Xu Zheng is just an ordinary buyer at a secondhand shop.
Until one day, he discovers that whenever he touches an old object, he has a chance to see a brief scene from its past.
A broken camera nobody wanted earns him his first bit of money. An old grandfather clock with a replaced casing teaches him for the first time that seeing the past doesn't mean knowing the answer.
From small deals worth a few hundred yuan to helping people recover old objects, identify their origins, and clear out entire batches of secondhand goods; from a street-corner thrift shop to collectors' circles, consignment sales, and larger markets for antiques, Xu Zheng meets more and more people, and the goods in his hands grow ever more valuable.
Some people care about the price, some about whether an item is genuine, and some want to know where it came from.
Xu Zheng can see a few seconds further into the past than anyone else.
What he wants to do has never been just to score a few bargains.
He wants to turn old things that others can't make sense of into a business of his own.
