1991: The Era of Hong Kong Dramas

The weather in Hong Kong in April is very humid and hot, with a prolonged period of high humidity, which Huo Sheng found very difficult to adjust to.

The dormitory wall tiles were covered with fine water droplets, which would seep back out after being wiped away.

The kapok flowers on the street corner have bloomed, about ten days earlier than in previous years, but they hang listlessly on the branches, the edges of the petals rusty, as if they have been rotten by the dampness.

However, the crew of "The Greed of Man" was not affected by the weather at all, and the group went out to shoot outdoor scenes in high spirits.

The reason is simple: today is the payday that office workers love most.

Huo Sheng also received his monthly bonus of 16000 yuan, plus the additional bonus from the production team, for a total of 34000 yuan.

He did the math: he had been with TVB for four months, earning about HK$20,000 per month for the first three months, and with his original savings, he was about to reach HK$100,000.

This gave him some confidence, and he was able to achieve his initial goals.

That is to settle down in Hong Kong.

In fact, he has never felt safe here.

Anyone suddenly sent to an unfamiliar place would feel worried and panicked, but he wouldn't show it on his face. It will probably take more time, until he finds a place to settle down in Hong Kong, before he can barely calm down.

But the 100,000 yuan he has now isn't a small amount, but it's not a lot either; it can't buy anything substantial, let alone a house.

In 1992, Hong Kong's property market had already experienced several rounds of price increases. A 500-square-foot unit in Taikoo Shing was priced at over two million dollars, and even entry-level homes for the average middle class started at around one million dollars. The amount of money he had wasn't even enough for a down payment on a village house in the suburbs.

Although he could afford to pay off the mortgage and borrow money from the bank, repaying it slowly over twenty years, Huo Sheng has only been with TVB for a short time, so it's uncertain whether the bank would accept his income certificate.

The only ones you can actually touch are the old tenement buildings built in the 1960s, in the Sham Shui Po and Mong Kok areas. A subdivided flat of about 100 square feet costs around 300,000 to 400,000 HKD.

However, in that kind of place, people live upstairs and salted fish are sold downstairs. The light bulb in the corridor has been broken for half a year and no one has replaced it. Portland Street downstairs is more lively after 10 pm than during the day.

Therefore, he had to find a way to make more money from the 100,000 yuan he had.

But how exactly to utilize it remains a question.

First of all, he doesn't want to touch stocks. He disliked them in his past life, and in this life, the original owner even committed suicide because of stock trading. He deeply abhors this stuff.

Moreover, with the current economic downturn, many stocks are long-term investments that require more than a decade to realize returns of several hundred times. Buying them now may not yield the same rapid appreciation as housing prices.

Secondly, although Huo Sheng didn't watch much football, he figured betting on Argentina couldn't hurt. However, he discovered that the Hong Kong World Cup lottery hadn't even started operating yet.

As for taking 100,000 yuan to do foreign trade or finance, please, he only knew how to write articles in his previous life. It's unrealistic for him to become a financial expert just by time-traveling.

After thinking it over and over, Huo Sheng couldn't come up with any ideas, so he decided to fix his computer first and look online for ways to make money.

He went directly to the accountant.

However, cash flow isn't very fast these days, and the extra funds still haven't arrived. But the accountant said that Wai Ka-fai had already made arrangements; if he urgently needed the money, it could be drawn from another budget first, and then the difference could be made up once the funds arrived.

Huo Sheng naturally had no objections. He filled out the form, went through the procedures, and after receiving the cash from the safe, he took Ning Wan to buy a computer.

He didn't trust anyone else with this task, preferring to make the trip himself.

Anyway, after working hard these past few days, he has finished the first thirty episodes of "The Greed of Man," enough to film for quite a while, so even Wai Ka-fai doesn't look for him much anymore.

The "Golden Computer Market" in Hong Kong is located in Sham Shui Po and is a well-known "computer building" mecca.

Huo Sheng went straight there and quickly picked out the accessories and bought them back.

These days, branded computers are ridiculously expensive. A Compaq 486DX33 costs HK$3.3, which is more than a year's salary for an average wage earner.

However, assembling a machine with the same configuration in Sham Shui Po would only cost around eight thousand dollars, saving him a significant amount of money, so he naturally chose the latter.

After selecting the computer, he went to apply for internet service, then went to claim his bill and pay off the remaining balance, and then reapplied for the computer. After going through a long and complicated process, the computer became the office tool provided to him by the film crew.

Then he carried the computer back to his office and assembled it himself. He hadn't really handled this kind of basic equipment much before, but with the instruction manual, it wasn't too difficult for him.

The machine was quickly assembled on the desk, and a telephone line was run, along with a modem. Theoretically, the internet speed should be 33.6Kbps, but in reality, it's hard to say whether it will even reach 3K.

This computer cost over eight thousand Hong Kong dollars. It runs Windows 3.1 with a graphical interface, which is much better than DOS.

Huo Sheng tried it out and silently compared it in his mind—it was probably much worse than the earliest Windows 95 model he had encountered before he transmigrated, but in this day and age, it was already considered a good product.

However, the dream of getting rich by investing in Microsoft stock is basically over; it will have to wait for the 95th anniversary of its release before it can see a significant surge...

This doesn't matter; there will be plenty of opportunities in the future. Even if it's not Zhang San, it will be Li Si.

He started typing on the keyboard and using the mouse to study the current internet, only to find that the content in front of him was primitive and almost rudimentary.

There were no web pages, no browsers, and no global information network. The screen only had a text-based interface. Apart from university databases, Gopher text directories, and research institution files, there was almost no complete Chinese content, let alone any website.

The so-called "going online" actually meant logging into Usenet newsgroups—the only global forum of that era—and communicating through text posts.

He casually typed in commands and entered some of the most popular discussion forums in Hong Kong: hk.music and hk.entertainment.

The page is entirely in Traditional Chinese, with a dense scrolling of chats from audiophiles, radio DJs, record industry professionals, and university students discussing recent TV dramas, new songs, and music scene developments.

It has a similar feel to the old Baidu Tieba.

Huo Sheng studied aimlessly for a while and felt that with the current network conditions, it was simply unrealistic to do business on the Internet and make a fortune by exploiting information gaps.

The infrastructure is too poor, there are too few users, and the content is too scarce.

But he wasn't completely disappointed.

Even the smallest mosquito is still a threat; if there's no reward, swat a couple of mosquitoes first.

If he gets another inspiration, there are plenty of avenues he can explore.

He was about to leave the forum and look elsewhere when his gaze suddenly fell on a newly posted thread on the hk.music page.

Priscilla Chan's album "Come Back" is a huge hit, and "Snowing" is especially good! The original song is an adaptation of a Japanese song!

In an instant, the entire hk.music page was flooded with the song "Snowing".

The newsgroup doesn't have a nested reply function; if you want to comment, you have to post directly. This can easily lead to a page full of the same topic.

Now, the whole page laments that half of Hong Kong's music scene relies on covers of Japanese songs, and many people are saying that Hong Kong has not yet bought the copyrights to many classic Japanese melodies, which is simply a hidden gold mine.

Seeing this, Huo Sheng paused for a moment as he moved the mouse.