Chapter 17: Su Ning's Changes — Taking Money with a Clear Conscience!
"I said one hundred times the price — after taxes!" Su Ning pressed his advantage without mercy.
There was a pause on the other end.
One hundred times the price!
And after taxes???
What a ruthless guy!
How had he never noticed this fellow was so cutthroat before... Wasn't Su Ning supposed to be a pushover? Since when did a pushover have this kind of nerve?
Manager Wang felt a bitter taste in his mouth.
Had this guy been playing the meek little lamb all along? Or had he... suddenly had some kind of awakening recently?
What on earth had he been through? Why was it so much harder to take advantage of him now?
"Is there a problem?" Su Ning pressed.
"No... no... no problem at all, absolutely no problem — I was actually going to say the same thing, that it'd be one hundred times the after-tax price! Heh... heh heh..." Manager Wang laughed awkwardly.
Even through the screen, Su Ning could tell that this guy was probably feeling worse right now than if he'd swallowed a dead fly.
Picturing Manager Wang's current mood, Su Ning felt a surge of satisfaction.
Knowing you're miserable makes me feel great.
Others might not know how shady this company was, or how insufferable Manager Wang could be — but Su Ning had experienced it firsthand.
Working overtime every single day, clocking over twelve hours a shift with no overtime pay... Oh, right — they were very well-versed in the law over there. They didn't call it overtime pay; they said overtime was already included in the base salary. As for the actual extra hours worked, that was called a "bonus"... and as for bonuses, well, there was always some excuse to dock them...
There were plenty of other grievances too, but Su Ning didn't feel like dredging them up now.
In short, working at that company had felt like being a beast of burden. If the boss was in a bad mood, he'd come over and tear into you — treating people like they were nothing. Su Ning still didn't know what had been wrong with him back then, that he'd actually put up with it for so long.
His illness, too, was probably partly due to the brutal workload and relentless stress.
Looking back now... he really had been a fool.
Memory after memory surfaced, and the silhouette of a woman drifted through his mind: perhaps back then, he'd just wanted so desperately to give her a home, to give her a future.
"Alright, that's settled then!" Su Ning said, and stopped paying attention to Manager Wang.
Ding — "You have received a transfer of 210,000 yuan from Manager Wang!"
In just a few breaths, the 210,000 yuan had arrived.
"Heh, since when did Manager Wang become so efficient?" In the old days, that Wang fellow had dragged his feet on everything — expense reimbursements, salary settlements, you name it, all done at a snail's pace...
"This project must really be important to them," Su Ning thought to himself.
Once he'd calmed down, Su Ning felt something stir inside him.
In the past, earning 200,000 yuan had seemed like a distant dream... yet now, 210,000 had landed in his account just like that?
Hah...
Life really was something.
Always so strange.
Sometimes the things you care about most, the things you want the most, only drift further and further away — and then the moment you stop caring, stop needing them... they come looking for you on their own.
Money was like that.
Women were like that too.
So many things were the same way.
Work especially.
When you worked your fingers to the bone, there was never enough money... but the moment you stopped looking for work, work came looking for you — and the pay was this good.
Money only flows toward those who don't need it...
And love, too, only finds those who aren't starved for it.
"Whatever the case... with this money, I can settle in comfortably out here in the countryside and focus on cultivating..."
Truth be told, since moving to the countryside, Su Ning hadn't cared much about money anyway — he didn't really need it.
He could grow his own vegetables, raise his own chickens, ducks, and fish.
Completely self-sufficient.
And all of it green and pollution-free.
Still, if a little extra income came his way, he wasn't going to turn it down.
210,000 yuan.
The going market rate for hiring someone to fix a program bug was around 2,100 yuan — one hundred times that was 210,000.
Su Ning returned to his room and booted up his computer.
He opened the program files Manager Wang had sent over...
And pulled up the long-familiar rows of code.
Line after line... dense, tightly packed — every one of them the product of his own sweat and blood, the fruit of countless days and nights.
