Chapter Summaries

Key plot points and events

• Tang Tang experiences a vision showing the truth behind her childhood: her grandfather, Tang Zhilin, had her abandoned after a monk declared her birth date inauspicious. The story she was told—that a hospital doctor switched and abandoned her—was false.
• After Tang Tang disappeared, her mother, Su Xiajing, refused to believe her baby had died, even after a DNA test. Her grief and declining health eventually led to a severe mental breakdown.
• Tang Beichen cared for Su Xiajing while managing the family company. Tang Zhilin brought home a young girl to adopt, hoping she would comfort Su Xiajing. Su Xiajing grew fond of the girl, but never mistook her for her lost daughter.
• Under mounting pressure, Tang Beichen withdrew from home. When Su Xiajing’s sister, Su Chuchu, returned and moved in to help, he gradually resumed coming home. He and Su Chuchu began an affair.
• Su Xiajing discovered the affair during a period when her illness had worsened. Seeing Tang Beichen’s evasiveness and Su Chuchu pleading for forgiveness pushed her past the breaking point.
• The vision then reveals that Tang Yue was found and placed in an orphanage through Tang Zhilin’s actions, and that her biological mother was Su Chuchu. Tang Tang recognizes the brutal irony: Su Chuchu’s daughter took her place in the family, and Su Chuchu eventually took Su Xiajing’s place as Tang Beichen’s wife.
• Tang Tang wakes in her rented apartment on September 19, a year earlier. A message confirms that Tang Beichen is coming to ask her to spend Mid-Autumn Festival with him. Realizing she has been reborn—and that the vision was true—she is furious at his attempt to reconnect.

Character developments and interactions

• Tang Tang moves from shock and disbelief to anger and bitter clarity. She recognizes the deception behind her upbringing and questions how Tang Beichen can claim to want a father-daughter relationship when she so closely resembles Su Xiajing.
• Su Xiajing is portrayed as devoted to her missing child. Though she accepts the adopted girl and treats her lovingly, she never forgets her biological daughter. Her grief, isolation, and discovery of the affair deepen her collapse.
• Tang Beichen initially struggles to care for his wife and manage the company, but gradually avoids his family rather than confronting their pain. His affair with Su Chuchu and insistence that she keep it secret reveal his selfishness and moral weakness.
• Su Chuchu enters the household as a caregiver, earns Tang Beichen’s gratitude, and becomes his lover. Her daughter, Tang Yue, is later revealed to have been raised in Tang Tang’s place.
• Tang Zhilin is exposed as the architect of Tang Tang’s abandonment and as a key figure in Tang Yue’s path into the family.

Significant themes

• Family betrayal and stolen identity: Tang Tang’s life and place in her family were deliberately taken from her.
• Grief and avoidance: Su Xiajing’s unresolved loss and Tang Beichen’s withdrawal show how pain worsens when it is ignored.
• Hypocrisy and self-deception: Tang Beichen rationalizes his affair and focuses on hiding it rather than facing its harm.
• Fate, coincidence, and irony: The monk’s prediction helps set the deception in motion, while the later family arrangements create a grim reversal of who occupies the roles of daughter and wife.

Key plot points and events

• Tang Beichen visits Tang Tang and asks whether she will come home for the Mid-Autumn Festival. To his surprise, she agrees to resign from her job and return to work at his company.
• Tang Tang reveals that her pale appearance was not caused by a nightmare: she dreamed of her mother, Su Xiajing, repeatedly suffering alone in the same room, as if trapped there.
• The dream prompts Tang Tang to confront her father about marrying Su Xiajing’s younger sister, Su Chuchu, after Xiajing’s mental health deteriorated.
• Tang Beichen admits he failed his wife and daughter. He explains that Chuchu had difficulty conceiving, and he stayed with her because doctors said ending her pregnancy might leave her unable to have children.
• Tang Tang points out that Chuchu eventually lost that pregnancy and, in fact, later had another child—contradicting the reason Tang Beichen gives. He is stunned and cannot explain why he believed Chuchu so readily.

