Back to the 1980s: I Take My First Love to Soar

In 2026, 59-year-old Tan Jiaming signs the equity transfer papers and collapses of a heart attack in a Shenzhen office building.

In his whole life, he earned everything—except the girl from 1986.

That year, when he was nineteen, in the county town of Qufu, northern Guangdong, a black bicycle, a ten-square-meter tailor shop, and 3,800 yuan in bride price—Li Qiufeng was shoved onto the rear seat of the wedding bicycle by her father. He stood in the dust at the bus station and didn't dare say a word.

When he opens his eyes again, the spring wind is once more in 1986.

This time, he goes first to snatch her away: he smashes a bowl at the dinner table, and meets her at the ferry crossing late at night. Qiufeng cuts off her braid and climbs down through the back window, saying, "This time, I'll be the one to take you away."

From setting up a street stall in Maba Market to crowding onto green trains south to Guangzhou to source goods; from a small workshop in Dongguan's three-in-one and complementary processing industry to building factories in Shenzhen, the Hainan bubble, the August 10th million-person surge, WTO orders, and the financial tsunami—Tan Jiaming knows the future, yet keeps falling again and again into what cannot be controlled: misjudged stock, stolen contracts, his father's life he cannot save, and things around him that he can prevent in the market but not among the people beside him.

What carries him to the end is not foresight, but the courage to fight and to risk, and the fate that knows when to stop.

And Qiufeng, in this lifetime, does only two things: she cuts away piece by piece the bloodsucking family she was born into; then she saves one by one the people ruined by that family.

Forty years, from a northern Guangdong mountain town to the Pearl River Delta and Shenzhen, from 3,800 yuan bride price to a whole family line.

At the end of his father's handwritten copy of the Zhouyi, four characters are written: a soaring dragon has regret.