In a remote, impoverished mountain village, a boy named Li Ming clenches a pen in his calloused hands, determined to rewrite his fate.
His parents died young, and his grandmother is frail. He scrapes by on leftovers and wild greens, barely keeping hunger at bay. By day, he is the poor kid in patched clothes in his classmates' eyes. By night, he is a stubborn figure curled beneath a kerosene lamp, poring over old textbooks. Fate has never been kind to him, but he believes, "As long as I can still crawl forward, I will never give up."
When an acceptance letter from a prestigious high school lands in his hands, the whole village laughs: "A sparrow from a mountain ravine thinks it can become a phoenix?"
But Li Ming slings his moldy quilt over his back, steps into worn-out cloth shoes, and walks into the city's steel jungle. There, he faces an even harsher reality: his classmates ostracize him, his part-time jobs humiliate him, and he nearly drops out because he cannot pay tuition. Yet the turning point in his fate lies hidden in an abandoned copy of The Legends of Business in the library.
As everyone mocks him for "dreaming the impossible," he grits his teeth and writes his first startup project in code. When his partner betrays him and his funding dries up, he scrapes together one last shot at success by setting up a stall beneath an overpass.
Until one day, the name once trampled into the mud becomes the brightest presence on the list of rising tech tycoons...
This is an underdog's declaration of war on fate: from scavenging trash to commanding a multibillion-dollar empire, from huddling in a leaky hut to standing on the Nasdaq bell-ringing platform, he proves with blood and tears that poverty can crush your backbone, but it can also temper the strongest bones.
