Cheng Zhu left the live stream where a female host was doing product promotions and returned to his office.
He plopped down in his chair, expertly stuck a cigarette between his lips, then picked up the S.T. Dupont Ligne 2 lighter sitting on his desk.
Cheng Zhu flicked his thumb upward, popping open the lighter's lid with an extremely crisp ding!
This S.T. Dupont Ligne 2 lighter of his had an official retail price of 13,200 yuan.
According to him, he bought it just to hear the sound.
In his office, Cheng Zhu puffed away without restraint, even propping his feet directly onto his desk.
He picked up his phone and opened Douyin. The first thing that appeared was one of his company's female hosts working hard at product promotion.
Cheng Zhu watched for half a minute before swiping past.
"I'm still very confident in Yiyi's professional abilities."
Yiyi was the top streamer at his company, someone he'd personally cultivated.
She alone earned him close to eight figures a year.
There was certainly a gap between that and the top-tier product promotion streamers.
But it was already enough to make Cheng Zhu filthy rich.
Cheng Zhu treated her well too. As a token of appreciation, they would occasionally discuss several hundred million yuan projects in star-rated hotel suites.
No helping it—Cheng Zhu was the chairman, and Yiyi was sensible.
The next Douyin video he scrolled to was one of those interactive types.
The image had text that read: "If you were given a chance to regress to the past, would you want it?"
This video had over two thousand comments.
Bored, Cheng Zhu clicked in to take a look. As expected, the vast majority said they wanted to.
Some people wanted to make up for lost love, some wanted to go back and make money, some wanted to study hard... there were all kinds.
Cheng Zhu, cigarette dangling from his lips, typed out a comment directly: "Don't want it."
Then he attached an image.
It was a screenshot of the balance from one of his bank cards—this card alone had over six million yuan.
This daddy's young and successful, with over six million in just one card. Regress my ass!
Regress back to being broke as fuck?
Among his circle of friends, Cheng Zhu was publicly acknowledged as the King of Showoffs—he was the most arrogant of them all.
While showing off was in most people's nature, this guy could really fucking flex!
He lived more freely than most people, with a touch of wild recklessness.
Unlike some of his friends who had to beat around the bush when trying to show off.
And his comment was undoubtedly extremely conspicuous among the thousands of others.
Before long, he received several replies:
"Where'd you find that stock photo? Looks pretty real though."
"Anything with a mosaic gets treated as a fake image."
"If this were real life and you had six million in one card, I'd call you boss. But this is Douyin—I can only say you're still lacking a bit."
"Fuck, he out-flexed us all!"
"Delete this so I can post it!"
"I've got ten thousand of these images in my photo album!"
Cheng Zhu stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and smiled indifferently, not bothering to reply to these comments.
When the cigarette's flame was completely extinguished, he suddenly felt the world spinning.
The next moment, he lost consciousness entirely.
...
...
"Cheng Zhu! Cheng Zhu!"
A female voice began to sound in his ears.
His vision gradually returned. He saw a young girl with chestnut-brown long hair standing in front of him with an angry expression.
Scattered cigarettes lay on the ground.
The scene before him felt somewhat familiar to Cheng Zhu, but he couldn't quite recall it all at once.
Beside him and the girl stood two other boys and a girl.
One of the boys said to Cheng Zhu: "Cheng Zhu, playing brooding here? Smoking is bad for your health anyway, and you shouldn't talk to Li Xinyue like that."
The next moment, Cheng Zhu felt his head swelling a bit. Many memories that had become somewhat fuzzy were now growing increasingly clear—fuck, dead memories are starting to attack me!
He remembered this was the summer of 2014, the summer vacation after graduating high school. He and this girl called Li Xinyue in front of him had confirmed their relationship, embarking on his first romance in life.
This was their first big fight, and Li Xinyue had brought up breaking up.
Teenagers in their adolescence carried a bit of that edgy, non-mainstream energy. Heartbroken, Cheng Zhu had started learning to smoke, and he was kind of deliberately smoking in front of Li Xinyue.
The nature of it was a bit like when girls get drunk after a breakup and deliberately call their ex-boyfriends while wasted, expressing their pain.