Character developments

• Tang Tang shows a tentative willingness to return home, but her decision is shaped by a desire to face her past rather than renewed trust in her father. She confronts him with controlled anger and compassion for her mother.
• Tang Beichen shifts from hopeful excitement about Tang Tang’s return to shame and grief. He acknowledges his betrayal but offers no convincing explanation for his choices.
• Su Xiajing, though absent, is vividly revealed through Tang Tang’s dream and Tang Beichen’s memories as a once-brilliant woman who suffered deeply after losing her daughter and being betrayed by her husband.
• Su Chuchu is further implicated: her claimed inability to become a mother appears untrue, and Tang Tang suspects her story served as a convenient justification.

Significant themes

• Betrayal and accountability: Tang Beichen’s marriage to his wife’s sister compounded Xiajing’s suffering, and belated apologies cannot undo the harm.
• Avoidance and self-deception: Tang Tang concludes that her father used Chuchu’s pregnancy as a shield for a choice he had already made.
• Grief and memory: Tang’s dream makes her mother’s unresolved pain feel present and inescapable.
• Family and trust: Tang Tang’s agreement to return does not mean she trusts her father; their relationship remains emotionally distant.

Character interactions

• Tang Beichen awkwardly tries to reconnect by encouraging Tang Tang to return home and promising to look after her.
• Tang Tang turns their stilted conversation into a direct reckoning, asking why he chose her aunt and whether he considered Xiajing’s feelings.
• Tang Beichen repeatedly falls silent or apologizes, while Tang Tang presses him for an honest explanation and challenges the story he used to justify his actions.

Key plot points and events

• After learning more about her birth mother’s tragic death and hearing Tang Beichen’s testimony, Tang Tang questions why she and her mother have been made to suffer while those responsible live comfortably.
• She briefly considers not returning to the Tang home, but decides she has done nothing wrong and refuses to give up her freedom just to protect the family’s peace.
• Tang Tang resigns from her job, gives up her apartment, and returns to Kyoto without warning. At dinner, she behaves as though everything is normal, unsettling Tang Beichen, Su Chuchu, and Tang Yue.
• She bluntly asks for a meaningful role at the company and proposes becoming Tang Beichen’s secretary. When Tang Yue questions her qualifications, Tang Tang presents herself as hurt by her limited educational opportunities. Tang Beichen reassures her and agrees to the position, which will let her learn the business closely.
• Once alone, Tang Tang dry-heaves from the strain of facing the family, but feels some satisfaction at their discomfort and resolves to make sure they cannot live peacefully if she cannot.
• The following morning, she learns Tang Beichen and Tang Yue have already left. Tang Yue is being groomed as the company’s successor. Tang Tang understands she cannot yet compete with her, so she sees the secretary job as a way to gain experience and study the company.
• At breakfast, Su Chuchu asks whether Tang Tang will really work as Tang Beichen’s secretary. Tang Tang says she will keep an eye on him and make sure he does not cheat on Su.

Character developments

• Tang Tang moves from grief and self-doubt toward defiance. She returns on her own terms and begins using a seemingly cooperative attitude to secure a strategic position in the company.
• Tang Beichen remains uneasy and appeasing around Tang Tang. He agrees to her request after she appeals to his sympathy, though his response also gives her access to his work and the company.
• Su Chuchu maintains a warm, welcoming manner, but her irritation at Tang Tang’s return is evident.
• Tang Yue is established as capable and favored as Tang Beichen’s likely successor. She questions Tang Tang’s qualifications, highlighting the gap between their backgrounds and positions.

Significant themes

• Justice and victimhood: Tang Tang rejects the idea that she and her mother should bear the consequences of others’ wrongdoing.
• Agency and reclaiming belonging: She refuses to stay away from the Tang home simply to preserve its outward harmony.
• Power and strategy: Tang Tang disguises her hostility with politeness and chooses a role that will help her learn how the company works.
• Family tension and appearances: The household’s strained reactions contrast with Tang Tang’s cheerful, composed behavior at the dinner table.

