A Corporate Drone Returns to Senior Year: Good at Making Money, Bad at Exams

Tired of the "reborn and instantly overpowered" trope?

Ruan Xingye takes you back to the real 2008. The soul of a 30-year-old office drone is crammed into the body of a 17-year-old girl from a small city in Northeast China. She has no golden finger, only chilblains beneath her school uniform and Jay Chou stickers in her desk.

This isn't a myth about turning stones into gold. It's about "mending" things through the bitter winter. With an adult's clear-eyed perspective and a girl's stubbornness, she clumsily calculates how to get by beside a leaking radiator and atop an icy desk. She counts every penny at the market and trudges through the snow, one step sinking deeper than the next.

Here you'll find shaved ice in an enamel mug, whispers beneath the New Year's fireworks, and countless nights spent torn between "studying" and "making money." This is the story of an ordinary person, warming herself little by little with hands reddened by the cold, in the narrow cracks of the times.

If life has ever hurt you, perhaps you'll see a version of yourself in the girl who grits her teeth and keeps going.