Chapter 1

What is happiness? If given another chance by heaven, would you still choose to live the same life, do the same things, that is called happiness.

This topic is completely beyond the comprehension of a four-year-old child, a heavy burden. However, this little boy, who had only just learned to walk due to various reasons, was constantly pondering three even deeper and more complex questions in his mind.

Who am I?

Where do I come from?

Where am I going?

The little boy's name in his parents' hearts was Yin Xian. His father was an ordinary blue-collar worker at a car manufacturing company, one of the industrial groups in Ulsan, South Korea. His mother was a semi-housewife, working part-time at a flower shop not far from their home. Yin Xian was their second child. Even by the peculiar Korean age calculation method, his parents were somewhat worried about the future personality and health of this child, who had just learned to walk at the age of four and seemed neither lively nor prone to crying.

However, this little boy, who was pondering the three great questions of Socrates, had another name in his heart. Su Xiubin. A slightly delicate Chinese name. A name that awakened with his first cry as he emerged from the womb, along with many memories that flooded his mind.

In the following three years, he often found himself in a state of memory overflow, or to put it another way, a state of system crash, constantly reviewing those memories, unsure if they truly belonged to him.

Or perhaps it was just a dream.

In that dream, he was a doctoral student in philosophy at a well-known university in the capital of China. Unfortunately, in his thirty years of life, he had never left the city, a place of concentric circles. Born and raised there, he might have spent his entire life as a shut-in if not for the last moment of his memory, a spark of electricity that never faded.

Yes, a shut-in. The loneliness brought by a single-parent family made his greatest habit to lock himself in a small, empty room, quietly watching TV, reading books, or pondering all sorts of strange questions in his mind. His only support, his father, would occasionally return home, throw down just enough money for him to get by, and then rush out again, disappearing without a trace. After junior high school, this irresponsible father never appeared again. To make a living, he had to work at a small, family-style restaurant not far from home. Fortunately, the seemingly stern restaurant owner was a gentle person, not only providing meals but also not exploiting him. Apart from the owner, he seemed to have no other friends.

This loneliness and introversion made him stand out in school. When he repeatedly topped various exams with excellent scores, this introversion was seen by others as aloof arrogance. But the Su Xiubin in his memory always guarded this introversion, neither explaining nor concealing it.

It wasn't until he successfully entered the prestigious university that almost all Chinese people dream of, and with the advent of the internet, that a crack began to form in his steel-like defenses.

Unlike his introversion in reality, on the internet, he was an active sage. The unparalleled reading volume brought by years of solitude, and the smooth writing style formed by the habit of self-expression, made him shine brightly in the early days of the internet, when you had no idea if the person on the other side of your computer was a dog.

The stark contrast between reality and the virtual world was so dazzling that it was impossible to break free.

Su Xiubin naturally loved this feeling. So when he was admitted to the philosophy master's program and then the doctoral program at his university, it was just to continue nesting in the school, oblivious to the world outside.

Of course, this "oblivious to the world outside" was not in the true sense. He could be considered one of the first Chinese to come into contact with the internet, from the early chat rooms and forums to the gradually emerging web portals, search engines, and the rise of mobile internet with the arrival of Steve Jobs. This person who spent almost all his time online knew far more than others.

Knowing more naturally meant understanding more, especially with the various "web literature" genres that his old friend had pioneered, which clearly told him that this was a mainstream way of rebirth and transmigration. However, novels are one thing, and when it actually happens, it's another.

Especially when it happens to a philosophy doctoral student at a well-known university who had already accumulated enough for his thesis and could apply for graduation at any time, the memory that should have taken a month to digest became much more complicated, especially the memory of the few minutes before the spark, when he was testing a new wearable electronic device for a long-time friend.

A strong sense of "Inception" and "The Matrix" hit him. He began to constantly examine the reality of the space he lived in, suspecting whether he was dreaming, whether he had been betrayed by his friend and entered a secondary matrix... If not for his current physical limitations, he might have really tried the method of waking up from a dream in "Inception."

