Rebirth + scrap collecting + stock trading + urban slice of life
In 2005, in a three-square-meter tin shack in a Dongguan urban village.
Lin Qiang opens his eyes, reborn at the age of twenty-six, when he was at his lowest: just fired from the factory, with only 37 yuan and 50 fen to his name.
In his previous life, he lost all his savings in the stock market. His marriage fell apart, his friends and family turned against him, and in his forties he died alone of illness in a rented room. When he died, there wasn’t even anyone to claim his body.
This time, he’ll settle every last score with his own hands.
With a few dozen yuan borrowed and tucked in his pocket, he pedals a secondhand tricycle from door to door, collecting scrap. Factory security guards give him a hard time, rival scrap dealers muscle in on his sources, and street thugs come looking for trouble. No matter. He spent seventeen years struggling at the bottom in his previous life, and knows the rules of the streets by heart.
Most importantly, he knows which things buried in scrap heaps are treasures nobody recognizes: old Republic-era envelopes, Qing dynasty copper coins, full sheets of Monkey stamps, and discontinued Red Lantern radios. He digs treasures out of scrap heaps and gold from beneath wastepaper. His first pot of gold is hauled in, load by load.
But scrap collecting is only the beginning.
He also knows every boom and bust in China’s A-shares from 2005 to 2008: the market bottom at 998, the nonferrous metals rally, the brokerage stocks’ explosive surge, the sudden overnight announcement on May 30, and the historic peak at 6,124. In his previous life, he lost every last penny in the stock market. This time, he’s diving back in with fifteen years of future knowledge.
He enters the market with 10,000 yuan in capital and precisely targets every major bull stock.
