Chapter 1

Volume One

Chapter 1: The Shuttle of Time

At the moment time stopped, there was, to be precise, no sensation at all.

Su Can was astonished to see himself caught in an unassuming stride, both hands in his trouser pockets, his left foot already stepping forward and the heel of his supporting foot raised.

He stood frozen in that pose on the street like a statue, uncanny and strange.

His mouth was still slightly open from his surprise a moment earlier. Three centimeters directly in front of his face, a fly flew with its rear cocked up, looking quite dashing. Only, it seemed to have suffered the same fate as Su Can: as though someone had pressed pause, it hung motionless in the air, its gleaming green compound eyes making the nausea pile up in his chest and stomach.

The dirty water the woman who owned the grocery store next door had thrown toward the roadside spread through the air in a wildly clawing shape. Round, bean-sized droplets hovered in midair, but they just wouldn't fucking fall.

The glow from a hooded streetlamp washed over the corner. Beneath it, mosquitoes and moths crowded together in a dense swarm, like a cloud set in concrete.

Yet ten seconds earlier, the world had still been operating normally as far as Su Can was concerned.

Three months earlier, a new rival had joined his company's project department. The newcomer was a top student from one of the country's finest universities. In terms of academic qualifications alone, a gulf separated him from Su Can, whose grades had been a struggle since childhood and who had eventually graduated from a third-rate university.

Moving forward to a month earlier, this new rival had become friendly with everyone in the company before anyone knew what was happening. His work was outstanding too, leaving Su Can looking inferior.

Then, a week earlier, the board of directors had adopted the other man's project proposal, while Su Can had been disparaged as utterly worthless. Later still, the man had summoned him to the boss's office with an arm around the boss's daughter.

And so, in an outcome that had never been in doubt, Su Can had lost to his formidable rival. He had lost the project manager position he had warmed with his backside for three years, receiving seven days of leave in exchange. It was like exile, a disguised humiliation inflicted by the victor on the loser.

Su Can's life was far less brilliant than his name suggested. Walking through the small hometown where he had spent nineteen years of his life, looking at this road he had walked for at least ten years, with the starry night glittering overhead and the lights dim around him, Su Can gave a bitter laugh. He realized his life was just like the road before him: full of hardship and gloom.

His grades had been so appalling that he had barely scraped into a lousy middle school. His miserable high school years had likewise brought him a miserable college entrance exam result, and in the end, he had only managed to enter a university many people had never even heard of. If life offered countless turning points, Su Can had never seized a single one. Every battle in his life had been linked and pieced together with failure, forming his own tragic existence.

Su Can had originally thought his life would simply continue as it was: he would keep being defeated, hover on the fringes of the bottom rung, and eventually marry a wife who wasn't exactly ugly, support his family, and live out his days.

As he walked rather desolately down this street in the little hometown where he had come to lick his wounds, a yellowed, almost moldy part of Su Can's memory emerged from storage. Many, many years earlier, he had walked just like this along this road toward his dreary middle school.

He had paused in the same posture, in the same place, and even at the same time. It was as though two points in time had suddenly converged and overlapped more than a decade later, in this winter beneath a sparsely starred sky.

Ten seconds before that moment of overlap, time had abruptly stopped.

The entire world was silent. Su Can had no idea what he had encountered-a god, a monster, or perhaps a horror scene like something out of Ju-On. All he knew was that, apart from being able to think and having his senses remain unblocked, he could do nothing, not even blink. Strangely, though he had held his eyes wide open for nearly twenty seconds, he felt no fatigue at all.

Watching the world hang motionless before his eyes, had the apocalypse predicted by the Maya arrived early? Or was all this merely a hallucination? But Su Can told himself he wasn't stupid enough to mistake such a real scene for an illusion.

Su Can could guarantee that no one could explain this moment. Whether it was Einstein, Newton, Archimedes, or even those experts and professors who blustered in the media every day, anyone who encountered something like this would surely be left speechless, with nothing to do but stare helplessly alongside him.

The world suddenly moved, but time defied its normal course and began to run backward.

The water thrown from the neighboring grocery store plunged ferociously back into the basin without leaving a drop behind. Then the proprietress, with her touch of mature allure, backed into the shop and vanished. It really did have something of the frightening feel of a horror film.

The green-headed fly hovering three centimeters in front of his mouth was flung beyond the heavens at what seemed like the speed of sound.

The stars faded from the sky. It suddenly grew light, quickly darkened again, and then grew light once more.

It happened so fast that the shifting shadows of the sky, cast by time shuttling past, sent light and darkness flickering over Su Can.

Everything around the street was changing rapidly. Su Can watched the newly built seven-story building beside him swiftly dismantle itself, going from a finished structure to a startling skeleton before disappearing. Then came the sunken foundations; once they had filled in, the site became an empty lot, from which countless old tile-roofed houses "grew," their walls mottled.

The grocery store remained throughout. Its main structure, a mixture of timber and concrete, gradually went from looking worn to gleaming afresh, becoming newer and newer.

