Sakurano Private High School—Shangsha City’s pride and calling card.

For the kids born and raised here, their parents have pushed them since kindergarten for one goal: get into Sakurano Private High. Once you’re in, odds are you’ll make it into Shangsha’s best universities.

Today in Shangsha, sunlight still fell across the earth. The wind still blew. Everything felt ordinary, conservative. The sky was a pure blue. For optimists, it was another hopeful day.

Shift the lens down. Back to this private high. Year 2, Class 1 at Sakurano. A pleasant voice drifted from the doorway. Inside, a female teacher stood at the podium, speaking with passion. She was the homeroom teacher.

After a whole summer, the first-years had moved up to second year. Yesterday, the school notified everyone to return a day early to prep for tomorrow’s opening ceremony. It was tradition.

But Xia Chuan Yuan figured it was just to get everyone to reconnect. A whole break had passed. Classmates hadn’t seen each other for ages. Of course they needed to catch up. Sure, some of them had met during the holiday.

While Xia Chuan Yuan drifted in his thoughts, the homeroom teacher went over the ceremony details. He wasn’t listening.

He didn’t know why, but something felt off today. Restless. Fidgety. The guy who should be playing along was looking away. Maybe it was his sharp senses buzzing. He hoped he was just overthinking. But the unease kept coiling around him. His whole body felt wrong. His attention stayed off the teacher.

Not scientific at all—Xia Chuan Yuan not paying attention to the homeroom teacher? Why? Because she’s female. Female teacher, okay? That’s already an edge over a male teacher! And she’s a knockout. A beautiful teacher beats your average female teacher again! That’s a super rare resource!

And for a guy like Xia Chuan Yuan, who often browsed pics of beauties online—campus queens, influencers, actresses—this homeroom teacher ranked near the top. She could go toe-to-toe with celebs. Might even surpass them.

People often complained during chats that their class’s female teachers weren’t beauties, or that they were stuck with male teachers forever. Envy, whining. Saying their grades were bad because the teacher wasn’t beautiful, or wasn’t a woman. Fantasizing that if their teacher were a beauty, their scores would have doubled by now.

Beautiful female teachers are rare resources anywhere.

If those envy-ridden students saw Xia Chuan Yuan’s current state, their glares would’ve killed him several times over. But he didn’t know. No one knew his state. Thanks to today’s weirdness, he didn’t listen all day. He had no clue what had happened. Not that it mattered. Classes hadn’t officially started. When the dismissal bell rang, he ignored everything and rushed home.

—

My name is Xia Chuan Yuan. Or you could say it’s my current name. I know I could also be called Wu Yuan.

I have a secret now: I’m a transmigrator (or a reborn one? I don’t know how to define it). Until yesterday, I didn’t even know this secret. So I never remembered my previous name.

Zhuang Zhou dreamed of a butterfly. I don’t know if I’m the butterfly, or if the butterfly is me.

Out of nowhere, I seem to have awakened my past-life memories. No idea whether they were hidden for ages or just popped up. Either way, whatever.

Thinking back today, in my last life (let’s call it that), I think I died on a long-haul flight. A plane crash.

In my memory, the plane was flying over the Bermuda Triangle. The aircraft suddenly lost control. It shook violently. Then… I blacked out. Maybe I died.

I remember, after who knows how long, I ran into a ball of white light. Hazy, unreal, dreamlike. My mind had been fuzzed out since the crash, dull and dazed. I guess a lone soul is like that.

I recall a science magazine wrote that the soul is a quantum wavelength. If I still remember this after reincarnating, I have to write it down! Submit it! Maybe I’ll blow up in fame! Beauties all around me! Maybe even a Nobel! I’ll be living large!

Weird—why can I suddenly think so much? No more muddled fog. Everything’s clearer! Right. It’s thanks to that white light! It’s amazing. Staring at it, I suddenly felt it was communicating. I could sense what it meant: if you reincarnate, what wish do you want?

How did I even know what it was trying to say? Strange, right? But come on, I’m a soul already. What’s there to be surprised at? I thought for a bit and said—can a soul even speak? Or maybe it was telepathy.

I said: I don’t know. You arrange it.

I was afraid if I asked for too much, I’d annoy it and end up worse off. Letting it decide felt best.

Suddenly, I felt a word: Perfect. It granted me an ability called Perfect.

Perfect? That word has a lot of meanings. Which kind of perfect did it mean?

I kept the question to myself, because it disappeared before I could ask.

The white light flickered, then vanished. Darkness. In that instant, a vortex appeared out of thin air. I got sucked in. Then nothing.

Was it… god?

—

After awakening his past-life memories, Xia Chuan Yuan found that his memories of this life were only scattered fragments. It was like they never existed. No—some parts were there. But broken. Some he could recall, some he couldn’t.

He thought:

Am I transmigrated or reincarnated? Doesn’t feel like soul-snatching. No clash with another soul. So why did the memories vanish? Did body and soul collide?

Based on all those transmigration and rebirth webnovels I’ve read, you usually start by understanding the world.

After accepting the memories, he stretched, climbed off the bed, touched his nose, rubbed his head lightly, and looked around. First impression: big. The room was big. The bed too. Beside it stood a multi-function computer desk. On it, a curved display over forty inches, plus a tower. Cool as heck.

Generally, a room that big, a screen that big, top-end PC specs—you can tell: me? Not poor. Nice. That’s already a plus many people don’t have.

He went to the window and looked out. It felt dark. No—low. And there was a garden outside. So the place was a single-story home or a villa.

He sat at the desk, stared at the display, and thought.

The PC build and monitor showed the tech level matched his last life. Not the future. CPU was Intel. GPU was NVIDIA. Looks like it’s still Earth. Nice.

From the surroundings, he made a rough assessment of the era. Probably the same as before. Even if different, not by much.

He pressed the power button. In about one second—basically a blink—the PC finished booting. Good machines really respond differently. He couldn’t help thinking of the old desktop back home: one or two minutes just to boot. No contest.

After startup, a clean desktop. Next step, open the browser.

Desktop still had the default IE. The OS was Microsoft. Looks like Microsoft still dominates. That hasn’t changed at all.

Default search engine was Baidu. He typed: history, modern history, China, Japan. Started browsing.

History matched his old world. The difference was, China and Japan hadn’t gone to war. So there wasn’t that much hatred. Relations were decent. In short, it’s a world broadly the same, with altered details. A high-fidelity parallel world. Knockoff. No free shipping.

The map showed his city, Shangsha. It was built on an island between China, Japan, and Taiwan. Right along the mysterious 30°N.

If there’s any geographic difference from his old world, it’s this island. It wasn’t on those maps. Even if it was, it wasn’t this big.

The island didn’t belong to anyone. If they fought over it, there’d be war—maybe a world war. Between nations, there are no absolute friends, only eternal interests. So China and Japan decided to co-develop it. A city independent of both. They developed the whole island. The city is as big as Chongqing! The whole island is urban.

Shangsha’s location made trade explode. The economy boomed. The population was huge. The city teemed with people from everywhere—China, Japan, Korea, Russia, the UK, the US, and more.

…

After absorbing the basics, he felt this world was pretty magical.

He shut the computer, lay back on the bed, and went back to sleep. He’d checked the time and the view out the window just now. It was already 2 a.m., the hour when the night is thick. He could barely see anything out there, which proved how pitch-black it was. He had class tomorrow. The opening ceremony.

Tomorrow was the first day of his second year. For Xia Chuan Yuan, a brand-new day. A new chapter in his life. After all, nobody knows what story tomorrow will bring, right?

…