When Li Wen's worthless body went cold in the alley, everyone thought it was over.
It should have been.
His heart stopped.
His lungs emptied.
His mind faded into black.
But his soul…
It didn't vanish.
It twisted.
It fell — into something far worse.
Time… broke.
He wasn't drifting toward heaven.
He wasn't dragged to hell.
Instead, his soul slammed into an endless, churning void — a chaotic storm of collapsing stars, shattered clocks, and spiraling fragments of forgotten days.
The River of Time.
And he was entangled in it.
Memories ripped apart.
Faces blurred.
His own past — broken, rearranged, looping like a cruel joke.
One second, he saw himself at age ten, a trembling child in his father's shadow.
The next, he was twenty-five, drunk, laughing at the world's disgust.
Then, a child again — then dying again — over and over.
Trapped.
Endless.
Meaningless.
But then… it shifted.
Time wasn't just punishing him.
It was offering something.
A crack.
A glitch.
An opportunity.
Li Wen's soul, battered and stripped of its ego, found itself dragged backward — to a time before the disgrace.
Before the rot consumed him.
Before the world gave up on him.
To the day before everything fell apart.
And with that, a horrifying realization gripped him:
The world thought he died.
But now, he could rewrite it.
Or destroy it worse than before.
His heart hadn't beaten for hours. His body should've been rotting.
But as his eyes snapped open, lying in his penthouse bed, staring at the familiar ceiling of his apartment…
Time whispered a second chance.
A second life…
But the scars of death still clung to him.
And the shadows of the future still waited.