Chapter One: Car Accident and Rebirth

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“Here is the latest news. At approximately eleven o’clock last night, singer Xiao Siqi, signed to Huayu Entertainment, was involved in a car accident on the Jinyan Expressway while driving back to the capital. According to reports, Xiao’s wife and child were also in the vehicle at the time. Following the accident, the family of three was taken to Yanjing Renhe Hospital for emergency treatment at midnight today.

“Our reporter has learned from the hospital that Xiao Siqi is no longer in life-threatening danger, but has suffered fractures in several parts of his body and is currently receiving treatment. His wife, Chen Zilin, a model with New Century Model Agency, sustained critical injuries and died at the hospital at two o’clock this morning. Their three-and-a-half-year-old son remains unconscious after suffering a head injury and has yet to regain consciousness. According to the hospital, it is possible that the child may never wake up...”

To the public, the accident was neither particularly major nor entirely insignificant. It was significant because the couple involved were both figures in the entertainment industry—a singer and a model. The news therefore attracted widespread attention almost immediately. Yet it was not considered a major event because car accidents occurred practically every day. Although both victims belonged to the entertainment world, neither Xiao Siqi nor Chen Zilin could truly be considered a top-tier celebrity.

Xiao Siqi had debuted five years earlier as a songwriter, winning that year’s Best Newcomer Award at the Golden Melody Awards with his entirely self-written debut album. Stubbornly committed to his identity as an original musician, he had refused to let his company purchase songs for him and had released only music he had composed himself. In five years, he had produced just three albums. His second and third albums had not been as astonishing as his first, and as a result, even after five years in the industry, he had remained somewhere in the upper middle ranks of the second tier, never becoming a truly major star.

As for Xiao Siqi’s wife, Chen Zilin could perhaps be considered a first-rate model within her professional field. However, in the entertainment industry, where actors were generally more famous than singers, and singers more famous than models, her name recognition was even lower than that of her second-tier singer husband.

Regardless of whether the public’s interest in the accident was great or small, everyone who heard the news felt sympathy for the unfortunate family. Above all, people worried about the three-and-a-half-year-old boy who remained unconscious. Children could most easily touch the softest places in people’s hearts, and the child’s fate weighed heavily on many minds.

What no one knew was that the child everyone was worrying about was, in one sense, already dead—and, in another, just beginning to awaken.

Li Hao felt as though he were dreaming, but it was an extremely unpleasant dream. His head felt terribly swollen, while images kept rushing toward him, as if trying to force their way into his mind and make the already painful pressure even worse. When the pain gradually accumulated until he felt he could no longer endure it, Li Hao awoke.

Startled awake, Li Hao sat up at once. He did not open his eyes immediately, but instinctively wrapped both hands around his throbbing head. When the pressure slowly receded and sensation returned to his body, he froze.

“What the hell!”

The hands clasped around his head felt the wrong size. Li Hao forced his eyes open and held them up before his face. What he saw were a child’s small palms.

His astonished gaze moved downward, landing on the sheet covering his body. With those tiny hands, he abruptly pulled the sheet away and looked from his chest to his abdomen, then farther down to his legs. Every part clearly belonged to a child’s body.

“Have I transmigrated?”

As a seasoned reader of online novels, Li Hao’s first thought was that he had somehow returned to his childhood. But after examining his surroundings, he could clearly see that he was in a hospital room. He distinctly remembered never having been hospitalized as a child.

Confusion filled his mind.

Just as Li Hao was still at a loss, footsteps approached from a distance. The hospital-room door opened, and an elderly man in his fifties or sixties entered. The moment he saw Li Hao sitting up in bed, the old man became intensely excited. He hurried to the bedside and gathered Li Hao into his arms, saying in a trembling voice, “Bayi, you finally woke up.”

“Bayi? What kind of name is that?”

Li Hao’s first reaction was to grumble inwardly. Then he realized something was wrong.

“Wait. My name isn’t Bayi. Did I end up in someone else’s body?”

The old man seemed to sense that the child in his arms was unnaturally motionless. He released him and looked at him anxiously.

“Bayi, how do you feel? Does anything hurt? Are you uncomfortable anywhere?”

Li Hao stared at the old man in bewilderment and asked softly, “My name is Bayi? And who are you?”

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The old man’s expression changed at once. He reached out and pressed the call button on the wall above the bed, then cautiously asked, “Child, you don’t recognize me?”

Li Hao carefully studied the elderly man before him. He had a square face, deep wrinkles, and dignified features. Though anxiety showed clearly in his expression, he still possessed an air of refined elegance. Li Hao did feel that the face seemed vaguely familiar, but he truly did not know the man.

He shook his head and answered honestly, “You seem familiar somehow, but I don’t know you.”

The old man looked even more worried. He was about to speak again when another set of footsteps interrupted him. Both he and Li Hao turned toward the door.

A man dressed as a doctor entered. Seeing Li Hao sitting up in bed, he smiled.

“It’s good that he’s awake.” The doctor smiled at the old man beside the bed. “Old Master Xiao, as long as your grandson has regained consciousness, he should be out of danger.”

