CH001

Lu Fan looked around the classroom in a daze for a long time.

Several things confused him, including the wrong method Mr. Wang was using to find x, but that was not the most important.

He had just regressed to his high school days.

Unlike most people who wished they could have a do-over, Lu Fan was quite content with his life.

One might not call it successful, but it was better than most. At least, he had no lingering regrets.

His family owned a rather successful hotpot joint, and he was content using his Accounting degree keeping the books in check in that small joint.

He was not very ambitious to begin with and one could say that he only did that course because it was up there together with computer science and engineering at the time.

But that did not mean he did not wish he had done some things differently.

Something like Crypto. Damn! How he wished he had followed Fatty Tang and bought a couple.

At that time, there was a time it cost 0.1 USD. 0.1 USD! How the hell did he manage to convince himself not to buy it?

Just miss lunch for a day or two and he could have had a dozen bitcoins.

Or, the girl at the corner.

She looked very unassuming. Nerdy, with big round glasses and thick bangs that covered her eyes. Petty much the template of what an introvert should look like. But hidden underneath all that… was a WWIII threat.

Lu Fan did not know what exactly was going on there, but whatever it was, it created the Country's biggest star.

Still, all that was not enough to daze him so, what truly confused him were the tags he was seeing floating above everybody's heads. There were tags too on other objects, but they were just labels, and the tags on the people shocked him.

Mr. Wang for instance had a glaring red tag [Severe Hair Loss -5] and other tags like [Basic Mathematics I, II, III +35], [Teaching +15], [Drinking -5], and list after that was collapsed. He could see an expand arrow at the corner but Lu Fan was somehow sure that none of the tags were important after that.

An Xing'er on the other hand had vastly different tags.

It was like there was a ranking or something.

Right at the top was a Golden tag [Singing] and a Purple tag [Dancing], then a Blue tag [Music]. These three did not have any number or sign alongside them and they gave Lu Fan a… natural feeling. It was like they were naturally there and nothing would change that.

Looking around more, there seemed to be such tags on everybody's heads. Some had colored tags but none were as bright and dazzling as the ones on An Xing'er.

'Is this… some sort of cheat? My golden finger? System come out!'

Lu Fan was basically sure that his inference was correct but no matter how he called out, the system never showed.

'Seems like it is one of those passive types.'

That was a conclusion that he had come up to after trying all sorts of ways and spells he knew to summon the system, and he knew a lot.

Lu Fan looked around and from what he could see, it seemed like the colored tags had something to do with natural talent or something along those lines.

An Xing'er aside, everybody else in class had a white, green, or blue tag floating on their heads.

The blue tags were few, making Lu Fan even more astonished by whatever was happening with An Xing'er.

Three talents and the least was a Blue? Wasn't this against some natural law or something?

Look, even the most acknowledged genius in the class only had a Blue tag [Athlete] and a white tag [2face].

Nobody had more than two tags. And the few that did, had quite the combination, ending up with a useless skill, or useless colors.

Someone like Fatty Tang had a green tag [Foodie] and a white tag [Appetite]. What the fuck was that?

And he was one of the good ones.

*Sigh*

Lu Fan moved on to the other tags.

He could see numbers and +- signs on them and Lu Fan was sure that he could somehow adjust them. It was scary just thinking about it. Quite exciting as well.

He concluded that these were skills. Something like [Reading], [Learning], [Writing], and other common tags were basically found on everyone.

There were colored ones like Fatty Tang's yellow [Obese] and Mr. Wang's [Drinking] and the red [Severe Hair Loss], which confused him a bit but, whatever.

What he was itching to find out was if he truly could temper with these skills and stats.

Thinking up to this point, Lu Fan hurriedly tried to 'touch' An Xing's golden tag. It was the most dazzling and if he was going to try something, who better than An Xing?

I mean, she had around 100+ skills and three great talents. It wouldn't matter much if she lost one, would it?

[You have insufficient balance.]

"…"

'Right, there is no free lunch in this world.'

Now the problem was, how much was sufficient.

His family might be doing good, but that did not mean he got too much pocket money. His mother worked all day long to save up for his tuition fee and college fees and he did not have much left to squander.

Much of the money he had received was set aside for future use, after all, it was still 2009, and making a yuan was hard. Pocket money of 100 yuan per week was already extravagant compared to many.

He was saving up for Vocational Study. He was going to sit for his entrance exam next year and he had to perform well, at least that was the plan before.

Now that he was back, this bit of money was insufficient.

He was not being greedy or something, it was just that society was bound to change too rapidly in the coming years.

He had seen it and even experienced it.

There was no logical reason for a fully certified accountant to do simple clerk work in a small hotpot joint even if the were no jobs left. It's just that the jobs were taken by AIs and he was not tech savvy enough to keep up.

But it was an entirely different matter now that he was back.