In 2026, Wang Hui, a development-zone official, drank himself into a blackout at a banquet. When he opened his eyes, he was back in 1980 on the Huai River flats of northern Anhui, inhabiting the body of eight-year-old Wang Huaigen. Armed with forty-six years of life experience, he climbed out of a manure pile and, faced with an earthen house, a family plot, and his mother's furious glare, began his reborn journey in a state of amused disbelief.
Here, he's the most “precocious” mud-caked kid on the Huai River flats: he blows bubbles for his friends with a condom and draws the whole village's attention, uses his “foresight” to help his family avoid rising grain prices, secretly fixes a radio to pick up Teresa Teng, and tricks Lin Sui from the neighboring village into playing with “slime” made from sweet potato starch in class. From the village primary school to the town middle school, he rides the wave of the 1980s, acting silly and childish while quietly saving up his first nest egg. From the army to the government, he brings the Huai River flats' rough-and-ready methods with him, turns flood-control and disaster relief into a “tactical showcase,” and puts his grassroots-governance savvy to work resolving disputes over homestead plots.
And then there's Lin Sui from the neighboring village, the girl who always wiped his nose and mended his crooked trouser hems. From a girl with braids to a poised young woman, she becomes the warmest presence in his reborn life. From a beginning on a manure pile to a journey aboard a green train, from an earthen house to an office building, Wang Huaigen treads the muddy Huai River flats and turns his second chance into an era-spanning legend, full of laughs, tears, and exhilarating triumphs. After all, who could resist a “prophetic” mud-caked kid armed with memories of the future, taking northern Anhui by storm in the 1980s?