If the old man had heard those words earlier, he would certainly have let out a long, relieved breath. But now, he could not bring himself to relax. Shaking his head, he described Li Hao’s behavior to the doctor.

The doctor did not look nearly as troubled as the old man. He comforted him, saying, “Old Master Xiao, the child did suffer a blow to the head, so some memory loss immediately after regaining consciousness is not necessarily serious. Based on my judgment, it should only be temporary. Naturally, to be safe, we’ll continue observing him and conduct some further examinations.

“And even if we assume the worst and the memory loss proves permanent, the child is only a little over three years old. He doesn’t remember very much to begin with. Rebuilding your relationship with him should not be particularly difficult.”

The old man sighed deeply and said with a mournful voice, “It would be manageable for me and the boy’s father, but his mother is gone. A child of three may not remember much, but he would still have some impression of his own mother. If all his previous memories are truly gone, that would be terribly unfair to the child’s mother.

“We don’t know exactly what happened at the moment of the crash, but Siqi said that the two of them were in the back seat. Aside from the injury to his head, the boy suffered almost no bodily harm. It’s easy to imagine that, in the instant of the accident, Zilin must have done everything she could to protect Bayi. If Bayi no longer remembers her, it would be a terrible injustice to that poor girl.”

As the doctor and the old man spoke, Li Hao gradually began to understand. The original owner of this body was evidently the child the old man kept calling Bayi. He did not know whether that was the child’s formal name or merely a nickname.

The accident the old man had mentioned was clearly part of the images that had just rushed into Li Hao’s mind in his dream. If so, those images were fragments of the original Bayi’s memories.

Li Hao carefully searched through the child’s memories. Most were ordinary scenes from daily life. Among the few memories he possessed, only three people appeared with any frequency. The elderly man before him was one of them. From the conversation between the old man and the doctor, Li Hao understood that he was the grandfather of the child who had previously owned this body—and, from now on, his own grandfather as well.

Naturally, the young man and woman who appeared most often in the memories had to be his parents.

As a responsible doctor standing beside a patient, the physician had kept part of his attention on the child while speaking with the old man. He noticed that, as Li Hao listened to their conversation, the boy seemed to be lost in memories of his own. As those memories surfaced, the bewilderment in his eyes gradually faded, replaced by a trace of understanding and clarity.

The doctor’s heart lifted. He gestured to the old man, then smiled at Li Hao.

“Child, have you remembered something?”

Hearing this, the old man immediately looked at Li Hao with hopeful eyes.

Li Hao nodded.

He had already thought the matter through. What had happened could not be changed. From now on, he could only live in this child’s body as the child himself. Since the elderly man before him was one of the three people closest to him now, he naturally had to put him at ease as quickly as possible.

“I remember that you’re my grandfather. On my third birthday, you gave me this jade pendant.”

As he spoke, Li Hao reached beneath his hospital gown and pulled out the dark-red, round jade pendant hanging around his neck. Its design was simple and carried an unmistakably antique air.

The old man nodded repeatedly in delight and pressed him eagerly. “Yes, yes. What else do you remember? Do you remember your father and mother?”

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Li Hao searched through the images of the young couple and slowly replied, “My father can play the piano, and he sings beautifully. He often plays and sings for me. My mother has very long hair, and she’s beautiful. Her figure...”

At that point, Li Hao realized something was wrong. A child of three would not normally comment on a woman’s figure, so he hastily cut himself off and changed course.

“At night, she tells me stories to help me fall asleep.”

Although he had already heard the old man say the cruel words “the child’s mother is gone,” Li Hao still had to ask, as any ordinary child waking up would have done, “Where are my mommy and daddy?”

The old man and the doctor exchanged troubled looks. They were uncertain whether a three-year-old could understand what death meant.

At last, the doctor forced himself to speak.

“Your father was injured and is being treated in another room. Your mother... your mother has gone to a very faraway place.”

“Heaven?” Li Hao was sweating inwardly, though he still had to keep his face and voice like those of a child.

The old man and the doctor exchanged startled glances. Neither had expected that a child so young would already have discussed death with his parents.

The doctor nodded silently and said to Li Hao, “Child, don’t be too sad.”

Li Hao lowered his head, feeling a little mournful himself. From little Bayi’s memories, he knew that the woman had been kind and good, a mother and wife who loved both her child and her family deeply.

At the instant of the accident, if her first instinct had not been to protect the boy beside her by wrapping him in her own body, but instead to shield herself, she would have had a very good chance of surviving. Her husband, who had been driving in the front seat, had suffered fairly serious injuries but had survived. As someone seated in the back, she should have had an even greater chance of living.

Watching the silent child, the doctor did not know what would be appropriate to say. After all, he was not a pediatrician, and comforting children was not his strength.

He therefore turned to the old man and said, “Although the child is awake, he still needs plenty of rest. I’ll arrange for some additional examinations tomorrow to make sure there are no lingering problems. I’ll leave you for now.”

The old man nodded, apparently just as unsure what to say to the child. He looked at Li Hao and asked, “Bayi, are you hungry? Grandfather will get you something delicious. What would you like to eat?”

“Mommy says children shouldn’t be picky eaters.”

The moment he finished speaking, Li Hao broke into a cold sweat.