In 2026, 30-year-old Lin Yao quit her job. She never imagined that after falling asleep, she would transmigrate to Dali in the year 2000 and become the 18-year-old heir to a family-run guesthouse.
All the previous owner left her was a complete mess: “Above the Clouds,” a guesthouse by Erhai Lake that her parents had impulsively opened after retiring from government jobs. Poor management had brought it to the brink of closure. The accounts were empty, the utility bills overdue, and its only long-term guests were two broke backpackers.
Luckily, she still had the side-hustle skills she’d picked up in her previous life: she could edit videos, knew her way around a camera, and understood what made a place Instagram-worthy. Even more unexpectedly, she successfully bonded with a tourism System powered by AI from the future.
From painting the walls herself and scouring the market for old boat timber to make a tea table, to planting her first succulent garden and putting up a sign that read “I Miss You So Much by Erhai Lake”; from replacing the mattresses with memory foam and establishing rigorous cleaning protocols, to taking guests to local markets and on hikes, and holding handmade soap workshops, she used a forward-thinking approach to slowly bring the rundown little courtyard back to life.
Over the next ten years, she got the guesthouse featured in newspapers and on television. It even attracted the variety show Home Away from Home, and celebrities like Chen Daoming stayed there and raved about it. From a little courtyard no one had heard of, Guiqi became a landmark guesthouse renowned across the country.
But more important than business was preserving its human touch. When investors came calling and copycat establishments sprang up everywhere, she chose not to expand, focusing instead on deepening the guesthouse’s cultural roots.
This is a story about slowing down, and about a worker left behind by her times finding a place to belong in another era. It’s a heartwarming tale of finding home.
Very nice book 📖.