Key plot points

• Tang Tang arrives late to a family dinner and overhears Tang Youzhen and Tang Youhao arguing about the family’s childhood training and pressure to join the company.
• Tang Zhilin criticizes Tang Tang for taking a demanding secretarial job without experience. She calmly admits her disadvantages and says she intends to work hard, then pointedly asks why the family failed to find her after she was lost as a child.
• Xie Yazhi acknowledges that the family did not try hard enough, but urges everyone to focus on the present. Tang Tang reads her evasiveness as evidence that she knows Tang Zhilin was involved in her abandonment.
• Tang Tang resolves to keep confronting Tang Beichen with reminders of his guilt. After less than six months living together, he offers to buy her an apartment, and she delays moving until after her twenty-sixth birthday.
• On the night before her planned move, Tang Yue traps her in the bathroom by tying the door shut and cutting the power. Tang Tang tries to climb to the window for help, slips, strikes her head, and later wakes in the bathtub—apparently dead again.

Character developments and interactions

• Tang Tang remains controlled and sharp-tongued in the face of family criticism. Her growing awareness that the family may know more about her abandonment hardens her resentment, while her decision to voice her pain marks a refusal to suffer quietly.
• Tang Beichen is still troubled by guilt, but cannot truly face Tang Tang; his offer of an apartment becomes a way to separate them after their short period living together.
• Tang Zhilin publicly scolds Tang Tang and reacts angrily to her pointed question about the family’s failure to find her.
• Xie Yazhi tries to smooth over the past, but her avoidance reinforces Tang Tang’s suspicion that she knows the truth.
• Tang Youzhen and Tang Youhao reveal their conflicting attitudes toward the family’s expectations: Youzhen resents the control, while Youhao challenges him for accepting the same training.
• Tang Yue escalates from family tension to deliberate cruelty by trapping Tang Tang alone in the dark.

Significant themes

• Family duty and inheritance as tools of control.
• Abandonment, guilt, and the limits of belated reconciliation.
• Tang Tang’s insistence on naming injustice rather than hiding it.
• The fragility of life, underscored by her sudden apparent death after a seemingly minor accident.

Plot points and events

• After dying young in two previous lives, Tang Tang observes her rebirth and sees a golden thread of life draining from her. Its irregular movement suggests a force is taking her life while another is resisting; she realizes this may be her lifeline and suspects Master has been protecting her.
• In her third life, she wakes at age twenty-three—two years earlier than in her previous rebirth.
• Drawing on what she learned before, she makes a plan: avoid rashly confronting Tang Beichen or Tang Yue, build alliances with her older brothers, strengthen her business and social skills, and apologize to her family.
• She calls her uncle, Su Zhihao, and asks him to teach her how to run a business. He asks whether she intends to compete for the Tang Family heir position. Tang Tang confirms that she does and asks for his help.

Character development

• Tang Tang is more composed and strategic than in her earlier life. Rather than acting on anger, she assesses her opponents and weaknesses and plans to improve her position.
• She shows new ambition, openly claiming her right to compete as a Tang family heir despite having grown up apart from the family.
• Su Zhihao is perceptive and supportive enough to recognize the purpose behind her request, though his response to her appeal is not yet shown.

Significant themes

• Fate and survival: The golden lifeline suggests Tang Tang’s short lives may be caused by an outside force, while another presence fights to keep her alive.
• Learning from past lives: Repeated rebirth gives Tang Tang insight, but she must turn that experience into wiser choices.
• Power and belonging: Tang Tang intends to claim a place in the family and compete for its inheritance.
• Self-improvement and alliance: She recognizes that ambition alone is insufficient; she needs knowledge, social skills, and allies.

Character interactions

• Tang Tang’s recollection of Tang Beichen and Tang Yue shapes her cautious strategy: she plans not to reveal her intentions prematurely and to keep Tang Yue from gaining the brothers’ support.
• She intends to reconcile with her parents and older brother, signaling a desire to repair family relationships.
• In her call with Su Zhihao, she is direct about her goals, and he responds with a probing question that shows he understands the stakes.

