Xie Chuan lived once, and died once.
In his previous life, he retook the college entrance exam for two years and got into a first-tier university to study computer science. He spent seventeen years coding at an outsourcing company, only to be laid off at forty-one. A mortgage payment of 7,500, a car loan of 3,200, his child's tuition, his parents' medicine bills: those figures pressed him inch by inch into the ground, until he died in front of a computer in a rented apartment.
When he opened his eyes again, it was the summer of 2007. The college entrance exam had just ended, and his score was still only enough for a second-tier university. His father was still a worker at a fertilizer plant, always on the verge of being laid off. His mother's fingers were still covered in bandages from odd jobs. Cicadas screamed like mad, and the internet cafes were full of people playing The Journey and Legend.
Everyone told him to retake the exam, saying it was his only way forward. But he had already seen where that road led.
Starting with game scripts written in a corner of an internet cafe, then tools that helped online sellers list products in bulk, and finally taking on capital head-to-head, he spent twenty years going from a rented apartment in Jiangxia to the poker table. Along the way were brothers who climbed out of the mud with him, a veteran section chief who opened a door for him when things were at their worst, and capital behemoths that nearly swallowed him whole.
And the future stored in his mind, every wave of the internet and every turning point in the rise and fall of its giants, was his biggest trump card. But playing a card changed the game. From the moment the first card hit the table, history was no longer the same history.
This is not a story about being reborn with a cheat. It's the story of an ordinary man who needed two lifetimes to learn how to stand firm in the current.
The river flows year after year. Some are swept away, while others make it to shore. Xie Chuan just doesn't want to be swept away a second time.
