In his previous life, Song Ye threw himself into the city’s cutthroat world of money and fame, hoping to make something of himself. He spent half his life striving, earned plenty of money, and ruined his health. He didn’t even have anyone by his side he could speak to from the heart. As he lay dying, what he longed for most wasn’t the city’s skyscrapers. It was the sea near Qingshan Village, his hometown, the mountain beside it, and the smoke drifting above his courtyard.
When he wakes up, he’s back in 1997, twenty-two years old, at the very best age of his life.
With the Yellow Sea before it and green mountains behind, Qingshan Village is full of resources that nobody has yet thought to value. What others see as barren backcountry, he sees as treasure. He doesn’t go to the city for work or start a business with anyone. He stays on his own patch of land and makes a warm, thriving life for himself.
A wild boar charging into his courtyard earns him the village’s first firearms license. An unremarkable stretch of tidal flats yields basins full of plump sea cucumbers. Wild rabbits and roe deer from the mountains, crabs and abalone from the sea: all become valuable commodities in his hands. While others are still worrying about having enough to eat, he has already built a spacious brick house, with meat at every meal and a surplus every year.
But life is about more than fine food from the mountains and sea. His second granduncle’s tobacco pipe, his mother’s warm kang, a bowl of dumplings from the neighbors, and muddy feet after gathering seafood at low tide: these simple comforts are what he truly wants to get back.
In this life, he seeks neither fame nor profit. He only wants to roam the hills in the spring breeze and return from the sea at sunset, dreaming of his little village and making his ordinary days into a life others can only envy.
