King of Industry

As autumn deepened, the maple leaves were at their reddest, and the air was thick with the season’s chill. In Ninghai City, Jiangnan Province, at the First People's Hospital, Zhao Guoyang reclined against the headboard, gazing out at a large tree whose leaves had nearly all fallen. His face was filled with bewilderment and disbelief.

The events of the previous day replayed in his mind with startling clarity, and he simply could not reconcile his past with his current reality. Zhao Guoyang, once a recipient of special government stipends and hailed as the youngest academician-level senior engineer—a leading figure in the country’s heavy industry—had collapsed unexpectedly while working late at the institute the night before.

When Zhao Guoyang awoke, he discovered himself in a scene straight out of a novel: he had been reborn. Reborn into the 1990s, inhabiting the body of a young man also named Zhao Guoyang.

From memory, the details about this body were as follows: Zhao Guoyang, twenty-one, a native of Ninghai under Guangling City in Jiangnan Province, and a student of the School of Mechanical Engineering at Jinling University of Technology. With his grades, he could have secured a place in graduate school, but the heavy burdens at home—aged parents and siblings still in school—prompted him to forgo further study. Instead, he chose to start working early, even requesting a posting in his hometown, Ninghai.

Thanks to the care of Dean Mao Tiansheng, Zhao Guoyang bypassed the internship and was directly assigned as a technician at Hongda Machinery