It wasn't until the real pain from a recent injection that he realized this definitely wasn't a dream.

But this didn't stop him from repeatedly asking himself those three questions in his constant self-examination.

Of course, as a shut-in who had always balanced studying and internet use, he could have played the role of a newborn baby well, but the various discomforts brought by the memories he had acquired always prevented him from fully embracing the role of an infant.

For example, it wasn't until the third day after his birth that he finally accepted breastfeeding... Then it took a month to get used to the bottle... Then there was the crawling he could never quite master... And the constant falling while learning to walk...

Even more terrifying was that he couldn't understand what the people around him were saying. From the various Korean variety shows he had watched in his past life, he could tell that this was Korean, but for some reason, he couldn't pronounce simple words like "mom" and "dad" no matter how hard he tried.

This feeling of "I know it, but I can't say it" was truly awful.

In this sad sense of frustration, he slowly grew to the age of four.

Speaking of which, Su Xiubin, or perhaps we should still call him Yin Xian. Yin Xian found the Korean age calculation method quite baffling. Because he was born around the Chinese traditional festival of Spring Festival, he was inexplicably four years old now. But he swore he had only had two birthdays. When his mother and sister brought a birthday cake with a "4" on it for his second birthday, his face showed a mix of laughter and tears, a deep sorrow: at 33 years old, he was still struggling with the question of whether he was two or four years old.

Although the influx of a large amount of memory to some extent inhibited Yin Xian's ability to learn language, as a Chinese student who had excelled in English in a test-oriented education system without ever interacting with foreigners, learning Korean, a language that was heavily derived from Chinese and claimed to be the most scientific in the world, was not particularly difficult for him. When he showed an interest in learning language through his cute behavior, his mother, who had already successfully raised a daughter through the rebellious phase, smoothly began his early education.

This experience of learning to speak is something that everyone only goes through once. And this experience is often not stored in one's own memory, only vaguely seen in the behavior of one's own children. But Yin Xian was both lucky and unlucky to experience it twice.

More unfortunately, the fluent intonation of the native Beijinger in his memory became a significant obstacle to his learning to speak. To overcome this habit, he practiced almost every day from the time he started learning to speak until he enrolled in elementary school.

Time quickly slipped away as he constantly battled with his memories and the rolling and flat sounds of his tongue.

Finally, this guy, who was still unsure of his situation, reached the age to start school.

At school, through learning, Yin Xian slowly understood his current situation. It seemed a bit... unreal, like science fiction. The place he had come to had the same history and culture as his past life, even the language seemed almost identical, but these details of complete similarity could not hide the significant differences in the bigger picture.

When he realized that the place he was in, or the planet, was not called Earth, his mind took a long time to process it.

Why are there such differences when everything seems so similar...

Then he remembered the string theory in the so-called cosmology that his roommate, a student of a future star in physics, had explained to him during their idle chats in the dormitory when he was a graduate student.

As a philosophy student, it was a bit of a stretch for him to understand all those equations, but this did not prevent him from grasping the theory his roommate had imparted.

In the cosmology his roommate had "popularized" or imparted, each solution to the equations corresponded to an existing universe, the so-called parallel universe theory... And the imaginary solutions might represent universes made of non-physical matter, the so-called spiritual world...

At the time, Yin Xian could only theoretically understand the possibility of their existence, and he was skeptical and critical of the imaginary solutions, leading to heated arguments between the two. But now, it seemed he had used his life to prove the correctness of this theory.

Fortunately, even if this was a parallel universe, it was still at least a material world...

Relying on the strongest attribute of a shut-in, "accepting what cannot be changed," Yin Xian only took half a year of elementary school to accept that he had come to a parallel universe and would continue to live here.

Then, he even found this setting quite cool.

If his best friend knew he had come to such a strange place, he would surely be excited and shouting... But he might never see him again, and thus could never tell him this news...

He still owes me two hundred yuan...

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