Key events

• Tang Tang decides to return to the Tang company, but first studies accounting and prepares to join its finance department. Tang Beichen is pleased and brings her back to live with the family, placing her under Su Chuchu’s care.
• While sizing up potential allies and rivals, Tang Tang finds that most of her cousins are either unambitious, unreliable, or uninterested in the business. She concludes that Tang Yue is the only serious contender and focuses instead on building her own skills and professional connections.
• Su Chuchu and Tang Yue respond to Tang Tang’s growing independence by arranging Tang Yue’s engagement to the son of a wealthy family. Tang Tang worries that she lacks family support and considers either seeking an alliance of her own or exposing the company’s accounts.
• Before she can act, Tang Tang is drugged after a work-related night out. She overhears Tang Yue’s fiancé and an accomplice planning to film compromising footage of her so the scandal will ruin her chance to inherit the company.
• Tang Tang escapes the hotel room but, weakened by the drug, falls down a stairwell while fleeing. She dies at twenty-four and returns to the strange space she experienced after her earlier death.
• A vision shows what happens afterward: Tang Yue becomes the favored heir, but Tang Zhilin opposes her because she is adopted. He backs Tang Beichen’s uncle Tang Shengwang in a power struggle; Shengwang becomes president and then sells the company. Tang Zhilin is left in a vegetative state, while Tang Beichen, Su Chuchu, and Tang Yue lose everything.

Character developments and interactions

• Tang Tang is more strategic than in her previous life: she hides her plans, studies for a new career path, evaluates her relatives, and cultivates useful contacts. Yet she still underestimates how far her rivals will go.
• Tang Beichen supports Tang Tang’s return in principle but is more trusting of and closely aligned with Tang Yue, reinforcing Tang Tang’s sense that she lacks a place in the family.
• Su Chuchu uses her social influence to strengthen Tang Yue’s position, while Tang Yue’s engagement signals that she sees Tang Tang as a threat. Tang Yue’s fiancé and his accomplice plot to destroy Tang Tang through a staged scandal.
• Tang Tang’s relatives prove unsuitable as allies: Tang Jian is self-indulgent, Tang Xiancheng is withdrawn, Tang Ziyang is kind but easily deceived, and the others are either settled into family life or content with unambitious jobs.

Significant themes

• Power and inheritance: Family ties alone do not determine who gains control; influence, alliances, and strategy matter.
• Betrayal and unequal support: Tang Tang’s biological connection to the family does not secure her loyalty or protection.
• Ambition and vulnerability: Tang Tang’s efforts to compete are undermined by a lack of experience and by opponents willing to use underhanded tactics.
• Irony and revenge: Though Tang Tang fails to bring down her enemies herself, the eventual collapse of the family’s fortunes fulfills her desire to see them suffer loss.

Plot points and events

• After witnessing the Tang family’s eventual destruction in her previous life, Tang Tang feels relieved that revenge has been achieved without her intervention—but is immediately reborn again.
• In this third rebirth, she returns to age twenty-one, shortly before Tang Beichen calls her home. She resolves to stop rushing into revenge, protect her fragile health, improve herself, and quietly encourage the Tang family to turn against one another.
• She returns to the family and chooses to study for an accounting certification, planning to build a career in finance and keep the option of exposing the family’s finances if needed. Tang Beichen approves and promises her a job at the company.
• For over a year, Tang Tang keeps a low profile, studies, exercises, and acts eager to please the family. They dismiss her as an opportunistic outsider with no ambition to inherit.
• She tries to get closer to her suspicious third uncle, Tang Shengwang, through work. Tang Beichen warns her not to associate with him, while Tang Shengwang reveals that he knows she is being watched and welcomes her attention. Tang Tang realizes both men are monitoring her.
• As Tang Yue rises at the company and rejects Su Chuchu’s proposed marriage alliance, Tang Tang decides the moment has come to subtly set events in motion and let Tang Yue and Tang Shengwang clash.
• Before she can act, an amusement-park pendulum ride crashes. Though the other passengers survive, Tang Tang sees her own corpse and dies once again.

