I can’t believe I almost missed that.
Xu Ye rode back feeling genuinely annoyed at himself.
Though in fairness — he wasn’t a football person. He’d never voluntarily watched a match in his life. The only reason he even knew about this result was because it had been unavoidable news in 2014, the kind of story that breaks out of sports coverage and takes over everything for a week.
He ran the numbers on the bike.
Three thousand three hundred yuan. Times 150. Just under 495,000. After 20% tax, roughly 400,000 in hand.
He passed the lottery shop, its shutter already halfway down for the night. He looked at it and exhaled.
Fine. Four hundred thousand into the market, riding a bull run, with the right picks? Ten times, a hundred times — both are possible.
He talked himself down and rode back to the bar.
Xiaonuan and Zhou Ying had finished the cleaning. Zhiwei was waiting, full of questions.
“Where did you go?”
“Secret.”
“You absolute—”
Xu Ye had no intention of explaining. Even if he won tomorrow, he couldn’t exactly say he’d had advance knowledge of the scoreline. The math would be suspicious enough without the explanation.
Actually — three thousand three hundred is probably the right amount to have bet. If he’d put in ten or twenty thousand and won, that story might have found its way into the news.
“Ying jiejie — I’ll handle cleaning duty tomorrow night. Sorry for tonight.”
Zhou Ying waved him off. “Don’t worry about it. Go home. Xiaonuan’s giving me a lift anyway.”
“See you tomorrow.”
Home. Ticket pressed between the pages of a book. Cold shower. Bed.
Lying there in the dark, knowing that by tomorrow morning his balance could jump from around twenty thousand to nearly half a million — Xu Ye found sleep stubbornly elusive.
He managed it eventually, somewhere in the anxious hours.
He woke up to his phone going off repeatedly.
Social Anxiety Patient: HOLY CRAP XU YE. Germany vs Brazil tonight ended 7-1!!!
Social Anxiety Patient: do you understand what this means?
Social Anxiety Patient: it’s like an international wildcard team going up against Korea in League of Legends and not just winning but shaving their heads. [TL: In competitive League of Legends, South Korean teams are considered the world’s best. Losing to them so decisively you “get your head shaved” is the esports equivalent of a historic upset. Zhiwei is reaching for the most extreme comparison he knows.]
Social Anxiety Patient: my dad said it’s absolute chaos over in Brazil. apparently there are gangs putting out threats against some of the Brazilian players.
Social Anxiety Patient: anyway you don’t follow football so whatever.
Social Anxiety Patient: module three practice today?
Xu Ye typed back: Not today. Something came up. Go without me.
Social Anxiety Patient: fine.
He was out of bed before the phone was back on the nightstand. He flipped open the book, confirmed the ticket was there, and headed to the bathroom.
Yuxin looked up from the couch. “Xu Ye gege, you’re up early.”
“I have something to take care of this morning.” He stuck his head out of the bathroom, toothbrush in hand. “I might not be back until noon. Can you start the rice around eleven? One scoop of rice, water just above your first knuckle.”
“Okay.”
He was dressed and out the door in ten minutes — ticket, ID, mask, shoes.
Prizes under five hundred thousand yuan could be claimed at the city-level sports lottery centre rather than the provincial office. [TL: China’s sports lottery (体彩) system has tiered prize redemption: smaller wins can be claimed at local outlets, mid-range at city centres, and large wins at provincial offices. The tax on lottery winnings in China is 20% on amounts exceeding ten thousand yuan.]
Xu Ye’s payout of 495,000 just cleared the city-centre threshold.
He took a taxi over, walked in, and found it nothing like he’d imagined — no audience, no fanfare, just a staff member at a desk guiding him through the process with the calm efficiency of someone who’d done this a thousand times.
Sign your name, phone number, and ID number on the back.
Write a declaration on a photocopy of your ID in this format.
Fill in this form.
Please wait a moment.
Check your phone — it should be there.
It was.
Xu Ye confirmed the number, nodded, and smiled. “Got it. Thank you.”
He walked back out into the morning sunlight just before eleven.
He stretched, took a long breath, and felt something settle in his chest — a kind of expansive clarity, the sense of a path that had been narrow suddenly widening.
This life is going to be something.
On the way home, he stopped and bought a whole white-cut chicken as a personal treat.
Wang Yuxin stared at the bag when he walked in. “Gege — did you get rich?”
“You can tell I got rich from one chicken?”
“You’re so stingy. You wouldn’t buy a chicken unless something happened.”
“Go set the table. Wash your hands.”
“Okay~”
That afternoon, Xu Ye stayed home.
He transferred the full four hundred thousand into his brokerage account, then spent a couple of hours reviewing stocks and building positions across several sectors he already knew were about to move. [TL: From Q3 2014, the Shanghai A-share market entered a sustained bull run that lasted through mid-2015, driven by a combination of government policy signals, retail investor enthusiasm, and leverage. The index roughly doubled in under a year.]
The market was already showing early signs of movement.
Anyone paying close attention would know: from the third quarter of 2014 onward, it was going to climb. For four straight quarters. Fast.
Getting four hundred thousand into the market at this exact moment felt like stumbling upon shelter just as the rain starts.
Red Leaf Estate.
Qingqing sat on the couch working through a manga. Normally she could spend hours absorbed in one. Today she’d barely finished ten pages before putting it down.
She picked up her phone and opened WeChat.
Her contacts list was short. She scrolled through it, and opened Wang Yuxin’s chat.
Qingqing: are you home?
Yuxin: yeah!
Qingqing: alone?
Yuxin: Xu Ye gege is here too.
Qingqing: what’s he doing?
Yuxin: not sure, he went out this morning and came back for lunch, and ever since then he’s just been sitting on the sofa with a dumb grin on his face. I think he found money on the street.
Yuxin: [photo]
Yuxin: Qingqing jiejie does he look like an idiot or what?
Qingqing opened the photo. Xu Ye, sitting on the couch, beaming at his phone with the undisguised satisfaction of someone who had recently gotten away with something.
She smiled without meaning to.
Qingqing: definitely.
Yuxin: jiejie, my gege is going to Shanghai for university at the end of August. where are you going?
Qingqing hesitated. She felt a slight self-consciousness about the answer, but leaving it unread seemed worse.
Qingqing: Shanghai too.
Yuxin: WAIT YOU’RE BOTH GOING TO SHANGHAI?!
Yuxin: that’s so amazing!!!
Qingqing: I’m actually kind of scared about university.
Yuxin: why?
Qingqing: you have to deal with so many people. I’ve heard the dormitory dynamics can get really complicated.
Yuxin: don’t worry! just go to my gege if you have a problem. he’s actually pretty reliable when it counts.
Yuxin: also I have a secret to tell you.
Qingqing: what?
Yuxin: my gege has your WeChat chat pinned to the top. like the “special care” feature on QQ.
Qingqing’s heart did something she hadn’t asked it to.
(End of Chapter)