The sky overhead, originally empty, was gradually replaced by a dense, tangled web of aerials. Concrete utility poles began sprouting out of nowhere along the roadside, the street narrowed, and trees disappeared.

Eventually, Su Can simply grew accustomed to the whole world collapsing and changing its appearance around him. The only thing that made his skin crawl was that, from beginning to end, he couldn't see a single person!

Not a single human figure! The world changed swiftly and soundlessly, like a silent play. Panic and fear slowly spread through Su Can's heart as he stood motionless as a statue.

Then the shifting daylight gradually slowed, slowed, and grew slower still, like that initial stretch of time when he had been frozen, until it slowed to a standstill once again.

By then, the surrounding neighborhood had changed beyond recognition, as though it had reverted to the way it had looked more than a decade earlier.

Time remained frozen again for a full ten seconds.

Back to normal!

"Cough! Cough!" Under the psychological impression that he hadn't breathed for a very long time, the first thing Su Can did was cough and gulp down air. His breathing, panting, and coughing rang in his eardrums.

There was sound! Finally, there was sound! My God! I was finally back in the normal world!

Then the clamor around him flooded his ears. Su Can blinked, and once he saw his surroundings clearly, he found himself amid a crowded stream of people-students, to be precise.

Boys and girls carrying schoolbags or wheeling bicycles kept passing him. Ahead were still more students. He was standing along a route used by students leaving school, and people constantly jostled past him, making Su Can, who had suddenly stopped, look as out of place as a rock in a rushing stream.

Golden sunlight spilled in from the side and spread over the ground, utterly unlike the dim dusk from before. Grocery stores and little shops lined the street in countless numbers, and business looked good.

There were none of the outlandish alternative outfits worn by those born in the nineties. Instead, girls who looked like delinquents from the same era as his own school days stood in groups of three or five beside the stalls, with a steaming fried-potato stand nearby.

Su Can instinctively looked at his watch, only to jump in fright. Was this his hand? How had it become a whole size smaller?

His dress shirt and suit were gone too, replaced by bare arms. He wore only a thin T-shirt, the kind washed pale with wear. Below it was a pair of equally faded jeans, and farther down, a pair of Double Star sneakers that looked a little old. Two taut straps ran over his shoulders, supporting a weight on his back.

Standing among the crowd, Su Can bent his arm behind his back at an extremely odd angle and felt around, twisting his head as though trying to see a flea on his back. What he saw, however, was a schoolbag.

Printed on the schoolbag with particular self-righteous grandeur was-"addis"!

My God! That antique backpack from my distant school days, which I had almost left behind completely, was hanging on my back again-and such a blatant knockoff, too!

Wanting first to figure out what had happened to him, Su Can decided the wisest thing to do now was simply to find a mirror. Eventually, standing before a mirror with half of it broken off in the grocery store, he saw his full appearance.

His face, more than ten years younger, still held a little youthful innocence. His hair was no longer cropped short and neat as it had been when he worked. Instead, it was soft, slightly messy, and loosely spread in a medium-short cut that reached his forehead. Below that, his T-shirt outlined a somewhat slight body, followed by jeans and sneakers: typical student attire. He was nearly ten centimeters shorter than his previous height of 180 centimeters.

After standing dumbfounded in the same spot for half a minute, Su Can finally asked the most cliché question of his life. "Excuse me, what year is it, what month, and what day? What time is it?"

The young woman before him, who had beautiful eyes, blinked. She had been resting on one hand, staring blankly at the stream of students outside the grocery store, but Su Can's question amused her. Turning her head, she called into the shop, "Mom, this schoolboy actually asked me what year, month, and day it is!"

An older middle-aged woman emerged from inside the shop, wiping her freshly washed hands on a cloth. She chuckled. "Whose kid has studied himself silly? Doesn't even know what year it is. You've gone and lived backward!"

You really got that right, Su Can thought. What's happened to me now is probably exactly that-I've gone back in my life.

"June thirteenth, 1998." The girl finished speaking, then smiled. Only then did Su Can realize that this girl was the grocery store's future owner. Back then, she had been a charming married woman in her thirties, but now she was merely a lively young woman of about twenty. It seemed she had taken over her mother's trade and inherited this grocery store. A feeling of familiarity welled up in him. At least she counted as the first person Su Can could recognize after inexplicably returning eleven years into the past.

"Oh, right, little fellow who doesn't even know today's date, your high school entrance exams are in three days, aren't they? Make sure you face them with a relaxed mindset. Still, seeing how you can't even keep track of the date, you must be one of the top students in your class. Even while you're studying hard, remember to rest now and then."

"Huh? What, the high school entrance exams?!" Su Can was still trying to sort through his tangled thoughts about suddenly returning eleven years into the past. Hearing the future proprietress's encouraging words, he blurted out in bewilderment.

"A top student?" Several groups of girls who had just entered the shop looked over at Su Can when they heard that. Then they exchanged glances, and mocking smiles spread across all their mouths.