Chen Mo, a top-tier business tycoon, is reborn in 1990, in the summer after failing his college entrance exams. He only wants to make up for his regrets and enjoy a leisurely retirement, but he gets bound to an absurd “Retirement Points System”: work hard to make money and lose points; take life easy and grow stronger. So Chen Mo, who had planned to lie flat, begins his “reluctant workday” routine. He makes a little pocket money from stocks, and the System warns him: “Excessive effort detected. Host loses 100 points!” His rivals go all-out in business warfare and bring about their own ruin, while he just wants to sip tea and read the paper, yet everyone sees him as a unfathomably cunning “old fox.” When the people he has reunited with quietly gather around him and Chen Mo finally saves enough points to retire, the System’s ultimate mission arrives: “Build a global business empire, or forfeit all rewards.” Chen Mo looks at the business empire he somehow built and smiles wryly. “I really just wanted to be a lazy fish!”
From then on, Lin Yang is forced to weave between the System’s outrageous antics and the surging business world of the 1990s. He copies snack foods with his cutting-edge vision and plays the stock market with a futuristic mindset, writing his own rags-to-riches story amid the roaring early years of reform and opening up.
He thinks he’s using the System to change his fate. Then his nemesis appears, a crisis strikes, and the System runs out of energy. As its cold mechanical voice speaks for the last time, it turns into a gentle sigh: “Idiot, this time… live well.”
It turns out every absurd mission was born of a deep love that crossed the boundary between life and death, burning away memories. This time, he must protect not only his family, but also the one who, hidden deep within the code, reversed time for him and never came back.
