Chapter 1: Rebirth of 001
Lin Zhi, PhD degree, Master degree.
He had a reversed day and night routine, ate coffee as meals, and had a very poor sleep and rest schedule. He died suddenly on the night of the deadline for the first draft of his doctoral dissertation. He was 24 years old.
Lin Zhi, a 24-year-old biophysics PhD who died young, found himself reborn in 1924, into a scholarly family in Shaoxing. He was surprised and a little... overjoyed.
What’s shocking is that it turns out that consuming five cups of coffee and a pack of cigarettes a day for a month can indeed lead to sudden death.
The story of my great joy will be told slowly.
The person who was reborn was called Lin Chuwang, the third daughter and the only legitimate daughter of the famous scholar Lin Yu.
Lin Yu passed the imperial examination and became a Jinshi in the late Qing Dynasty. However, he did not work for the old empire. Instead, he went to study in Japan. After returning to China, he founded a school in Shaoxing and served as its principal.
Lin Yu's first wife had no children throughout his life, so his concubine gave birth to a pair of children, both of whom were registered under the name of his wife. Although these children were born with bad luck, they were lucky enough to be half-legitimate children and were pampered until they were five and two years old respectively. Unexpectedly, the wife suddenly became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, Lin Chuwang.
This girl should have been honored because of her mother, but unfortunately, this was an era of transition from the old to the new and the collapse of rituals and music.
Lin Chuwang's mother died in childbirth, and Lin Yu did not remarry. However, the birth of his legitimate daughter threatened the future of his concubine's twin children, so much so that for more than a decade afterwards, they seemed to be regarded as a thorn in the side of the family.
Although Lin Yu studied in Japan, he is a very traditional person at heart.
So he promised his second daughter, Lin Yunyan (a concubine), to the son of an old friend, Zheng Yimin, a talented man born into a well-off family in Shaoxing.
After arranging a marriage for his second daughter, Lin Yu promised his third daughter to Si Yansang, the legitimate son of Si Ying, who was his good friend and fellow Jinshi in the previous dynasty and is now the most trusted figure in the northern government.
If the Zheng family and the Lin family were both petty-bourgeois scholarly families, and the two families were barely even matched (and sometimes needed support from the Lin family), the Si family could now be considered one of the most prominent families in the country.
The story of my overjoyed surprise starts with Si Yansang.
Although Lin Zhisheng was a science student, and his limited knowledge of modern history was largely inherited from his teachers, even a five-year-old would probably know about a figure as famous as Si Yansang.
It is no exaggeration to say that he is the greatest talent in the Republic of China.
Lin Zhi remembered Si Yansang because before her college entrance exam, her homeroom teacher called her into the office and said with a deep sigh, "You got almost full marks in math, English, and comprehensive science, but you almost failed in Chinese. Your academic imbalance is really quite serious, Lin Zhi. If your Chinese score is still this low, I'm afraid you won't be able to pass the admission line of XX University."
Lin Zhi was also quite helpless about this. She always felt that Chinese was something natural and intuitive. She could not make the specific things in spring flowers, autumn moons, and three hundred poems emotional.
The homeroom teacher handed her a stack of Si Yansang's biographies and poetry collections and said, "Memorize all of this for the next two months. If the college entrance exam essay is about sentimentality, write about his difficult life and quote the love poems from his works. If it's about inspiration, write about his life as a teenager, wandering overseas with his father, and his ultimate success as a student. If it's about the changing times, quote his decisive role in the literary revolution of the new era..."
In short, this person has such a wealth of life experience that any of it could be used to write a long and flowing essay topic, making it a very versatile topic. So before the college entrance examination, Lin Zhi did nothing but study Si Yansang.
However, after less than two weeks of study, her family was worried about her progress in liberal arts and finally decided to let her study abroad.
So in fact, Si Yansang did not play a big role in the turning point of her life.
But regardless, to Lin Zhi, who had no literary background, Si Yansang was actually a very attractive person. Beyond his handsome appearance in the yellowed black and white photos, this charm was like the way girls in the liberal arts class relished talking about the reserved, calm, and computer-installing skills of engineering boys—it was all a fence effect.
