Prologue: 000

  What is happiness? If heaven gives you another chance and you are still willing to live the same life and do the same thing, that's called happiness.

  Such a topic is completely incomprehensible to a four-year-old child. However, in the mind of this little boy who had just learned to walk for various reasons, he was constantly thinking about three more profound and complex questions than this one.

  Who am I?

  Where am I from?

  Where am I going?

  The little boy's name in his parents' hearts is Yoon Hyun. His father was an ordinary blue-collar worker at one of Korea's industrial groups, an automobile manufacturing company in Ulsan, and his mother was a semi-housewife who worked part-time at a flower shop near their home. Yoon Hyun was their second child. Even by Korean age reckoning, which is strange to outsiders, the parents were worried about the future personality and physical health of this four-year-old boy who had only just learned to walk and seemed neither lively nor prone to crying.

  But this little guy who was thinking about the three big questions of Socrates had another name that belonged to him. Su Xiu Bin. A slightly delicate Chinese name. A name that awakened memories with his first cry when he came out of his mother's womb, and many memories also flooded into his mind along with this name.

  Then for the next three years, he was often in a state of memory overflow, or to put it another way, a crashed state, constantly looking at that memory with nostalgia, not knowing whether it really belonged to him.

  Or maybe it's just a dream.

  In that dream, he was a Ph.D. student in philosophy from a well-known university in the capital of China, but unfortunately, in his thirty years of life, he had never left that ring-shaped city. Born and raised there, even if it weren't for the last moment's flashing electric light in his memory, it's likely he would have grown old as a homebody.

  Yes, a nerd. The loneliness brought by the single-parent family made his biggest habit to lock himself in a small room without people, quietly watching TV, reading books, or thinking about various strange questions in his mind. His only reliable father would occasionally come home and throw him just enough money to make ends meet, then hurry out the door and disappear. After junior high school, this irresponsible father never appeared again. To make a living, he could only work in a small restaurant near his home that was similar to a private house. Fortunately, the boss of the restaurant, who looked very serious, was a very kind person, not only providing food but also not exploiting him. And apart from the boss, it seemed that he didn't have any other friends.

  Such introversion and self-closure made him extremely special in school. And when he repeatedly ranked among the top scorers in various exams, this introversion became an unapproachable arrogance in others' eyes. But Su Xiu Bin in his memory had always adhered to this introversion, without explanation or disguise.

  Until he successfully passed the entrance exam of that university, which is almost every Chinese people's dream school, something born with the development of the times slowly opened a crack in his hard-as-steel heart.

  That thing is called the Internet.

  Unlike his reclusive nature in reality, he is an active sage on the internet. The unparalleled quantity brought by years of solitude, and the fluent writing style formed by being used to talking to himself, shone exceptionally brightly in that era when the internet was still in its infancy, and you wouldn't even know if there was a dog sitting in front of your computer.

  The disparity between reality and illusion is so stunning that it's utterly captivating.

  Su Xiubin naturally fell in love with this feeling. So when he was admitted to the philosophy graduate program at his alma mater, and then a Ph.D. in philosophy, it was just so that he could continue to nestle in school, oblivious to the outside world.

  Of course, this "two ears not hearing" thing outside the window is not really a matter outside the window. To know that he can be considered one of the first batch of people in China to contact the Internet, from the early days of various chat rooms, forums, and then gradually appearing portal websites, followed by the magnificent turn of search engines, and then with the arrival of Jobs, mobile internet, this person who is almost always online knows much more than others.

  The more you know, the more you'll naturally understand. Especially when memories of various "web novels" he had read as a good friend occasionally flashed before his eyes, clearly telling him that this was a mainstream way of rebirth and transmigration. But it's one thing to know about it, and another thing entirely for it to actually happen.

  Especially since this happened to a well-known university's philosophy doctoral student who had already completed his graduation thesis and could apply for graduation at any time, what was originally a memory that could be digested in a few months became not so simple. Moreover, in the memories of the few minutes before the spark flashed, he was entrusted by an old friend to test a new wearable electronic product.

  A strong sense of déjà vu from Inception and The Matrix hits him. Then he starts to constantly examine the reality of this space in his life, then begins to suspect whether he is dreaming or not, and starts to suspect whether he has been framed by friends and entered a secondary matrix... If it weren't for the limitations of his current body, he might really want to try the way of waking up from dreams in Inception.

