In 2036, forty-four-year-old programmer Jiang Yan was notified by an AI that he was being laid off.
In the final ten minutes of his employment, he discovered that the System taking over his job was exceeding its permissions and deleting audit records that were supposed to be preserved.
When he opened his eyes again, he was back in 2014.
Twenty-two years old, in the spring of graduation.
Forty-seven minutes remained before the school server was mistakenly rebooted.
He had no System, no AI cheat, and no ready-made answers from the future to copy.
All Jiang Yan had were twenty-two years of experience earned through pitfalls, failures, accidents, and losing everything.
Preventing one accident earned him 1,200 yuan.
Writing a piece of software brought him his first customer willing to pay.
When a 50,000-yuan buyout contract was put in front of him, he refused to sell his source code.
Starting out as a graduate who had even missed the final interview for campus recruitment, Jiang Yan decided to start a business again.
This time, he didn’t want to be a cog in anyone else’s company.
He wanted every line of code he wrote to truly belong to him.
But as “Candlelight” made its way into real companies, a sun emblem that shouldn’t have existed in 2014 appeared once more...
Had the thing that laid him off twenty-two years later really not been created yet?
