On his thirty-fourth birthday, nobody remembered.
Except his mother, who sent him a WeChat message: "Binbin, happy birthday! When are you bringing home a partner?"
Pei Chengbin stared at the screen, his nose stinging.
The next second, the computer asked him: What age would you like to return to?
He chose seventeen.
Not because he wanted to turn his life around, but because he wanted to see them again:
The family that used to celebrate his birthday, his mother when she was still young, and the era he had not yet missed.
"With stock ticker symbols from twenty years in the future in my head, how could I lose?"
He memorized the numbers for the five-hundred-million grand prize, the rise of Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu, and every single one of the hardest questions on the college entrance exam.
He returned to March 14, 2004, at precisely 12:00:13 a.m.
He stole 3,500 yuan from the hidden compartment in the grandfather clock and bought 150 lottery tickets.
He installed the Squirrel Browser for his older cousin, who thought he had gone crazy.
He looked at the ice-cold campus goddess and said, "In this life, the top scorer will be me."
But becoming the richest man was not what he wanted most.
He wanted to take his parents out to eat on the day the lottery results were announced,
order a whole table of red-braised pork ribs, and tell them:
"From now on, I'll take care of you."
[Making money and face-slapping early on, then building a technological empire. Slow to warm up, but satisfying.]
