When someone has had enough bad luck, it can feel as if fate itself has arranged everything around them to bring about one particular outcome. Chen Deyi has always felt that way. A young man from modern-day China, he dies in a fire and is reborn in the Republican era. His mother dies when he is one, his father when he is two, then his father's old friends, his senior fellow disciple, the housekeeper… Chen Deyi thinks glumly, “If this is all Heaven’s script, couldn’t you at least make the process run a little more smoothly?”
Then he finds himself standing at the gates of Hogwarts, stunned. ‘I thought this was a Republican-era story!’
