In her previous life, Lin Wan was trapped in a cubicle, working 996 hours. She spent her whole life giving up halfway. She wanted to be a writer, but stopped halfway through a story; she wanted to study music, but her guitar gathered dust and she never finished a song; she wanted to make a short film, but after writing the script, she never dared to start filming. Then she suddenly died at her desk, her life filled with nothing but regrets scribbled across the page: “I could have.”
When she opened her eyes again, she had transmigrated to a parallel world, a cultural wasteland, and become Lin Wan, a recent graduate blacklisted by the entire industry and left with nowhere to turn. She was also bound to a ten-year wager to pass culture between worlds. If she failed, all her memories and talents would be erased, and the Chinese-language classics of both worlds would vanish forever. If she won, she could make up for every regret and live the life she had always envied.
Her mind held all the brilliance of the golden age of Chinese-language culture. She broke through in online fiction, then kept moving forward, one song and one work at a time. She experienced the glory of going viral overnight, and wrestled with the guilt of borrowing other people’s work. She faced capital’s ultimate campaign to crush her, yet held fast to her creative ideals. From someone who merely repackaged classics, she gradually grew into a cultural steward who built a homegrown creative ecosystem and brought Chinese-language culture to the world.
She had arrived many years late, but in the end, she brought that golden age to this cultural wasteland. And all the passions she had never pursued and the dreams she had never realized in her previous life bloomed in this world in the grandest way.
