A rising star in academia, who died horribly in a laboratory data leak in 2025, opens his eyes to find himself in 1980, hung from the village entrance’s locust tree as a “speculator.” Facing the onlookers’ spit and a salt-soaked rope, Zhou Zhiyuan clenches his bleeding left hand. The paper bearing the “2025 Solid-State Battery Manufacturing Formula” is searingly revealing a new line: “Countdown to the grain procurement price increase: 7 days.”
As his wife, a history major, a lover who studies materials science, and a beautiful financial reporter enter his life one after another, his left hand wipes grease off the commune’s tractor while his right lays the first covert piece in a technological empire in the Special Economic Zone. From using the laws of thermodynamics to turn the tables on a village bully, to riding the momentum of Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour to establish China’s first private enterprise national key laboratory; from ticket scalpers outside the Shenzhen Stock Exchange to the operator holding technological leverage under the table at WTO negotiations, this “reactionary academic authority” in the eyes of the academic establishment races along the tightrope of the dual-track system, carrying the seeds of technology from three eras.
But the blood-red paper that keeps predicting major historical turning points bears a final countdown, 1980–2010. Is it a bargaining chip gifted by being reborn, or a death warrant issued by fate? When the temperature of his left palm passes 42 degrees, the man standing before the monument to his era will finally uncover the shocking truth behind his transmigration…