He had to admit, he was rather impressed with his past self.
To have built something this substantial.
Fixing the bugs and sorting out the errors was actually simple, because this was code Su Ning had written himself — he could see at a glance exactly where the problem was.
His fingers tapped across the keyboard a few times.
The whole thing took no more than two minutes, start to finish.
Nothing major.
Just something an ordinary person would never be able to find.
"Done."
Two minutes.
Two minutes, and he'd earned 210,000 yuan.
Something he wouldn't have dared dream of before.
And another thing...
Turns out that shady company he used to work for wasn't exactly poor — they could casually throw out 210,000 yuan as a fee without blinking. How could they be poor?
"Sure enough... looking for work doesn't make you money. Only when work comes looking for you... can you actually make money." Su Ning shrugged.
If he were still employed at that shady company right now, fixing a bug like this would be taken completely for granted. Do it well and there's no reward; do it poorly and you get chewed out.
Su Ning had handled problems like this more times than he could count. Hundreds of times? Thousands?
And almost never any compensation for it...
With the work done, Su Ning thought it over... and didn't immediately send the fixed files to Manager Wang.
Instead, he sent a message: "This problem of yours is pretty serious — I don't think it'll be sorted out in under a week!"
A reply came quickly: "What? That long? Brother Ning... can you speed it up at all? Things are really urgent over here..."
"Hmm, alright... I'll push myself — I'll get it done in five days. That's genuinely the fastest I can manage," Su Ning replied.
Ding — "Received a red envelope of 8,888 yuan from Manager Wang!"
Manager Wang didn't waste words — he sent a cash incentive on the spot.
"Brother Ning, see if you can think of anything to speed it up even more!" It was clear Manager Wang was truly in a bind — otherwise he wouldn't have paid one hundred times the rate without batting an eye.
And now, without so much as a flicker, he'd transferred another 8,888 yuan.
Something clicked in Su Ning's mind...
So Manager Wang wasn't actually stingy — he was just stingy toward his own employees?
"Manager Wang is generous. Since you're being so open-handed, I'll go all out — two days. I'll work through the night, two days and I'll have it done for you!" Su Ning declared with great righteousness.
On the other end of the line, Manager Wang finally felt a small measure of relief.
Brother Su Ning... what a stand-up guy. How had he never noticed how stand-up he was before?
"Thank you, thank you... Sorry for the trouble, Brother Ning. If there's ever an opportunity, I'll definitely make it up to you properly!" Manager Wang felt genuinely touched.
"Think nothing of it! Take a man's coin, spare a man's pain!" Su Ning said breezily.
"'Take a man's coin, spare a man's pain' — that's true enough. But the results could come in two days, or they could come in a week. When they come says everything about whether Brother Ning is a man of his word. I have to say... you really are the real deal," Manager Wang thought Su Ning was something else.
"Glad you see it that way... Alright, that's enough for now — I'd better get to work. We'll talk later," Su Ning said.
"Of course, I won't keep you." Manager Wang was full of gratitude.
And then... Su Ning went off to happily make dinner.
Moving at a leisurely pace, perfectly at ease...
Meanwhile, Manager Wang was under the impression that Su Ning was locked in a desperate battle with the code.
If he ever found out that Su Ning had actually wrapped it up in two minutes and spent the rest of the time being lazy... who knows what he'd think?
As for whether Su Ning himself felt any guilt about it?
He took the money with a perfectly clear conscience.
He didn't know if it was because cultivation had sharpened his mind, but many of his actions had become a great deal more clever.
Take this situation, for instance... If he'd sent the files over to Manager Wang in two minutes flat, the man would have thought he'd solved it with a few casual keystrokes — and felt that 200,000-plus yuan was money poorly spent.
But tell him it was difficult... that it would take a long time — and he'd feel the money was absolutely worth every cent, that this was exactly how it should be!
Cultivation... had truly made Su Ning evolve.
In the old days, he would have sent the files straight to Manager Wang the moment he was done... Now, things were different.