20 years of restarting life

Chapter 3778 Character Determines Destiny
"It's a girl's nature to love beauty, and it's a good thing that deserves recognition and praise. If her teeth are crooked, she can get them straightened; if she doesn't have a good figure, she can learn dance, music, calligraphy, or painting to cultivate her character. Even cosmetic surgery is an option. Those who view things with prejudice are either foolish or jealous."

Zhao Chang'an spoke gently, but Lin Xiaojie, who slept on the top bunk and didn't want to eavesdrop because she felt it was immoral, had no choice but to overhear everything. She felt disgusted by Zhao Chang'an's shameless words!
However, as she listened, Lin Xiaojie burst into tears. Why did her parents and brother look at her with such disappointment and disapproval? Why were the villagers all waiting to see her get dumped?
To put it bluntly, it's just the money I've been sending to that ungrateful Liu Shilin every month over the years. In the past four and a half years, including the clothes I bought for him and the sweaters I knitted for him, it's been about seven or eight thousand yuan.

Of course, in the village, seven or eight thousand yuan is a huge sum of money. In rural areas, one mu of paddy field is planted once a year. After deducting the investment in fertilizers, one can earn more than one hundred yuan. My family has four mu of paddy fields, which can earn five or six hundred yuan a year.

This seven or eight thousand yuan is enough to build three large red brick houses for the family. With this new house, my brother can also get married.

You can eat at Qiao Yan's hotel in Qiaojiashan. A single meal there costs over 300 yuan, which is equivalent to her monthly salary.

What's even more outrageous is that they were drinking Pengzhou Spring Wine, which costs only a dozen yuan a bottle and is already considered a very good wine.

However, Lin Xiaojie knew that the wine had been switched beforehand, with Jiannanchun wine being poured in instead. All Lin Xiaojie knew about Jiannanchun was that it retailed for a little over one hundred yuan a bottle in tobacco and liquor stores.

So a group of people drank a case of Pengzhou Chun liquor, six bottles, and the meal cost 1,000 yuan, which is equivalent to three months of her salary.

Last night, He Cai treated Ye Yiyi and the others to imported liquor, the name of which Lin Xiaojie had never heard of before, and she didn't know the price either. However, she overheard the dishes on the table, and the dishes alone cost more than three thousand yuan.

That's equivalent to her hard-earned salary for a whole year!

Many of the dishes were ones she had never heard of, never seen, or had only heard of but never seen before: abalone, snow frog, dried scallops—

Also, why is the papaya like this?

What is ice plant? It looks like it's covered in dewdrops. Is it eaten raw like this?
What made her feel even more disgusted by the extravagance of the wealthy was that almost none of the dishes on the table were eaten, from the time they were served until the very end of the meal.

Ye Yiyi, Fan Chufei, Qi Xuan'er, Wang Yu, He Cai, and Chu Yun all ate a little bit of food casually, like dragonflies skimming the water. Lin Xiaojie had no appetite and barely touched her chopsticks. Xiang Yong, being the only man there, ate rather awkwardly. Only Qiao Yan ate heartily and even asked with a smile about the names and ingredients of some dishes that interested her. She said that she owned a hotel, and although people in Qiaojiashan Town couldn't afford such high-end food and drinks, she could try to learn how to make some fashionable new dishes from her hotel.

Thanks to Qiao Yan's question, Lin Xiaojie learned about papaya, ice grass, and scallops—these are the names she was given.

Some dishes were completely untouched from beginning to end, and Ms. Ye Yiyi only drank a small bowl of lotus seed, white fungus, and papaya porridge, picked up a few pieces of rapeseed, and ate some ice grass.

He Cai even went so far as to introduce the plate of rapeseed, saying it was Hongshan rapeseed, priced at over thirty yuan per kilogram, and that it was impossible to buy it in the market normally.

He Cai even put a piece of food on Lin Xiaojie's plate, but Lin Xiaojie felt it wasn't as delicious as the ones she grew at home. Of course, it's also possible that she was in a bad mood and couldn't taste the difference, or perhaps she simply couldn't reach the level of these people and couldn't appreciate the difference.

