Xiao Jinting wakes up and finds himself in the middle of a strange room. In a state of agitation, he reaches out his hand and rubs his forehead to clear his thoughts.
All he can vaguely recall is that he was on his way back to his dorm after finishing the day’s work on studying genetically modified potatoes in his lab when suddenly a mysterious and powerful force pushed him into a river. The last sensation he felt was the agonizing fear of drowning to his death, which seemed to have lingered forever.
While looking around the room, Xiao Jingting recalls from his dream that he now has the memory of a man with the same name as his – a second-generation descendant of a wealthy family who now is in straitened circumstances. With his surroundings getting more and more familiar with those in that man’s memory, he realizes he has traveled back through time.
Before he could wrap his head around what’s happened, he finds his stomach is grumbling.
Rubbing his belly, Xiao Jingting rolls out of the bed to cook himself some food.
As he builds the fire and starting cooking, the man keeps organizing all the pieces of his newfound memory. Obviously, he has traveled back to the body of a young man from the Xiao family. The man’s parents were both very capable and successful people but were seldom home. Due to a lack of proper parental discipline, the man was spoiled rotten and ended up becoming a good-for-nothing who would spend his days either loafing around or visiting one brothel after another.
Had his parents been alive, Childe Xiao would have kept leading a comfortable life without a care in the world. Unfortunately for him, his parents got into an accident while on business, and with no one to support him anymore, the man was banished by his own family to a desolate and remote place.
In the middle of cooking, Xiao Jingting hears a rustling sound.
Then he sees the door across him is slightly opened and through the crack a child is observing him from outside.
Xiao Jingting keeps his head lowered without speaking or doing anything else.
The previous owner has a wife who was originally one of his servants to whom he married after he, drunk into oblivion, forced himself upon him in a quite scandalous affair. The man didn’t like his wife at all and the couple had long had a bad relationship.
The couple father two sons even though they had only shared the same bed a few times.
In this world, it’s not easy for men to conceive, and the man’s wife proves to be much more fertile than everyone else. The previous Xiao had quite a number of female and male confidants, all of whom would trash talk his wife to him in private, saying that the boys were not his, his male wife cheated on him, and that he was raising someone else’s children.
The previous Xiao, being easy to be influenced, grew suspicious of his wife whom he already disliked, and consequently, his disdain for his wife spread to his own sons.
Back when he was living in his mansion, the man would simply ignore the existence of his wife and children, which in a way avoided much friction between them. But after he was banished to this remote village, the man was filled with bitterness for the ill treatment from his own family. Unable to vent his grievance, the man chose to unleash his anger and frustration upon his wife and children.
Xiao Jingting assumes that his male wife, Xu Mu’an, has probably gone out looking for food.
Because the husband always gets violent, whenever Xu Mu’an goes outside, he would tell his two boys to lock the door from the inside in case their father causes any trouble.
Xiao Jingting is only seventeen years old, but he already has two sons – four-year-old Xiao Xiaodong and three-year-old Xiao Xiaofan.
This somehow puts the man, who is a twenty-seven-year-old single man in the previous world, to shame.
The previous Xiao had always been reluctant to pay much attention to his two children. Since the older son was born in winter, he simply picked the name Xiaodong (“Dong” means winter in Chinese), while as for the younger son whom he thought was not special at all, he named him Xiaofan (“Fan” means ordinary in Chinese).
Despite his young age, his older son, Xiaodong is quite smart and cunning.
The younger son, Xiaofan, however, is nothing like his bother. Shortly after Xiao Xaofan was born, the boy fell seriously ill. The father didn’t bother to care, and when the doctor was called in, it was too late. The severe fever got to the boy’s brain and has since left him mentally handicapped.
Xiao Jingting raises his head and looks at the door where he finds a small head cautiously peaking through the crack. After meeting the man’s eyes, the child instantly draws back his head, and after Xiao Jingting looks away, the small head pops up one again.
Even though Xiao Jingting and Xu Mu’an were spouses, the former had never treated his male wife as one, forbidding him to take any food in their home. Whenever the husband was out drinking and seeking pleasure, Xu Mu’an had no choice but to find food for him and his two boys on his own.
Lowering his head, Xiao Jingting remembers that he left his original home with eight hundred liang of silver ingots while Xu Mu’an didn’t have a cent. Had the man scrimped on the money, it could have last him for a while.
However, this spoiled childe, who wouldn’t blink an eye while handing out generous tips to servants, couldn’t change his reckless way of spending and after only a few trips to town, he ended up squandering all the money on his vices.
The previous Xiao’s eventual death was caused by his hopeless addiction to the so-called Happy Powder, a nerve-paralyzing drug that is said to give people extreme pleasure.
After knowing every detail about the man whose body he’s trapped in, Xiao Jingting is suddenly filled with a sense of gloom for his future.