In 1987, the winds of reform and opening up had only just reached Suifenhe, a remote border town in the far north.
Twenty-five-year-old Chen Anzhi is reborn with only eighty-one yuan in his pocket. His mother is critically ill in the hospital, his younger sister is about to drop out of school, and his father is being pressured by relatives to transfer his timber quota.
In his previous life, he spent forty years building a trillion-yuan business empire, only to find weeds growing over his parents' graves and become a stranger to his wife and daughter. This time, he decides to start over at the market right under his feet.
Other people set up stalls to make a living. He sets his up to crush the competition. Clear prices, buy five get one free, refunds and exchanges accepted: three policies no one at a 1987 market has ever seen, earning him enough in a single day to cover his mother's medical bills.
Other people take risks moving goods. He does it for precise arbitrage. The price gap for sugar between north and south, seasonal fluctuations in wool prices, shortages of Soviet light industry goods: every information gap is the starting point for his snowballing fortune.
From a small-time vendor at the Suifenhe market to a border trader and then an industrialist in the south, Chen Anzhi seeks more than financial freedom. He wants a whole family and the dignity of a man who rides the tide of his times.
In this life, everything he was owed will be paid back. Not one person he wants to protect will be lost.
