Above the Well's Edge

Wu Hao, 28, is a young man from a small town, forced by his father to stay in the county seat under threat of suicide. Zhang Xueyan, 26, is the office’s perennial “nice girl,” passed over for promotion every time. Then the mysterious Qiu Shilin hands them an unsigned manual, filled with “rules for the strong”: leave your hometown, stop letting people take advantage of you, set boundaries, build relationships with influential people...

They believe in it. Over the next ten years, Wu Hao goes from food-delivery rider to founder of a publicly listed company, while Zhang Xueyan rises from a junior employee whose work gets stolen to the head of a trillion-yuan fund. They cut ties with their families, abandon intimate relationships, and learn to be “quietly ruthless.” At last, they climb to the edge of the well and see the real sky.

Then they discover that Qiu Shilin wrote the manual, and they were nothing more than subjects in a controlled experiment. The rules that made them successful were also a curse that left them lonely.

Beyond the edge of the well is no finish line. It is the discovery that there is another sky beyond the sky.

A novel about awakening to new ways of thinking, written for people aged 25 to 35 who are struggling to climb out of the well.