I was once a shooting star streaking across the night sky, brilliant for an instant before falling into the mud. For forty-two years, I swallowed the burn of whiskey beneath the dim lights of bars, beside a battered guitar, along with dreams that had long since gone cold. I thought my end, saving someone on a rainy night, would be the final footnote to my wretched life.
When I opened my eyes, I had become Lin Jin, a nineteen-year-old impoverished college student whose parents were dead and who depended on his younger sister. The world was familiar, yet utterly changed. The melodies, words, and images I had once looked up to, praised, and believed immortal had never existed here. This was a cultural wasteland, where polished but hollow canned music was popular and the written word was piled high with pale, formulaic plots.
And I had arrived here carrying the cultural treasures of an entire world from my previous life.
It seemed like a second chance from heaven, an exam paper with all the answers filled in. But when I tried to sing the first line from the depths of my soul, I discovered that the price of perfectly recreating those classics was the quiet erosion of my own memories, emotions, and experiences from my previous life, like a sandcastle crumbling away. When I sang “Father,” the warm image of my own father grew a little blurrier. When I played the melody that had kept me company through my loneliest years, the colors of those years themselves began to fade.
I used the ashes of “Wang Jinyan” to light the torch of “Lin Jin.”
From stunning everyone at the campus music club, to quietly making a name for myself on independent platforms; from subtle clashes with the proud child prodigy Chen Hao, to meeting Shen Xinghe, a music artisan devoted to preserving music's purity; from protecting the undying starlight in my younger sister Lin Xiaoyu's eyes, to confronting the cold rules of this world's entertainment industry and its corporate behemoths...
