Chapter 18 Part 1

Long before he ever met Li Zhuo in person, Li Xuan had already etched that name firmly into his mind. There was no special reason—it was simply that the day Li Xuan was reborn happened to be the same day Li Zhuo was born.

Even though more than a decade had passed, he still remembered that day with crystal clarity.

It was the millennium year, the fifth day of the first lunar month. In that rare, once-in-a-thousand-years moment, the streets and alleys brimmed with a festive air many times richer than in ordinary years.

Passersby streamed past in all manner of new clothes, their faces alight with happy smiles as they walked arm in arm with family and friends.

In the corner of a dark, grimy alley, a little boy stood wrapped in thin, tattered clothes that hung several sizes too big for him. The soles of his shoes had come unglued and were barely held in place by rubber bands. His fingers were red and swollen from the cold, his hair a tangled mess, his face smeared with dirt—he looked just like a little beggar.

But he couldn’t have cared less. Not one bit.

He stared at his shrunken hands, quivering with excitement, then kept scanning the half-familiar, half-strange surroundings. Stumbling deeper into the alley, he finally came to a halt before a small, rust-eaten iron door.

Inside, the two or three children who had been waiting for what felt like forever pricked up their ears. The moment they heard approaching footsteps, they couldn’t wait to throw open the door and thrust out their bony arms, voices urgent with hope.

“Well? Well?”

“Did you manage to get anything to eat?”

“Didn’t the granny at the alley entrance say she’d leave us a little something? Was she not home?”

The child outside ignored all those outstretched hands. His breath came in short, quick gasps, his pupils slightly dilated, as he asked the same question over and over: “What year is it right now?!”

“What are you on about?”

“Have you lost your mind?!”

“Ugh, so we’re going hungry again today.”

“…”

The moment he saw those three children, Li Xuan understood exactly when he had been reborn to: the time he was still living in that orphanage.

In this world, there are great benefactors who pour out their hearts and their own money for children they share no blood with, giving the kids in their care a second home. And then there are the utterly wicked, the ones who use the name of an orphanage to play both sides, pocketing every last cent of the goodwill donations from kind-hearted people.

Sadly, the orphanage Li Xuan was in belonged to the latter sort. The director grew fat and greasy-mouthed, while the children were so starved their bellies stuck to their backbones, every last one of them hollow-eyed and sickly.

Back then, Li Xuan hadn’t yet gone by this name. In his previous life, in order to claw his way out of a life that felt like wallowing through mud, he had to pour in several times more effort, sweat, and sheer suffering than anyone else. Through a startling, almost terrifying tenacity, he became the first child from that orphanage to attend senior high and even sit the exams that got him out of that little county town up north.

At the time, he was so full of pride and ambition, certain that he could change his destiny this way. In the end, all it got him was barely scraping by as a high-class corporate wage slave.

His first boss was a complete idiot who couldn’t even solve a basic math problem—nothing more than a lucky pig who’d been in the right place when the wind blew. The man coasted on stale experience, talked a big game, but in truth, it was Li Xuan who did all the work day in and day out.

Even after all that blood, sweat, and sacrifice, when the company found itself mired in public scandal due to its owner’s greedy, idiotic personal decisions, Li Xuan was ruthlessly shoved out and made the scapegoat, fired on the spot.

Someone else might have crumpled for good. But Li Xuan somehow dug deep and clawed his way back up again.

This time, he didn’t choose to work for anyone. Instead, he started his own business. The early days were punishing, and the company was small, but the market was a blue ocean, and he soon started to see profits…

No one could have guessed that disaster would strike again. The framework Li Xuan had so painstakingly built was silently stolen right out from under him by another, much larger firm in the industry.

He preserved the evidence and hired a lawyer. Before the trial even started, he’d already spent several hundred thousand yuan. Then the other side turned around and falsely accused him. That company had deep pockets and vast resources. A small fry like him simply could not afford a drawn-out war, and it quickly ended with his bankruptcy…

All the myriad experiences of his previous life flashed through the newly reborn Li Xuan’s mind at lightning speed. Alongside his knowledge of the decades ahead, a bold new plan took shape in his heart.

In his past life, he had suffered too much precisely because he played by the rules too much, because he had no connections. So the first step of the plan absolutely had to be changing his own background.

After careful deliberation, Li Xuan chose Mr. and Mrs. Li.

It wasn’t just because he’d had some business dealings with them in his previous life and knew them fairly well. It was also because of a rumor.

