Chapter 81 The Black Cat

For the past few evenings, I had been adjourning directly to the Internet cafe once I had finished closing the Center that I spent my dinner time poring over the computer screens while munching my food. For an entire year, I had been cooped up in the Center, studiously perusing the booklet that my father had given me that I almost became a hermit that was detached from the world. It was only after our return from Inner Mongolia that I had found out the existence of a new Internet game that had grown popular more than a year ago. Much of my recent hours I had spent engrossed in the game, that I became part of a tacit brotherhood of players bound together by the game who regularly fill the seats of my nearby Internet cafe to the hilt as we chanted the mantra "WINNER WINNER, CHICKEN DINNER!" as we played the game. Even the caretaker of the cafe, a young girl, could easily recognize me now; not only I had subscribed for a five-hundred-yuan account, but I had also become one of the more prominent youngsters in Wu Zhong County. One would be hardpressed not to when one had become one of the youngest millionaires in the locale at the age of twenty-two. But I never liked mingling with the rich children of my age. I could never get along with them; unlike the forthright and genuine temperaments of both Mr. Zhang and Mr. Lee, rich children seemed snobbish to me, exuding an air of self-entitlement at being born with a silver spoon that I could never tolerate. I would prefer spending time alone in an Internet cafe than associate and fraternize with their ilk; instead, I always managed to blend into the boisterous and rowdy crowd in the Internet cafe and spend my time unnoticed and alone despite the noisy din.