Li
Li was a young man of 17. He came from a village under the Jin Sect province, which was at the end of the province.
His father, Jet, was a scholar who could not get to the final imperial exam because of a lack of money. He did his best to give Li education, hoping he would one day enroll in the imperial exam and probably become an imperial official.
This was the reason Li could read and write without proper schooling.
His mother, Yu, was a well-known storyteller in their village. Her skill in forming worthwhile stories out of nothing made her an adored woman in their village. This made the small village kind of famous because her story telling skills attracted listeners from other villages.
Though the money she got was regular, it was too meagre. She taught Li everything she knew about the art of storytelling as he grew up. Li was a willing student and before long, Li became a wonderful and even better storyteller.
Despite his storytelling abilities and the little rewards that comes with it, both Li and his mother could not make ends meet, so after his father's demise Li journeyed to the capital of the province to find a better source of income using his talent for reading and writing and his wonderful skill as a storyteller.
He used his skills for storytelling and writing to pay his way to the city from village to village as he moved. Throughout his journey, the money he made was sufficient for his survival and transportation, but when he got to the capital, he found things were a little different and harder. Li found out that the money he used to rent a room for a month in the villages could not even get him accommodation for a night in the city, and to make matters worse actual Scholars had taken over the business of writing and reading and there were far too many story tellers on the street.
After a few days scouting through town feeling slightly hopeless, Li started considering going back to one village he had passed through and start out a life there when one day, he came across a man who gave him a job to trans copy for the local newspaper. He was offered a very merger salary which could not even pay for a closet sized room. When he told the proprietor this, the proprietor of the publishing house, he offered him a small room at the back of the building that faced the garbage site of a local restaurant next door. The room had a bed, a small kitchen, and a bathroom. This was a sweet break for Li, so he took it.
Li began working at the newspaper house from late evening to early hours of the morning.
Since Li worked only at night, he spent each day searching for a day job after a few hours of sleep.
Eventually, he found a job as a storyteller at a low-class restaurant. The pay was much worse at first, but when his story telling attracted more customers, the manager of the restaurant increased his pay a bit, making it equal to that of the newspaper house.
With his double pay, he could send some money to his mother in the village. Li never really got enough to buy a new set of clothes, so he ended up almost always wearing the same clothes over and over, looking more like a beggar even when the clothes were washed.