apart and breaking up calmly...