Chapter 13 - Seeking Employment
Late at night, at a barbeque stand next to the street.
A few men were guzzling alcohol, their arms bared, voices rough. Empty alcohol bottles were scattered all over the floor, and the slightest touch made them clang together loudly.
Their entire bodies were red from drinking, and all the other customers stayed far away from them upon seeing that. The only one near them was a teenager.
A few dozen skewers were placed in front of the youth. One leg was hooked over the other disdainfully, a hat placed casually on his thigh; his hair was an attention-grabbing blue. He was currently eating skewers as he talked to someone on the phone.
"I told you before that the platform was going to undergo reforms, but I didn't think it would be like this." Shiliu paused for a second and coughed lightly. "And I completely forget that you're only seventeen..."
Jian Rong swallowed a piece of lamb and corrected him stiffly, "Seventeen and a half."
His unemployment arrived too out of the blue. Twenty lamb skewers were already sitting in his stomach, but Jian Rong still hadn't truly recovered yet.
"But it's not too bad, waiting a few months until you're of age and coming back to stream then. Your audience is fairly fixed, you won't lose too many of them." Shiliu said, "At least you'll get a chance to relax for a few months, travel a bit. Want me to take you to have some fun in Disney?"
Jian Rong could make out Shiliu's brotherly way of speaking, and he said coldly, "Why the hell don't you just say you'll take me to the kiddie playground?"
He drank a mouthful of alcohol to cleanse his palate and spoke again. "I'm not worried about streaming."
It was just that he actually couldn't think of something to do now that he was suddenly no longer streaming.
"How about finding a job to keep busy?" Shiliu guessed what he was thinking and pondered over it. "Take advantage of your youth, you can go do some part-time work and experience life a bit. Otherwise, when you start streaming, you won't have time to do anything else again. Or is there anything else you really want to do?"
Jian Rong stared at the fizzing liquid in the bottle and paused for a beat. "Make money."
"..." At first, Shiliu wanted to say, 'you're just a kid, why so materialistic,' but he was also afraid of being cursed out, so he forcefully restrained himself.
He glanced up at the streamer group chat, which was chatting energetically, and suddenly thought of something. "How about you go give dating a try? A few months will pass by in a flash, really."
Jian Rong: "?"
"Ge can introduce someone to you," Shiliu said. "Do you want someone older or younger than you? It's not very easy to find someone younger than you though. Or what type do you like? Actually, I know many female streamers who are quite interested in getting to know you..."
"Beep—"
Jian Rong hung up decisively and concentrated on eating his skewers.
After completely demolishing all the skewers, Jian Rong picked up his phone again and opened Weibo.
His mood earlier hadn't been very good, so he had just sent out a brief post about stopping streaming before leaving his apartment.
[Soft: Special circumstances, no longer streaming, will return later.]
Looking at the four thousand comments below the post, Jian Rong felt his eyelid twitch; his intuition told him that it wasn't a good thing.
Sure enough.
