early fruit

Chen Yu, an ordinary boy from the countryside, went through middle school and teacher training college, spent his working years teaching, and lived an unremarkable life for decades before ending up in a hospital bed. Then, due to an unexpected accident, he finds himself transported back to his childhood in 1986. Given the chance to choose a different path, he begins to map out an entirely new future—one that takes him through school, university, work, marriage, and a career in business and politics, accumulating wealth along the way. With the benefit of hindsight, he sees things others cannot, and his foresight gives him a clear advantage over everyone around him. In the quiet of the night, he reflects on his previous life and the direction society took, using those memories to plan a more deliberate existence. But he is careful to hide his knowledge, often playing dumb to avoid raising suspicion. Yet even with all his planning, he wonders how much any of it truly matters. Personal fortune and influence, he realizes, cannot change the course of history. In the end, he may still face the same fate, lying in a hospital bed. The story offers a parallel between two possible lives, a quiet conversation between two versions of the same person, and raises a deeper question: if life could be lived again, what is it really worth? And who decides? The final exchange between these two selves, shaped by different choices, becomes the heart of the story—a meditation on fate, effort, and the emptiness that lingers beneath the surface of modern life.