CH 1

“Qualified soul captured. Binding system in progress!”

……

”Ding – system binding successful!”

Meng Zezhi died on the hospital bed.

He was already seventy years old when he died, but when he came back to life, he was only in his early thirties.

Only he hadn’t managed to relax yet when the sky spun around him. He heard a muffled thud as he fell to his knees. His hands firmly locked behind his back as his face was pressed to the ground, unable to move.

”Sure enough, *a dog can’t stop himself from eating shit. If I hadn’t brought my bodyguards here, he would have–” Chen Yinglong said with an insincere smile as he stood there, holding Xu Jiaqing, arrogantly looking at Meng Zezhi who was held on the ground by his bodyguards. His hair was in disarray and his whole body was covered in dirt.

(T/N: idiom: bad habits are hard to change)

Xu Jiaqing patted her heart and took two ragged breaths. Recalling the way Meng Zezhi had gone crazy when she said the word “divorce”, and how he was about to pounce on her, she still had a lingering fear.

She took a deep breath and became more and more determined as she said in a cold voice, “Will you sign this divorce agreement or not?”

His confused vision slowly became focused. Meng Zezhi’s brows knitted together as he panted heavily, struggling with the pain in his head and the rage in his heart.

Seeing that Meng Zezhi didn’t speak, as if he was venting, Xu Jiaqing became more and more excited: “Meng Zezhi, if you still have some conscience, just sign the divorce agreement…or did you think that after things have come to this point, I would still continue to act like a fool, thinking that you will one day be able to change your mind and return to your old self? And then let you beat and scold me and forgive you for what you’ve done?”

Meng Zezhi’s forehead was resting against the ground, unable to catch his breath. He had no time to pay attention to Xu Jiaqing.

”Meng Zezhi, I advise you to sign the divorce agreement immediately. Otherwise, do you really think the Xu and Chen families can’t touch you?” Chen Yinglong threatened unabashedly.

”Okay.”

Meng Zezhi’s forehead was already covered with sweat when he finally slowed down. His whole body looked like he had just been fished out of the water.

He was breathless. “I’ll sign.”

”Good.” A brilliant light suddenly erupted from Chen Yinglong’s eyes as he gave a wink to the two bodyguards.

The two bodyguards immediately let go of Meng Zezhi, followed by a pile of documents and a signature pen thrown on the ground in front of him.

”Sign it!” Chen Yinglong said as he stood arrogantly.

Meng Zezhi slapped one hand on the documents and moved his body forward with difficulty. With the other hand, he took the signature pen and grabbed the documents, going through them roughly while signing his name in the blank space of the documents in imitation of his predecessor’s handwriting.

As the last word fell, Chen Yinglong kicked Meng Zezhi away and grabbed the documents, flipping them back and forth to make sure there were no mistakes, before handing them to Xu Jiaqing as if offering it as a treasure.

Xu Jiaqing looked at the divorce agreement in Chen Yinglong’s hand, and suddenly her face was tinted with a touch of confusion.

Was she getting a divorce?

Was she divorcing her husband of over ten years?

She should’ve been happy, but why did she have an empty feeling in her heart, as if she had lost something extremely important.

Looking at Xu Jiaqing’s appearance, Chen Yinglong’s heart immediately rose with a touch of caution, lest something else would happen, he said in a deep voice: “Jiaqing, since we have the divorce papers in hand, let’s go back first. Didn’t you say that you wanted to ask a monk to oversee the child’s reincarnation? I’ve already found someone. It’s Master Hui He from the Pu Zhao Temple. He’s staying at the Xinghe Hotel. See if you want to go over there.”

As soon as she heard the word child, Xu Jiaqing subconsciously touched her stomach before her face changed.

The child she had been hoping for thirteen years was not even two months old when she was beaten to death by this beast.

Xu Jiaqing’s eyes turned red and her body shook. She didn’t look at Meng Zezhi again, grabbed Chen Yinglong’s outstretched hand and said through clenched teeth, “Let’s go-“

”Good.” Chen Yinglong’s eyes flashed with smugness as he took Xu Jiaqing out the door. The corner of his eye fell on Meng Zezhi, who was silent on the ground, sneering as he spat on the ground.

