In 2010, Shi Feng was a fifty-year-old teacher at a rural middle school. He had once been a brilliant graduate of a teachers’ university. In thirty years of teaching, he had nurtured countless students. But the principal, who had risen through connections, looked down on him, and he was repeatedly passed over and bullied whenever awards, honors, or promotions were handed out. After witnessing the local town mayor brazenly bullying ordinary people, Shi Feng was overcome with anger, suffered a heart attack, and lost consciousness. When he awoke, he was back one month before the 1981 college entrance exam.
Shi Feng had grown up in a poor village and was now a high school student. He had first taken the college entrance exam in 1979, scoring twenty points above the technical school cutoff, but his admission letter never arrived. Unwilling to accept it, he worked at a brick factory for a month, saved up thirty yuan for tutoring, and studied for another year. In the 1980 exam, he scored fifteen points above his province’s junior college cutoff, but still received no admission letter. After that, Shi Feng worked while continuing to study. Now, with another college entrance exam just around the corner, he had been reborn.
His memories of his previous life revealed the truth: someone had stolen his place in both exams. He couldn’t get justice in his previous life, but what about this one? What should he do? First, he’d rank first in the whole province and see how they planned to steal his place then!
What should he do after that? Become an official, of course. Get into Jing University, find allies, and seek powerful patrons, especially those veteran comrades who had yet to be rehabilitated. Then he’d advance step by step, climbing higher and higher. With thirty years of future experience, why shouldn’t he reach the very top?
Reborn in the turbulent 1980s, a teacher changed his life and became a civil servant. He will eventually rise to the forefront and become an outcast of the era.