Character developments

• Tang Tang becomes more patient and strategic, choosing self-improvement and caution over direct revenge. Beneath her composed obedience, she remains observant, distrustful, and intent on influencing the family’s conflicts.
• Tang Beichen believes Tang Tang has accepted her place and is planning sensibly. His protectiveness also shows through his effort to control whom she approaches at work.
• Tang Shengwang appears relaxed but proves perceptive and watchful; he recognizes that Tang Tang’s contact with him may be deliberate.
• Tang Yue grows more confident and successful at the company, while apparently lowering her guard toward Tang Tang.

Significant themes

• Fate versus agency: Tang Tang changes her strategy and takes precautions, yet cannot escape her repeated early deaths.
• Revenge and restraint: Having seen the family destroy itself, she tries to let events unfold rather than burden herself with direct action.
• Performance and suspicion: Tang Tang’s submissive persona conceals her plans, while family members watch and misread one another.
• The fragility of life: Her careful efforts to stay healthy cannot prevent a sudden, seemingly random death.

Character interactions

Tang Beichen encourages Tang Tang’s career plans but warns her away from Tang Shengwang. Tang Shengwang, in turn, openly acknowledges the warning and invites her to keep speaking with him, creating a tense, mutual awareness. Tang Tang outwardly complies with both men while privately judging them and maintaining her plan. Later, Tang Yue’s growing influence and rejection of the marriage alliance bring her closer to the conflict Tang Tang hopes to exploit.

Key plot points and events

• After another rebirth, Tang Tang abandons revenge and focuses on staying alive. She wakes at age twenty, five days before she is meant to meet Tang Beichen, and quits her café job so she can avoid him and the Tang Family.
• At Su Xiajing’s grave, Tang Tang apologizes for giving up on revenge. She believes she has already made the Tang Family suffer and urges her mother to be more selfish in another life.
• Tang Tang leaves Kyoto for City B, hides her face to avoid being recognized as Su Xiajing’s lookalike, and lives in fear of encountering Tang Beichen.
• After graduation, she refuses her parents’ suggestion that she work in Kyoto. Claiming she plans to take public-sector exams, she returns to her rural hometown, believing distance will keep her safe.
• On the minibus to her village, the vehicle crashes into a ravine and Tang Tang dies again. She concludes that fate is targeting her, not merely forcing her toward the Tang Family: no matter what she does, she is destined to die young.
• In her fifth rebirth, she sees memories of Su Xiajing’s childhood, but is too exhausted and afraid to dwell on them. Her overriding concern remains escaping an early death.

Character developments

• Tang Tang shifts from seeking revenge to prioritizing survival. After repeated deaths, she loses faith that she can control her fate and tries to avoid every possible risk connected to the Tang Family.
• Though she calls herself a coward, she shows care for Su Xiajing by visiting her grave, apologizing, and reflecting on what her mother might need in another life.
• Her parents and Xiao Xiang worry about her decision to return to the countryside, but Tang Tang persuades them with the public-sector-exam explanation.

Significant themes

• Fate versus agency: Tang Tang changes her choices and avoids the Tang Family, yet still dies, leading her to believe her fate cannot be escaped.
• Survival and fear: Revenge becomes secondary to the desire to live, while constant vigilance steadily shapes Tang Tang’s daily life.
• Inherited suffering and injustice: Tang Tang sees herself and Su Xiajing as victims forced to bear undeserved tragedy, and questions why they should suffer.
• Self-interest and self-preservation: Tang Tang’s advice to Su Xiajing—to think of herself first—echoes Tang Tang’s own attempt to protect herself.