Hai City is one of the country’s top-tier cities. Its unique geographical location, its strong industrial economy, its concentration of elite schools and hospitals, and its generous social benefits drew wealthy people from all over the country to gather here.

The Li family was one of them.

The sort that had risen quickly by catching a lucky break, the Li family couldn’t really be counted among the truly top-level great houses of Hai City. They belonged to that middle tier: better than those below them, worse than those above.

The wave of the times had let the Li family rapidly amass more wealth than they could spend in several lifetimes. What they lacked now was prestige.

In the fiercely exclusionary upper circles of Hai City, other transplants formed their own cliques, but the Li family patriarch, Li Huachuan, was determined to shake off the nouveau riche label and fit into the so-called truly elite social circles. He frequently dragged his wife and son along to all sorts of high-society galas.

What was the point?

In his previous life, Li Xuan hadn’t understood. But that didn’t stop him from seeing it as an excellent point of entry.

He had done his homework on the Li family. Li Huachuan and his current wife had one son. Her health was poor, and short of any accidents, this boy would likely be the sole heir to the Li family.

Li Huachuan had always had a sterling public reputation. His conduct at public events had earned him lots of praise as a good husband and a good father. Never mind whether it was an act—the point was, that image was out there.

But there are no walls in this world that don’t leak air. As long as you were thorough enough, you could always trace the threads of old matters.

For instance, Li Huachuan had once had a first love in his younger days. They’d been sweet and clingy together before eventually parting ways. After the first love passed on, Li Huachuan learned that he had a son with her. By this time, he was already married. In order to save face, he’d secretly gone off in search of the child—only to find that the boy had long since died.

This ought to have had nothing to do with Li Xuan. But by a stroke of fate, Li Huachuan’s illegitimate son had actually been in the very same orphanage, in the very same small county town, as Li Xuan.

And that changed everything.

So what if Li Xuan was a little older than that dead child? He was skinny and scrawny to begin with; impersonating an illegitimate son wasn’t that hard.

Another example: the Li family’s only son, Li Zhuo, had nearly perished in a fire when he was just over a year old. Though the family publicly passed it off as an accident, the truth was that before his wife got pregnant, Li Huachuan had fooled around with a housemaid. He’d later kicked her out for unclear reasons, and she’d nursed a grudge and plotted her revenge.

Wouldn’t it be simple, with just a bit of manipulation, to make use of that hatred for something?

A soul that had weathered countless storms awakened inside a young body. Those eyes that should have been purely innocent now glinted with the deep, calculating schemes of an adult.

It was only much later that Li Xuan realized the day of his own rebirth had actually been Li Zhuo’s birthday. It felt as if some invisible hand had linked two completely separate lives together from that moment on.

The beginning of Li Zhuo’s first life was also the rebirth of Li Xuan’s second life. It sounded profoundly mystical.

In the end, by leveraging his foresight as a reborn person—laying out plans and building schemes in advance—Li Xuan successfully achieved the first step of his plan: changing his background.

Although there were no major mistakes in the grand scheme, the world is fickle, and some tiny, minor details didn’t quite align with his predictions.

For example, Li Xuan had originally only intended for the housemaid to secretly take Li Zhuo away and hide him for a while.

The main goal had been to guide the Li couple along the arranged path so they would “find” Li Xuan without suspicion. That way, Li Xuan could use a few ambiguous pieces of “evidence” to make Li Huachuan mistakenly identify him. Then, once Li Xuan was safely inside the Li family, Li Zhuo could just be let go.

Instead, the housemaid went and sold him off.

Fine. If he was sold, so be it. What mattered was that the first step of the plan succeeded; only then could the next moves play out smoothly.

What Li Xuan hadn’t counted on was that, when his second-step Erosion Plan was only half finished, some obscure low-budget program would actually find Li Zhuo and bring him back.

Brought him back? Was that some kind of joke? He’d spent so long scheming; if Li Zhuo came back and threatened his position, wouldn’t all his effort have been for nothing?

When he got the news, Li Xuan couldn’t believe it at all. That disbelief only grew more acute when he saw Li Zhuo in person at the airport.

The Li Zhuo he met was completely different from the one in his memories: a face weathered by hardship, eyes full of wary vigilance, and a skinny, undersized frame…

It’s hard to put into words what Li Xuan felt at that moment.

And the Li couple?

Perhaps there was some real emotion there, especially during that early, fresh period right after he was found. A massive, long-overdue surge of feeling flooded both their heads. They were so consumed by guilt, so desperate to make up for everything and heap it all on this poor, unlucky child.