Lu Yuan died at one in the morning on November 11, 2026, just as the sales report on the big screen hit nine digits.
When he opened his eyes again, it was June 2003 in Hangzhou. Cicadas buzzed outside the window, and an old oscillating fan creaked overhead. He was twenty-two. His family’s convenience store owed 28,000 yuan, the warehouse was stacked with two truckloads of unsold washing powder and three hundred emergency lamps, and creditors were blocking the door. They gave him three days.
In his previous life, he had run a business processing a million orders a day. This time, he had nothing: no System, no capital, no warehouse, and not even a decent delivery vehicle.
All he had were rows of apartment stairwells and one household after another.
Back then, nobody believed you could sell things through a screen. The words "e-commerce" were tucked into newspaper columns, parcels took a week to arrive, and anyone who bought a bag of washing powder had to carry it up five flights of stairs themselves.
Lu Yuan set up a blackboard outside the store:
"Washing powder delivered to your door, eight yuan a bag. Get ten bags for the whole building, and save another fifty cents if you live above the sixth floor."
In one afternoon, he recruited seventeen building reps.
From clearing two truckloads of dead stock to capitalizing on a power shortage; from being blacklisted by the wholesale market to becoming a market of his own; from one blackboard to staking ten months of the store’s profits on a website no one understood yet.
The cake is already in the oven. This time, he wants to hold the knife that cuts it.
