I'm Down 20,000 at Month's End: What Should I Do? Asking Online

This book is also known as "28 Millimeters"

On April 1, 2028, Lin Zhiqiang died in a hospital bed.

His final sight was his son walking away without looking back.

He snapped awake. His phone screen glowed: April 1, 2018.

Lin Zhiqiang stared at the date for three minutes, then called his wife. “Zhou Yun, find my dad’s set square.”

“What do you need that old thing for?”

“To measure my fate.”

No one knew that this small factory owner, a middle-school dropout, would turn himself into a legend over the next 22 years.

He taught himself to code. When he wrote his first line of code, tears welled in his eyes: in the year he had dreamed of, he lost 200,000 yuan.

He stockpiled 200 packs of face masks and gave them all away after the outbreak began. His friends called him a fool. “In my dream, I sold them for 300,000 yuan, and after that no one would do business with me,” he said.

He created software that kept hundreds of small factories on the verge of bankruptcy alive.

He took a job at an old villa in Xiamen and lost 170,000 yuan, but left behind one rule: handleless cabinet doors should have a 28-millimeter gap. That measurement let even an eighty-year-old wearing gloves open the cabinet.

The set square had been left to him by his father. Two words were engraved on the back: Measure the heart.

Some said he was lucky. Only he knew he was simply trying to escape a dream.

In the dream, he died in 2028, and his son didn’t look back before he died.

So he coded with all his might, built software with all his might, and tried desperately to be good to everyone, all because he wanted to change that ending.

Twenty-two years later, on the day the company went public