Back to 1998: from Unemployed to Richest Man

At the age of forty-five, on the rainy night when he was fired from the company, Wang Jian was walking on the road holding a cardboard box and found a name in his address book that he had not typed in more than ten years. He hesitated and didn't dial. Then a van hit. Open your eyes again, August 12, 1998. He was eighteen years old and had just finished his college entrance examination. His mother was sitting by the bed peeling an apple, and his father was talking to the doctor in the corridor. They were all still alive, so young that it made him want to cry. In his previous life, his parents disappeared mysteriously in the winter of his sophomore year. The doors and windows were intact, his savings were untouched, and they disappeared from the world. He searched for more than twenty years and found nothing. In this life, he remembers every major event in the next twenty-five years. Stamps, treasury bills, the stock market, Internet cafes, domain names, real estate, gold is everywhere, and he knows where to dig with every shovel. But he remembered one thing more: in January 2000, that winter, he would never let his parents disappear again. He clenched the corners of the quilt so tightly that his knuckles turned white. The machines in the textile factory outside the window rumbled like a countdown to fate.