It was early morning on June 5, 2008, in a rented room in an old apartment building in Jiangcheng’s old district. The protagonist, Li Zhe, was a high school senior about to take the college entrance exam. He was seventeen or eighteen, thin, pale, and had dark circles clearly visible beneath his eyes. He came from a poor family. His father had been hospitalized for a long time with a serious illness, while his mother scraped by doing odd jobs. At that moment, he had just jolted awake from a chaotic memory of dying and discovered that he had been reborn two days before the exam. The room was sparsely furnished, and a handwritten countdown on the wall read, “2 days until the exam.” He had not yet come to terms with the fact that he had been reborn, but the weight of reality was already leaving him breathless.