Character interactions

• Tang Tang and Su Xiajing: At the graveside, Tang Tang speaks candidly to her absent mother, apologizing for abandoning revenge while hoping Su Xiajing will be more self-protective in another life.
• Tang Tang and her parents: They struggle to understand her desire to leave Kyoto, but accept her explanation that she wants to pursue local public-sector work.
• Tang Tang and Xiao Xiang: Alarmed by her choice, he suspects something is wrong and insists on checking on her before she eventually persuades her family.

Key plot points and events

• In her fifth life, nineteen-year-old Tang Tang becomes obsessed with finding an explanation for her repeated short lives. She studies occult texts and seeks answers online, but is dismissed as a lunatic.
• Increasingly afraid of accidental death, she cannot bring herself to attend a job interview. Instead, she visits a temple, where a master advises her to do good deeds. She begins volunteering and donating, which helps calm her fears.
• Before she can return to thank the master, Tang Tang catches a severe cold and fever. Too weak to reach the door, she calls emergency services but dies and is reborn again.
• Her sixth life begins in her final year of high school, just before the college entrance exam. She visits her deceased mother’s grave and reflects on how each rebirth makes her younger.
• Tang Tang asks her parents to let her leave school but will not explain why. After her father strikes her in anger, she withdraws further, refuses school, and spends months in bed, eating very little.
• Her parents try to care for her by keeping fresh treats for her, and their persistence eventually moves her to eat some. But prolonged starvation has left her malnourished, anemic, and weak. She becomes dizzy after using the bathroom, falls, hits her head, and loses consciousness.

Character developments

• Tang Tang shifts from desperate investigation to severe anxiety, then finds temporary calm through volunteering. In her sixth life, however, her expectation of dying young leads her to give up on school and neglect her health.
• Tang Xia and Xiao Wangqing are confused and distressed by their daughter’s withdrawal. Though Xiao Wangqing reacts harshly at first, both parents ultimately prioritize Tang Tang’s health and keep trying to feed her.
• Tang Tang’s mother, Su Xiajing, remains emotionally important to her; the cemetery visit shows Tang Tang seeking comfort and connection across her successive lives.

Significant themes

• Fear and uncertainty: Tang Tang’s repeated deaths make ordinary activities feel dangerous and leave her unable to trust her future.
• Cycles and lost time: Each rebirth resets her age, while memories of previous lives shape her choices.
• Family care and helplessness: Her parents cannot understand her pain, but continue caring for her despite their frustration.
• Good deeds as comfort: Volunteering does not solve the mystery of her rebirths, but gives Tang Tang purpose and briefly eases her anxiety.
• Despair and self-neglect: Believing death is inevitable, Tang Tang stops investing in her life, contributing to the physical collapse at the chapter’s end.

Character interactions

• Tang Tang’s search for guidance leads her to dismissive online communities and a temple master whose advice she nonetheless follows.
• Her roommates initially look after her but distance themselves when she becomes absorbed in occult research.
• At her mother’s grave, Tang Tang speaks intimately to Su Xiajing, imagining that rebirth will let her visit at every age.
• Her conflict with her parents centers on her refusal to return to school: Xiao Wangqing loses his temper, while Tang Xia later tries to understand her. Their ongoing efforts to feed Tang Tang express care even when they cannot reach her emotionally.

Key plot points and events

• Tang Tang awakens in her eighth life as a high school freshman and goes to Su Xiajing’s grave, spending the day there in silence.
• Believing she has little time left and is doomed to die young, she takes her own life only thirteen hours after rebirth.
• Her mother, Tang Xia, returns home and discovers her body. Watching her mother’s grief, Tang Tang realizes that suicide also inflicts terrible suffering on those who love her. She regrets being so selfish and resolves not to die by her own hand in the next life.
• Reborn again, this time in her final year of middle school, Tang Tang visits Su Xiajing’s grave and then spends days drifting around the city instead of attending school.
• A bus driver, concerned by her troubled appearance, mentions Taoist Master Yunlong at White Cloud Temple. Tang Tang visits the temple, where Yunlong finds her at a scenic overlook and warns that a fall would likely injure or disable her rather than kill her.
• Yunlong invites her for tea, recognizing that she has questions. In his courtyard, he offers her first the Tao Te Ching, then a Buddhist scripture, leaving Tang Tang puzzled by his approach.

