A Mortal Bone Defies Fate

From the moment Zhan Houcheng was born and cried, his tragic fate was already written. In 1978, to secure control of the family fortune, the wealthy Shen clan of the provincial capital switched him with his twin and sent him to a county in the watery countryside. They fabricated a curse branding him a born harbinger of disaster, then joined forces with the clan and fortune-tellers to design a lifetime of misery for him: abandoned by his foster parents as a child, shunned by every neighbor, deliberately cut off from his education, and blocked at every turn from earning a living. The ropes of fate tightened around him more and more.

Born on the edge of a precipice, Zhan Houcheng has no mystical golden finger or violent strength with which to fight back. Instead, he masters the policies, laws, contracts, and industry rules of the reform era, relying on his intelligence and playing by the rules as he struggles forward one step at a time. He starts with a street stall, uses public livelihood policies to enter an official market, and breaks the merchants' monopoly. From a discarded son of the countryside, he enters the provincial capital's business world and confronts the wealthy elite who wrote his fate for him.

He refuses to bow to fate. Along the way, he and Yi Meijing save each other, he clears his name in court, and he brings the scheming factions to justice. Just as the right to inherit a fortune is within his grasp and he is poised to rise to the top, he willingly gives up the wealth and power, breaks free of the family bloodline's game, and escapes the tragic life others wrote for him.

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.