Looking back at how he started down the path of smoking, making outstanding contributions to national military funding, he just felt it was fucking stupid.
The boy who'd just criticized Cheng Zhu was their class monitor, named Li Rui.
His academic performance was decent, his family was well-off, and his dad drove a Mercedes S350. But the car was actually an S300—they'd just picked off the badge and changed it to S350.
Li Rui had always liked Li Xinyue. Their fathers were apparently from the same village, and the two had known each other since childhood.
But what was that saying again?
Childhood sweethearts can't beat love at first sight.
Li Rui wasn't tall, and he wasn't handsome either. Unlike Cheng Zhu, who was 182cm tall and had a roguish kind of handsomeness.
In this first love, the person Cheng Zhu found most annoying was Li Rui.
Using the excuse of being childhood friends, he'd chat with Li Xinyue every day. Every time the young couple had a fight, he would immediately go find Li Xinyue, offering all kinds of comfort, and even invite her out for meals and movies—all under the banner of "we grew up together."
Whenever he found an opportunity, he would do his utmost to display how gentle and considerate he was, a complete "warm guy."
It's just too bad that Li Xinyue at this stage was still a looks-focused girl, and hadn't yet transformed in the direction of being materialistic.
Dead memories continued to assault Cheng Zhu. He remembered that after this big fight, he went crawling back to Li Xinyue to apologize and make up.
Clearly the fight started because she was being too dramatic, but for Cheng Zhu at this stage, the moment she pulled out the breakup card, he would stupidly surrender.
Of course, the end result was that the two really did make up. Li Rui, like a tool, spent three days consoling Li Xinyue, only to get kicked aside by her again and receive a "good big brother" card.
These days, it was still popular among students to recognize each other as brothers and sisters.
Just like how Xu Song was still singing in his songs: "She's just my little sister~~"
At this moment, seeing Cheng Zhu still not saying a word, Li Rui couldn't help but say again: "Cheng Zhu, learning to smoke was wrong in the first place. Don't you see how angry Xinyue is?"
Among the other boy and girl standing to the side, a darker-skinned boy with acne said: "Zhuge, we really shouldn't learn to smoke. It really is bad for your health."
Cheng Zhu glanced at this boy named Wang Anquan, his gaze softening a bit.
Wang Anquan's father was a firefighter, and based on the phrase "safety first," gave his precious son this name.
He was Cheng Zhu's high school deskmate. They lived in the same residential complex and were basically best friends during their student days.
As for the girl standing beside Wang Anquan, her name was Chen Rongrong, Li Xinyue's best friend.
Both were telling Cheng Zhu not to smoke, but Li Rui was taking the opportunity to step on him, while Wang Anquan genuinely cared about him.
He turned his head to look at Li Rui, looking at this class monitor who persistently swung his hoe, thinking about nothing but poaching his girl all day long until successfully taking his position. He smiled with narrowed eyes:
"Do you know this saying: warm guys rank behind dogs."
What's your status, trying to poach my girl?
According to the hierarchy, warm guys ranked even lower than simps.
Even if he really didn't make up with Li Xinyue this time, it still wouldn't be your turn, you Pleasant Goat wannabe.
TL: Pleasant Goat and the Big Big Wolf was a really popular Chinese cartoon in the 2000s, and the main character was a nice, kind, boy. Well, goat. But he was like all green flags.
It's just that people these days didn't seem to have this awareness yet. "Warm guy" still seemed to be a compliment.
Although Li Rui didn't fully understand the meaning behind Cheng Zhu's words, anyone who wasn't an idiot knew he was cursing at him.
"Cheng Zhu, you fu... you..."
In front of Li Xinyue, he even held back a "you fucking," maintaining his so-called gentlemanly demeanor and warm guy image.
In the end, he only said with a slightly raised voice: "What do you mean!?"
"What do I mean? Do you really need to ask?" Cheng Zhu raised his eyebrows slightly.
He grinned and said: "I generally don't say things that embarrass people, but if I do..."
Cheng Zhu paused slightly, his smile becoming even brighter: "Then I really do want to embarrass you."