Stormy Shanghai, 1910
Financial genius Lu Chenzhou falls to his death in 2020 and is reborn. When he opens his eyes, he finds himself in Shanghai in 1910.
His family is on the brink of bankruptcy. Foreign merchants and compradors have joined forces to set a trap, and a gambling debt of eighty thousand taels of silver hangs over his head. He has just one month. The rubber stock crash is about to sweep through Shanghai, and he is the only one who knows it is coming.
With two thousand taels of silver as his stake, he shorts the market and rakes in forty thousand taels in just three days.
But that is only the beginning.
William Hardoon, the underground emperor of Shanghai, is an opium dealer, a real estate tycoon, and the invisible power behind the Shanghai Municipal Council. He greets this inexperienced young man with a venomous smile.
“Shanghai is my chessboard,” Hardoon says.
Lu Chenzhou stands by the Huangpu River. Behind him are a fallen genius he picked up beneath a bridge over Suzhou Creek, an investigative reporter whose hand was cut off, and a printing-house owner blacklisted by the entire industry. He says one thing to the river breeze:
“I didn’t come here to play on someone else’s chessboard.”
“I came to flip it over.”
From financial warfare to intelligence battles, from newspaper influence to national industry, he uses knowledge from a century in the future to unleash a storm in Shanghai that will change the nation’s destiny. The fate of the country, the rise and fall of fortunes, an epic tale of comeback and sacrifice begins.
But no one knows that the price of changing history is being reckoned against him, inch by inch.
The plum tree that blossoms in midsummer is already waiting for him.
