"Have you found a job? "
Lynch had just come home from outside, watched his girlfriend cooking, and shook his head guiltily.
The girlfriend was neither disappointed nor overly moody, as if not finding a job was a normal occurrence.
Lynch tried to avoid verbal exchanges as much as possible, afraid that this woman who slept next to him every day would see something unusual about him.
His girlfriend walks over to the rickety wooden table with a frying pan, places a fried egg on a plate of ground beef, and sits down.
"Don't think so much, I still have some money here, maybe you can find a job tomorrow, let's eat first! "
Lynch nodded and started to enjoy the not so tasty food.
Lynch pierced the slightly congealed outer layer of the eggs with his fork, and the thick yolk flowed over the chunks of meat like a natural seasoning or some kind of sauce that made them more appealing.
He ate mechanically, but his mind was on other things.
He'd "crossed over" (in fiction, crossing over is when someone suddenly goes to another world, without warning).
Lynch didn't know what kind of science it was, or anything else, but he definitely crossed over.
Before he crossed over, he had a lot of jobs, like courier, insurance salesman, waiter, kitchen dishwasher, delivery man, etc.
He'd done a lot of small, unremarkable jobs in the thirty years before he crossed over, and that changed drastically after the age of thirty.
According to him, he spent the first 30 years of his life gaining experience, and then he managed to impress the judge in court with his eloquent speech (Lynch tried to be big but failed).
And then, in that tiny room where he first slept, with the intention of later publishing an autobiography recalling his storied life.
Just as he falls into a daze of sleep, he crosses over.
When he awakens, he appears in this house, in a body whose owner also happens to be named Lynch, but this world has nothing to do with the old one.
Now he's like the social scum of the earth, the biggest loser of all.
He eats and sleeps with his girlfriend like a parasite, except that he can help her solve some "problems" at night.
He's been out the last few days under the guise of looking for a job.
The world has given him an indescribable new feeling.
It's like the 1930s, when technology wasn't very advanced, but at the same time it was exploding at a rapid pace.
There were so many products appearing that it was dizzying, and then Lynch saw the slogan on a billboard in the street - "Every day is a new day!
In Lynch's opinion, this world, this society, was full of money, it just needed him to bend down and pick it up.
His blood was boiling, his heart was strong and powerful, and there was a longing deep within him, a conviction that he had crossed over for a reason.
Maybe something brought me here to leave my own legend behind!
"Go and boil some water. We're taking a bath today," his girlfriend said as she cleared her plate.
Lynch nodded and stood up as he walked to the bathroom not far away, casually asking, "Didn't we just shower yesterday?
In the time since he'd crossed over, he'd realized that he and his girlfriend had a very clear plan for their lives, and it wasn't exactly chaotic.
Nowadays, the weather is not too hot and not too cold, and if you don't exercise too much, you don't sweat too much, so you basically don't need to shower every day.
It's not that people don't want to clean themselves every day, it's just that they have to pay for a change of clothes and hot water.
Rich people don't care about these small amounts of money, they even install a boiler in their house to provide hot water and buy a washing machine to do their laundry whenever they need it.
But for the poor, these are unnecessary and unaffordable expenses, so their lives must be regular.
They live a life of carefully accounting for every expense, sticking to a monastic routine to save every penny.
It's not that they want regularity, but rather because of poverty.
His girlfriend walked over to the sink and unscrewed the tap to rinse the dishes, "Our hot water goes off at noon and we'll wait until next week to pay the bill so we can save some money.
Lynch shrugged as he stepped into the bathroom, unscrewed the faucet, and after the cold water at the top was drained, hot water radiated out of the pipes.
They showered and lay down on the small bed, quickly falling into a deep sleep.
Lynch's girlfriend works at a supermarket as a cashier, working ten hours a day with a one-hour break.
She would often pick up some expired or outdated food or cheap household items from the supermarket side and come back, so the two of them could still get by with only one person working.
The two were classmates in high school, neither of them were able to go to college, Lynch worked as a laborer for a while, then gave up because the work was too tiring.
Catherine, his girlfriend, found this job at a supermarket and kept it.
It's a pretty typical loser family, both Lynch and Catherine, and they don't know how much longer they can live like this.
Maybe they can make it until the day they walk down the aisle and then barely make it for the rest of their lives.
But it's also possible to end a fragile relationship anytime, anywhere, because of some sudden outburst of emotion.
He walked over to the cupboard and poured the milk into a saucepan to heat it, glancing at the expiration date, which, not surprisingly, was two days past.
Milk like this is thrown away in supermarkets, but many supermarket workers are willing to put up with long hours and low pay to work in supermarkets!
What they're looking at is all this stuff they can get for free.
The rich, milky taste was somewhat intoxicating; Lynch was used to soaking something in hot milk, while Catherine was used to soaking it directly in unheated milk.
After breakfast, he tidied up a bit and came to a stop on a street not far from where they rented.
It wasn't that he hadn't done anything in the last few days, not that he was looking for a job here of course, he was just thinking about his first money and how to get it.
Although this world is very different from the other world, there are some things that follow the same path.
Let's say you know that in a hundred years the land under your feet will be an inch high, let's say you know that the price of art is going up year after year, let's say...
Everyone who stands in Lynch's present perspective has a sense of ambition, because they can overwhelmingly seize the future.
But the problem is that most people's ambitions don't materialize because now isn't the future, and anything that requires start-up capital.
Where is the seed money going to come from?
It's not just going to fall out of the sky or come in a flood, in fact many people are just as incapable of changing their lives in any way, even if they had the opportunity to go back in time.
It's probably going to be buying an extra house or two and then waiting until they're older to look at twice as much equity as they had in their last life and gawk at it, which isn't quite what they had in mind in the first place.
Some people are destined for greatness, while others can't do anything about it, even when given the chance.
Obviously, Lynch is the former, and he has all the qualities that make the difference.
He spent most of the morning staring at a laundromat across the street, scribbling in a notebook as he made his first pot of money.
As noon approached and the flow of people on the street began to slow, two guys in trench coats stepped in front of him; one of the guys had his hand tucked inside his trench coat and appeared to be holding something.
"Hey man, Mr. Fox wants to see you."
At first glance, these two people weren't good people, and of course it could be that Lin Qi was thinking too much, but at the moment, he didn't have the slightest bit of fear, and instead, a smile appeared on his face.
"I've been waiting for you for days. What are you waiting for? Lead the way," Lynch said.