  It wasn't until the needle pierced his skin and he felt that sharp pain that he realized this definitely wasn't a dream.

  But this did not affect his ceaseless self-examination, repeatedly asking himself those three questions.

  Of course, as a former bookworm and internet addict, he could have played the role of his newborn self well, but the discomfort brought by the memories he gained kept blocking his dream of becoming an infant.

  For example, it wasn't until the third day after he was born that he finally accepted breastfeeding... then it took another month to get him used to a bottle... then there was the crawling that just couldn't be done well... and then there were the tumbles while learning to walk...

  What's even more frightening is that he can't understand what the people around him are saying. It's just from watching various Korean variety shows in his past life, forming a similar tone to Simida, that confirms this is North Korean language. But for some reason, no matter how hard he tries, he can't seem to utter simple words like "dad" and "mom" that he had painstakingly learned.

  It's really frustrating to have this kind of "I clearly know but just can't say it" awkward feeling.

  In this sad and frustrated state of mind, he slowly lived up to his current age, 4 years old.

  Speaking of which, Soo-young Bin, or rather let's call him Yoon Hyun for now. Yoon Hyun is really speechless about Korea's age calculation method. Because he was born around the time of Chinese New Year, somehow he's already 4 years old now. But he swore that he only had two birthdays so far. When his mom and sister brought out a birthday cake with "4" written on it during his second birthday, his face showed an unspeakable sadness: he was clearly 33 years old but still struggling with whether he was 2 or 4 years old.

  Although the influx of memories suppressed Yoon Hyun's ability to learn languages to some extent, as a student from China who could learn English well in an environment without any contact with foreigners after many years of examination-oriented education, learning Korean, which is considered one of the most scientific languages in the world and is actually largely derived from Chinese, was not a very difficult task for Yoon Hyun. When he showed interest in learning languages with his cute gestures, his mother, who had successfully raised a daughter to adolescence, began to enlighten him.

  This experience of learning to speak is actually only once for everyone. And this experience often does not exist in one's own memory, but can only be vaguely seen from one's own child's body, faintly seeing the shadow of oneself back then. However, Yin Xian was indeed very lucky and unlucky to have experienced it twice.

  Unfortunately, the native Beijing accent that had been deeply ingrained in his memory since childhood became a major obstacle for him to learn to speak with a fluent Chinese tone. To overcome this habit, he practiced speaking every day from the beginning of his language learning journey until elementary school.

  Time slipped away in his relentless battle with memories in his mind and the rolling flatness of his tongue.

  Finally, this guy who couldn't figure out what his situation was all about arrived at school age.

  In school, after studying, Yin Xiancai slowly realized the situation he was in now. It seemed a bit... science fiction-like and unrealistic. This place he came to had history and culture that were exactly the same as his previous life, even the language seemed to be no different, but these similarities in details couldn't hide the vastly different overall picture.

  He knew that now he was in this place, or on this planet which was surprisingly not called Earth, his brain had been spinning for a long time.

  Obviously everyone is more or less the same, why would there be such a difference...

  Then he recalled the memories... or perhaps it could be called past life, when he was a graduate student in school, a certain academician who claimed to be the future star of physics in the dormitory gave himself a popular science lecture on string theory in cosmology during idle chat.

  He was a philosophy major and it would be a bit of a stretch for him to understand that big pile of equations, but this did not affect his understanding of the theories instilled in him by his roommate.

  In his roommate's "popularization" or indoctrination of the universe, each solution to the equation corresponds to a existing universe. That is, the theory of parallel universes... And the imaginary solutions are likely to be non-physical universes, that is, the so-called spiritual world...

  At that time, Yin Xian could only understand the possibility of its existence in general theory. Although he was skeptical and critical of the virtual number solution, the two had a big argument. However, looking back now, it seems that he has proven the correctness of this theory with his own life.

  Fortunately, this is at least a material world, even if it's a parallel universe...

  With the strongest attribute of "otaku gene" - "since you're here, make yourself at home", Yin Xian has accepted the setting that he had come to a parallel universe and would continue living here, just after half a year of his first grade in elementary school.

  Then he also felt that this setting was quite impressive.

  If that dead party friend of mine knew I'd come to such a strange place, he'd definitely be excitedly shouting... Only, I might never see him again, and it's not possible for me to tell him this news...

  He still owes me 200 yuan...