It was only when the footsteps disappeared that Meng Zezhi reluctantly stood up, slumped onto the sofa, and closed his eyes.

When he woke up again, it was already two hours later.

Having regained some energy, Meng Zezhi then began to receive the plot of this world.

The original body was also called Meng Zezhi, who came from a poor background. With the help of his family, he studied hard for 16 years and finally flew out of the mountain nest to become a phoenix.

This phoenix was not derogatory in Meng Zezhi’s eyes.

At the age of sixteen, he was admitted to Xiamen University, graduated at the age of twenty and was guaranteed a master’s degree at the Capital University, where he studied under Professor Wan Zhexian, a famous Chinese mathematician, founder of finite geometry research and member of Two Academies.

After graduating with his PhD, the predecessor was invited by Capital University to stay and teach there. He was promoted to associate professor two years later and full professor five years later. He won the Chern Prize of Mathematics at the age of thirty-two and was selected as a Changjiang Scholar a year later.

According to the predecessor’s proper life trajectory, he would have been elected a member of Two Academies at the age of forty-six and stepped on the minimum age line to win the Hua Luogeng Mathematics Prize at the age of fifty.

Twenty years later, his only daughter was awarded the Fields Medal at the age of thirty-five for her proof of Goldbach’s Conjecture – the most famous mathematics prize in the world, known as the “Nobel Prize” in mathematics – and became China’s first Fields Medal winner. In the same year, he was elected as an academician of Two Academies.

With two academicians in one family, the world was full of students. A harmonious husband and wife, and a large number of children and grandchildren, the predecessor should have had nothing to ask for, right?

But there was a change in the middle of the road.

The main character, Jiang Qiyang, was a loser in his previous life. He graduated from a third-rate university. With high standards and little ability, he was unable to find a job. So he simply patted his ass and went home to rely on his parents to eat. As a result, one night, he was struck by lightning when he was concentrating on watching a movie, and transmigrated to a new world’s high school underachiever with a so-called ‘Celebrity Raising System’.

In this world, for some reason, the laws on copyright protection have been perfected, but literature and art were extremely backward. This world has no Shakespeare, JK Rowling, Jin Yong, Gu Long, Lu Xun, Xu Zhimo …… no Titanic, Chainsaw, Avatar, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Infernal Affairs …… no City in the Sky, Lemon Tree, Hotel California, Ten Years, Actors serving in the military ……

There were just clichés and laughable things.

Jiang Qiyang was ecstatic to watch the Celebrity Raising System collect influence, copy history, copy famous books, copy movie scripts, copy The Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung ……

Crush top student class monitor, brush army’s goodwill, slap the face of the industry’s seniors, dominate Hollywood, win the Nobel Prize in literature ……

Fresh and pure school flower, beautiful teacher, hot policewoman, gentle nurse, overbearing female president, enchanting actress…… all *within the range of a bow and arrow.

(T/N: under control)

The most important thing was that you can get the most out of your life.

As for the predecessor, he was merely a cannon fodder on the way to the male protagonist Jiang Qiyang’s success.

The world has now progressed to the point where Jiang Qiyang dominates Hollywood.

Two years ago, Jiang Qiyang published “How Steel is Made” and “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame”, two books that directly squeezed a suspense novel written by Professor Yan Shijun of the Capital University from first place to third place in the bestseller list.

Perhaps out of resentment, Professor Yan Shijun publicly questioned Jiang Qiyang’s plagiarism on Weibo on the grounds that Jiang Qiyang had never been abroad but could write pure and authentic Russian and French novels. The matter caused an uproar.

Jiang Qiyang, however, used this as an opportunity to incite his fans while confronting Professor Yan Shijun on Weibo. First by mocking Professor Yan Shijun for being narrow-minded, and then by mocking Professor Yan Shijun for being jealous of those who are more talented than him because he himself is not capable. Then he published five foreign novels in one breath, covering five countries – England, America, Germany, Italy and Japan – shocking the entire Chinese literary world.

Finally, he openly challenged Professor Yan Shijun that as long as he could provide evidence that he had plagiarized these books, he would apologize and donate his entire family property to the Red Cross, otherwise, he wanted Professor Yan Shijun to worship him as his teacher.