Character developments

• Tang Tang moves from despair and resignation to recognizing the harm her choices cause her parents. She is still deeply troubled and curious about death, but now resists acting on those impulses.
• Tang Xia is shown as a loving mother whose devastation makes Tang Tang understand the impact of her death on others.
• Taoist Master Yunlong appears perceptive, direct, and kindly persistent. He notices Tang Tang’s suicidal thoughts and tries to engage her.

Significant themes

• Despair, fate, and agency: Tang Tang initially tries to take control of an apparently inevitable early death, but learns that her actions affect more than herself.
• Love and responsibility: Her parents’ grief makes her reconsider what she owes the people who love her.
• Seeking help and meaning: Though skeptical of religious figures, Tang Tang is drawn toward Yunlong, suggesting a possible opening to guidance or answers.

Character interactions

• Tang Tang’s silent visit to Su Xiajing’s grave reflects her ongoing attachment and grief.
• Tang Xia’s anguished discovery of Tang Tang’s body prompts Tang Tang’s remorse.
• The bus driver shows concern by directing Tang Tang toward the temple.
• Yunlong calmly confronts Tang Tang’s unspoken wish to die, invites her to tea, and offers religious texts; Tang Tang responds with skepticism and dry humor.

Plot points and events

• Taoist Master Yunlong gives Tang Tang Buddhist scriptures and quietly spends days drinking tea with her, without pressing her to explain her suicidal thoughts. She returns to the temple daily and eventually declares him her master.
• Tang Tang openly describes her past suicide and threatens to die again. Yunlong calmly counters each proposed method, making clear he will intervene. Their exchanges become a provocative stalemate.
• Yunlong encourages Tang Tang to spend time with his lay disciple, Chu Yun, a quiet boy her age. Chu invites her to an anime convention and an amusement park. Rain cancels their first amusement-park outing, but they enjoy the convention together.
• Tang Tang’s tenth life begins a year earlier, when she is in eighth grade. She tells her parents about her repeated lives and leaves school. Feeling at peace at White Cloud Temple, she starts growing vegetables, doing good deeds, and reciting scriptures.
• When Chu Yun returns from studying abroad, Tang Tang recreates their previous convention trip with him. In town, she glimpses Tang Jian as a younger, happier man, then meets Tang Beichen, who mistakes her for someone he knew. She rebuffs him and leaves with Chu Yun.
• Tang Tang collapses at home but survives long enough to reach the hospital. Yunlong asks whether she wants to die—and then whether she wants to live. Remembering her family and the life she still wants to experience, she finally answers: she wants to live.

Character development and interactions

• Tang Tang moves from treating life as pointless and provoking Yunlong with suicide threats to accepting that she wants more time with her family. Her peaceful routine at the temple and friendship with Chu Yun offer moments of ordinary enjoyment.
• Yunlong remains patient and enigmatic, responding to despair with practical care rather than platitudes. His repeated question helps Tang Tang confront her genuine desire to live.
• Chu Yun is quiet and reserved but shows care through action: inviting Tang Tang out, paying for their outings, guiding her through the convention, and accompanying her home.
• Tang Tang and her parents share a more accepting relationship in this life; their kindness becomes central to her decision. Her encounters with Tang Jian and Tang Beichen show her detached from the Tang Family’s past and unwilling to be drawn into it.

Significant themes

• Choosing life: Tang Tang’s decision comes from recognizing her attachment to loved ones and curiosity about the future.
• The value of ordinary days: Tea, gardening, helping others, and shared outings give meaning to time she once dismissed as useless.
• Connection without pressure: Yunlong’s patience and Chu Yun’s quiet companionship support Tang Tang without demanding that she perform or explain herself.
• Change and perspective: Seeing Tang Jian as a younger man reminds Tang Tang that people can change, while her own changed circumstances let her face old relationships differently.

