Two Thousand Years of Being a Broke Ghost

An ancient copper coin changes one person’s fate; nine cycles of reincarnation bear witness to two thousand years of upheaval.

Chen Qiong, a young man in the modern era, was a low-level worker burdened with debt in an urban village. But after saving a mysterious old beggar, he gained the “God of Poverty’s Divine Nature.” From then on, he was forced to travel through the Qin and Han, the Tang and Song, the Yuan and Ming, the late Qing, the Republic of China, and finally the present day. In every life, he was born into utter poverty and had to rely on his wits and hard work to rise from nothing.

Yet fate was cruel. Whenever he finally managed to escape poverty, war, natural disasters, and conspiracies would follow one after another, reducing him to his former state and sending him into the next cycle. More mysteriously, the reincarnation of one woman always appeared in his life, from Qin Yun to A Yun, from Yun Yun to Hua Yun... She shared nine lifetimes of joy and sorrow with him, but each time she died in his arms.

Amid a thousand years of struggle, Chen Qiong gradually uncovers the truth: he bears the mission of the “God of Poverty” and must oppose the “God of Greed,” who devours the world. He witnesses the divide between rich and poor across the dynasties: the struggle to survive amid the chaos at the end of the Qin; land consolidation during the prosperous reign of Emperor Wu of Han; the dark side beneath the Tang dynasty’s glittering prosperity; institutional poverty during the Jingkang crisis of the Northern Song; ethnic oppression beneath the Yuan cavalry; the first stirrings of capitalism during the Ming maritime bans; the national crisis of the Opium Wars in the late Qing; revolutionary awakening amid the turmoil of the Republic of China; the ideals and realities after the founding of the People’s Republic; and the growing pains of the transformation brought by reform and opening up...