These books were the product of another world, so how could Professor Yan Shijun possibly produce evidence?

When things came to this point, Professor Yan Shijun began to reflect on himself and wondered if he was too suspicious. He thought that he was at least a senior in the literary world, so he would give in and ask a few friends from the publishing house to help him put in a good word. Jiang Qiyang would give him face, and the matter would be over.

But Jian Qiyang was unreasonable and unforgiving. His fans went straight to the classroom, mocking Professor Yan Shijun in front of hundreds of students that he was a coward and dared not to act.

After losing his face, Professor Yan Shijun, who already had a weak heart, lost his breath and passed out on the spot.

Although Professor Yan Shijun was more than 30 years older than his predecessor, he was one of his few close friends, or what is commonly known as *”year-end friendship”.

(T/N: friends despite the difference in age)

As he watched his old friend being admitted to the intensive care unit, the predecessor was furious and wanted to teach Jiang Qiyang a lesson.

It just so happened to be that Jiang Qiyang wanted to enter the film and television industry, and the father of a doctoral student under his predecessor was the deputy director of the National Radio and Television Administration. With his help, Jiang Qiyang’s films and TV dramas would not even pass the vetting process, let alone be screened.

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Even if Jiang Qiyang had a military background, it would be useless.

However, Jiang Qiyang had the backing of the Celebrity Raising System, and the investigation went straight to his predecessor.

Knowing that the predecessor was responsible for the shenanigans, Jiang Qiyang directly took a grudge against the predecessor.

As his domestic career was over, Jiang Qiyang had the idea of going to Hollywood, as he had plenty of scripts, anyway.

But before that, he wanted to teach his predecessor a lesson.

Especially after learning that his partner Chen Yinglong had been secretly in love with his predecessor’s wife Xu Jiaqing for over 30 years and had never married. He had a plan and redeemed a bottle of psychotoxic drugs from the system, slipped it to Chen Yinglong and urged him to poison his predecessor.

In the movie and TV series of Jiang Qiyang, Chen Yinglong also invested money, and quite a lot, a whole 50 million. Now that the movie and TV series couldn’t be released, that money would naturally also go to water.

Coupled with the revenge of taking his wife in the past, Chen Yinglong harboured a grudge in his heart and took the bottle of psychotoxic drugs without hesitation.

The poisoned predecessor, on the one hand, had a marked decline in intelligence, making it difficult to produce creative scientific research. On the other hand, it was as if he had lost his emotional regulation mechanism. In just two years, he had transformed from a gentle and elegant university professor into a violent and irritable domestic violence man.

Just a month ago, the predecessor came home from work and happened to bump into Chen Yinglong comforting Xu Jiaqing in an intimate manner. In a moment of anger, he lost his temper and kicked the child in Xu Jiaqing’s stomach to death.

That was the child he had been hoping for thirteen years.

The predecessor also collapsed.

The poor relationship between husband and wife, domestic violence, miscarriage …… All of these wiped out the last trace of love Xu Jiaqing had for the predecessor.

The predecessor tried to avoid the matter with a negative attitude, but Chen Yinglong did not relent. On the one hand, he urged Xu Jiaqing to divorce, and on the other hand, when the predecessor was drunk, he had someone dressed up as a delivery man and infiltrated his home, then injected him with a tube of blood from an AIDS patient.

Less than six months after that, the predecessor was first exposed to an academic fraud scandal, and his two papers that had already been published were returned by core journals. Then the news that he was suffering from AIDS was also spread by people with interest.

Chen Yinglong took this opportunity to buy a water army on the internet to smear the predecessor’s reputation.

Domestic violence caused his wife to miscarry, academic forgery, and a chaotic private life …… It took the predecessor thirty-five years to climb to this height, but it took him less than two days to fall into the abyss.

Along with the predecessor, his teacher, Professor Wan Zhexian, also followed his reputation to rock bottom.

After that, the predecessor received the news of Chen Yinglong and Xu Jiaqing’s marriage ……

In desperation, the predecessor climbed onto the hospital rooftop, and then jumped down from there, ending his sad life.