Key plot points and events

• Tang Jian, Tang Xiancheng, and the rest of Tang Tang’s family dream of the lives she endured across her previous ten incarnations. They see how their past selves failed her and how Tang Tang repeatedly suffered and died while they remained indifferent.
• The dream prompts Tang Xianqi to return home. The family gathers at Tang Tang’s bedside, while Su Xiajing keeps caring for her and Tang Beichen struggles with guilt. Su Xiajing refuses his help after sharing the dream.
• Taoist Master Yunlong arrives and says Tang Tang’s awakening depends on her own wishes. That night, she wakes briefly, recognizes her master and family, and weakly says she is glad she did not die before passing out from exhaustion. Yunlong reassures everyone that she needs rest.
• Tang Tang spends six months recovering. The chapter then catches up on how her family and friends have built their lives, and notes that Tang Zhilin died after being investigated for bribery.
• Tang visits White Cloud Temple and learns more about Yunlong’s role in her repeated rebirths. She thanks him rather than blaming him, then leaves with Chu Yun to fulfill their promise to visit an amusement park—and plans an anime convention as well.

Character developments and interactions

• The siblings and cousins have grown into the people their younger selves hoped to become: Tang Jian is a pilot, Tang Xiancheng a successful singer, and others pursue design, law, medicine, business, and religious study. Their dream forces them to confront how badly they once treated Tang Tang.
• Tang Beichen is remorseful, but Su Xiajing’s coldness shows that an apology cannot undo Tang Tang’s suffering. Their relationship remains unresolved.
• Su Xiajing and Lu Hengyuan are now dating. Lu is devoted to her, though he is content with their life as it is; Tang Tang gently nudges him about proposing.
• Tang Tang’s bond with Yunlong is affirmed as she recognizes him as her benefactor and master. With Chu Yun, she resumes a playful, affectionate relationship, insisting he keep his promises and join her adventures.

Significant themes

• Accountability and regret: The family must face the harm caused by their past indifference, while recognizing that remorse cannot erase what Tang Tang endured.
• Fate, choice, and forgiveness: Yunlong explains that outside interference twisted Tang Tang’s fate, but her own desire for revenge also shaped the cycle. She chooses gratitude over blame.
• Recovery and renewed life: Tang Tang’s return is gradual, and her plans with Chu Yun signal a turn from suffering toward joy, connection, and experiences she still wants to have.

Key points

• In this author’s afterword, the writer reflects on the story’s ending and apologizes for not connecting its two halves as smoothly as readers expected.
• The story began as a lighthearted tale of redemption and comeuppance, but Tang Tang’s suffering across ten lifetimes made a purely comedic approach feel wrong.
• The parents’ divorce prompted strong reader criticism. Some argued that the father should not be held responsible for his previous-life actions in this life, while others saw the mother’s continued contact with him as excusing his behavior.
• Despite pressure to revise the father’s past and avoid the divorce, the author kept the original direction, believing it would be unfair to decide Tang Tang’s feelings for her. The author stresses that being reborn carries the emotional weight of one’s past; letting go does not require forgiveness or renewed love.
• The author explains that the mother chose divorce after learning what had happened and recognizing the risk, while the father felt remorse and tried to repair the relationship. The mother’s choice is framed as caution, not blindness or manipulation by Tang Tang.

Character developments and relationships

• Tang Tang is understood as shaped by all ten of her lives. Her choices—including whom she forgives or rejects—belong to her.
• The mother recognizes the father’s capacity for harm and chooses to protect herself by divorcing him.
• The father regrets his actions and wants to make amends, but regret does not erase the mother’s right to leave.
• Tang Tang, her siblings, and her parents can offer one another support, but none can force another person to accept help.

Themes

• Redemption must ultimately come from within. Family, friendship, and love may offer a lifeline, but each person must choose to take it.
• Accountability and forgiveness are distinct: remorse does not obligate someone harmed to forgive or stay.
• Personal agency matters: Tang Tang must be allowed to make her own choices.
• The author concludes by thanking readers who stayed with the story and witnessed Tang Tang’s redemption.