Although she knew this, she was inevitably attracted to this epoch-making great writer Si Yansang because of the wall effect.
Since she was already here, she might as well make the best of it. She wasn't overly pessimistic, and was even very grateful for her understanding of Si Yan and Sang Sancheng, which might very well become the only golden finger for surviving in this era. So she sighed briefly about the first draft of her paper, which she hadn't submitted yet, and then lay down and slowly eavesdropped on the initial character information provided by the landing point.
A: When you are reborn, you must be bedridden.
B: The scene upon waking up is either a grand scene: such as a husband divorcing his wife, a quarrel between the wife and the concubine, or a festival; or a sad and lonely scene where no one cares about him: that is why no one would notice him even if he died and his soul was transported across worlds;
C: There will definitely be a group of gossipy maids and servants who gossip about their master, and if they are not careful, they will be heard by the person who traveled through time and space.
Under the current circumstances, the three items ABC are basically met.
So at this moment she was lying on the bed exhausted and barely breathing; outside there was a lively noise of beating drums and gongs, and in the severe winter weather, a charcoal brazier was burning in the house, and it seemed that it was probably the Spring Festival; the group of maids outside were so busy that they found some time to hide and be lazy, complaining about the pressure of work outside her room - no one noticed that the third young lady in their family had been replaced.
Maid A said, "Today is different from previous years. All the relatives who were supposed to come are here."
Maid B said, "Isn't it? Even the former Fourth Miss of the Lin family, who had cut off all contact with her parents' family since her marriage... no, now it should be called Mrs. Ge, the widow of a wealthy Hong Kong businessman, has come to join in the fun. Did you see the tense atmosphere between her, the master, and the former Miss Lin, now Mrs. Qiao, at the banquet? If it wasn't a good day, I'm afraid the two ladies would have come to blows."
Maid A said, "I heard that Mrs. Ge has become one of the most famous socialites in Hong Kong since her husband died?"
Maid C said, "Mrs. Qiao was a very famous lady in her time. They are so different, so of course they have no contact with each other since they died."
Lin Zhi found it interesting.
After a while, Maid A said, "I heard that the young master of the Si family is here to celebrate the master's birthday today."
Maid B said, "Yes, if the master hadn't promised the Third Miss to Mr. Si so early on, who knows how many wives of military officers in the government would want to marry their daughters to him. Tsk, tsk, the Third Miss is truly blessed."
Maid Bing lowered her voice and said, "In fact, the master didn't promise the third young lady to Mr. Si just because he loved her the most."
Maid A said, "Master is usually very strict with Third Miss, but he gave her the best marriage in the world, so how can he say it's not good?"
Maid Bing said, "Master Si and our master were old friends. When the new government was first established, the Si family was displaced and even worse off than ordinary families. Master then promised his four-year-old third daughter to the Si family. Just imagine the Si family's situation at the time. Who would have promised their beloved daughter to the son of a criminal?"
The maid Ding said, "I've heard about this, too. Fortunately, the Third Miss is lucky. After the establishment of the new government three years ago, the Si family has been on a meteoric rise, and now it's unattainable for our family. If it weren't for the friendship of helping someone in need, would Master Si have let his precious son marry the unknown Third Miss of the Lin family?"
Maid A sighed and said, "No wonder the master brought the eldest young master and the second young lady to meet the guests at the banquet today. The third young lady has been suffering from a cold all night, but no one has paid attention to her. Listen, how badly the third young lady is coughing? I'm afraid she might have tuberculosis. Cuiping, go and heat up the medicine for the third young lady and bring it over."
Maid B: "I'm not going. You guys go if you want to go... I don't want to get tuberculosis too."
Maid C: "Why don't we put the medicine on the windowsill and leave, so as to avoid being blamed by the master."
Lin Zhi looked at the coal briquettes burning in the small stove on the floor. If they continued to burn like this, they would probably produce carbon monoxide in the oxygen-deficient environment. She had only wanted to attract the maids' attention so they could stir the charcoal basin. But when she coughed so hard she was about to die, the maids fled as if they had seen a ghost.
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