Qiao Yan said that while the rapeseed wasn't bad, the rapeseed from the vegetable gardens of the people on Qiaojia Mountain that her hotel sourced from there was no worse.

Chu Yun then gave a detailed introduction to the origin of the Hongshan rapeseed, saying that the hotel specially purchased the top-quality rapeseed from the Baotong Temple Pagoda Shadow Field and Zhongsheng Field, the two fields with only six acres each, which are the two best fields for the entire Hongshan rapeseed.

So now Lin Xiaojie and Qiao Yan know why this rapeseed is so expensive. For some devout and wealthy people, let alone thirty yuan per kilogram, even three hundred or three thousand yuan per kilogram, they would buy it without batting an eye.

Lin Xiaojie lay on her side on the bed, silently shedding tears. She was afraid that her tears would wet and soil the quilt, but she had nothing to wipe her tears with. Then she couldn't stop crying, so she quietly sat up a little and moved her pretty face away from the wooden railing of the bed, letting the tears drip from her eyes, one drop after another silently dripping onto the floor tiles below the bed.

Zhao Chang'an was holding Tian Xue when he suddenly noticed streaks of light dripping from the foot of the upper bunk. He was stunned for a moment, then realized that these were Lin Xiaojie's tears.

This silly girl was afraid that her tears would soil Tian Xue's sheets, pillows, and blankets, so she stuck her face out over the wooden railing at the head of the bed and let her tears fall to the ground.

Although Lin Xiaojie was just an unrelated person, she was still a delicate and beautiful girl. And that 'awful' Tian Xue had even put her underwear out to dry in the air conditioner vent, and thrown her cheongsam down, leaving Zhao Chang'an to hang it on the clothesline in the room, 'to prevent it from getting wrinkled and He Cai and Chu Yun from seeing it, hehe, they'd think the three of us were up to something naughty tonight.'

It's a pity Zhao Chang'an didn't have a god's-eye view, otherwise he really wanted to look down at Lin Xiaojie from the ceiling—that scene—

"Well, Chang'an, what are you planning to do with her? Help her if you can. I see a reflection of my past self in her. I was lucky to meet you, and she was just as lucky to meet you. But back then you still had time, but now you're extremely busy with countless affairs."

Tian Xue let out a muffled groan and slumped limply into Zhao Chang'an's arms.

Zhao Chang'an remained silent for a moment, because he knew that Lin Xiaojie had woken up, but Tian Xue did not.

The problem was that he couldn't hint to Tian Xue that Lin Xiaojie was awake.

If Tian Xue knew that Lin Xiaojie had woken up, she would be incredibly embarrassed.

Similarly, if Lin Xiaojie knew that she was awake, how shy and embarrassed she would be.

So she is a good girl at heart. Because the current situation is that Zhao Chang'an and Tian Xue are being a bit unreasonable, but taking their advice has made her very cautious.

"Just now, He Cai and Chu Yun suggested in the living room on the first floor that she take a crash course in secretarial studies and a Microsoft Office course. That's not a bad idea, but Ye Yiyi can't wait for her to grow up like that. If she doesn't become Ye Yiyi's assistant, taking these two courses is still a good option. After all, it's always good to learn more. Once she's learned, it will be easy for her to find a clerical job in Jiangcheng."

"You mean you don't approve?"

“It’s not that I don’t agree with it. If she’s thinking about establishing herself and being able to earn her own living first, then learning this is definitely fine. But if she has much higher ideals for the future, or rather, ambitions, then these two starting points are too low. If she takes this as her starting point, she may never reach your current level in her entire life, or even fall far below it. Even He Cai and Chu Yun, who are at a similar level as liaisons and public relations personnel, are basically beyond her reach in her entire life.”

"That's really exaggerated?"

Tian Xue was a little skeptical. It wasn't that she didn't believe Zhao Chang'an's judgment, but rather that she found the conclusion somewhat unbelievable.

However, Zhao Chang'an said quietly, "Character determines destiny."