Shi Ran has a secret: she has lived through ninety-nine lifetimes. She has been a general, a physician, a famous performer, an artisan, an emperor… She has tried every kind of life. When the System asks what she wants to do in her next life, she says, “Lie flat. I’ll coast through college, save no one, and the world can leave me alone.”
So she becomes a freshman in the archaeology department at A University, planning to keep a low profile until this life is over. But she never expects archaeology to be where she gets exposed. She can restore bronze artifacts with her bare hands, distinguish three thousand kinds of soil at a glance, and read lost ancient Western Regions scripts. Her mentor makes an exception to take her on as a student, her senior schoolmates all turn into her fans, and the whole university is abuzz: A goddess of a junior has arrived in the archaeology department.
Then there’s Gu Linyuan, making things even more complicated.
The head of the Gu family and a ruthless king of the business world, he is afflicted by a curse spanning nine lifetimes and won’t live past twenty-eight. He comes to the archaeology department to find an artifact that can break the curse, only to realize that the “ordinary student” he hired is anything but ordinary. When they encounter danger in a tomb, she knocks away every hidden weapon with one hand. Faced with poisonous mist in an ancient tomb, she calmly concocts an antidote. Before a beast guarding the tomb, she speaks a phrase in an ancient language no one understands, and the creature bows its head and retreats.
He presses her to tell him who she really is.
She doesn’t say. He’ll find out sooner or later: she didn’t come here to study archaeology. She came to save him. In every one of her ninety-nine lives, he has died for her. She has spent ninety-nine lifetimes preparing for this one, and she won’t let him die again.
