I only reached the Foundation Establishment stage at eighty years old, and then the system appeared.

A man in his thirties, in order to support his two children, traveled hundreds of kilometers to a city in search of work. The city was like a steel behemoth, its neon lights gleaming coldly in the rainy night. Yang Hongbo stood at the entrance of the job market, clutching his crumpled resume, raindrops dripping from his faded canvas bag onto the steps. Inside were two medical reports for his children; his younger daughter had recently been complaining of knee pain, and the doctor said she needed nutritional supplements.

"Hey security guard, are you still hiring cleaners?" He stopped a uniformed man who was about to lock the door, his fingernails still stained with blood from carrying bricks the day before. The man looked him up and down, his overalls covered in cement: "Come report for duty at eight tomorrow. 2,800 a month."

This number made Yang Hongbo turn over in his metal bunk bed in his rented room. In the 15-square-meter partitioned room, the creaking of the electric fan and the arguing of the couple next door intertwined. He pulled out a yellowed photograph from under his pillow. His wife, before she passed away, held his hand and said, "Hongbo, the children are counting on you." The warmth of those hands seemed to still linger on his skin, yet several years had passed.

"Dad, the kindergarten teacher said we need to pay for craft materials." Yang Hongbo was adding water to the last half bowl of rice in the rice cooker when his eldest daughter, Xiaoyu, handed him the crumpled notice. He stared at the number "30 yuan" on the notice, his Adam's apple bobbing. "I'll give it to you when I get paid tomorrow."

At four in the morning at the construction site, Yang Hongbo climbed the scaffolding, stepping over the steel bars scattered on the ground. His hard hat thudded against a beam, and he rubbed his aching back as he continued tying the steel bars. Foreman Lao Zhang, a cigarette dangling from his lips, approached: "Old Yang, I heard you used to be a college student?"

"I dropped out of school." Yang Hongbo twisted the wire to a sharp end. "My family is poor and can't afford to support me."

"Do you regret it now?" Old Zhang exhaled a smoke ring. "If only I had done it back then..."

"No regrets." Yang Hongbo interrupted him, his gaze following the lights of the tower crane in the distance. "My daughter memorized 'Quiet Night Thoughts' yesterday."

These days seemed to be stuck in a loop. Until one stormy night, Yang Hongbo was huddled in his work shed watching a secondhand television when a familiar name suddenly appeared on the screen. The woman on the interview program was wearing a well-tailored suit, and the diamonds on her earlobes trembled slightly with the rhythm of her speech.

"As a leading figure in the field of quantum computing, who would you most like to thank?" The host handed over the microphone.

The woman's previously straight back suddenly relaxed, and she took off her glasses to wipe the corners of her eyes: "My mentor. Twenty years ago, he was teaching in a rural area and used three months' salary to buy us textbooks. At that time, my father was seriously ill, and he..." She choked up as she said the name, "Yang Hongbo."

The TV screen suddenly filled with static, and laughter erupted from the workers' shed: "Old Yang, you're a celebrity now!" "That woman looks a lot like your ex-wife!" Yang Hongbo's enamel mug clattered to the ground, the scalding tea staining the cement floor with a dark mark.

The next day, he took a day off and went to the mall with the money he had saved for half a year. The sales assistant was promoting the latest learning machine: "This one can connect to open courses from top universities around the world..." Yang Hongbo touched the smooth screen and remembered the way Xiaoyu wrote on the ground with a twig.

"I want this." As he counted out the crumpled banknotes, he caught a glimpse of the reflection in the glass window—the hunched-over middle-aged man and the spirited woman on TV, as if they lived in two parallel worlds.

During the rebroadcast of the interview that evening, Yang Hongbo finally saw the woman's name tag: Lin Ziqing, CEO of Quantum Technology Group. The camera panned across the bookshelf in her office, where on the yellowed title page of a copy of "Advanced Mathematics," the bold, penmanship read: "To Ziqing—Yang Hongbo, June 15, 2003."

That day, his phone suddenly vibrated; a text message from an unknown number read: "Mr. Yang, this is Lin Ziqing. Would it be convenient for us to meet?"

The air conditioning in the coffee shop gave Yang Hongbo goosebumps. A woman in a beige suit pushed open the door and walked in. The sound of her high heels clicking on the floor reminded him of twenty years ago, of a girl with a ponytail running across the playground carrying her homework.

"Teacher Yang!" Lin Ziqing sat down opposite him, the ring on her ring finger dazzlingly bright. "I've been looking for you for seventeen years."

Yang Hongbo stared at the untouched cappuccino in front of her, the milk foam slowly collapsing into an ugly shape. "Back then..." he cleared his throat, "the day I received my transfer order, your father was already..."

"I know." Lin Ziqing suddenly reached out and covered his rough hand. "My dad said before he died that a young man used all the money he had saved for his wedding to pay for his medical expenses." She took out a yellowed medical record from her bag. "Over the years, whenever I wanted to give up, I would look at this."

Yang Hongbo felt his eyes welling up. He remembered that snowy night when he, at twenty-one or twenty-two, carried an unconscious elderly person to the clinic, the snow squeaking through his rubber boots. Later, when the Lin family pooled their money to repay him, he secretly slipped the money back into the little girl's schoolbag.

"I can't give my children anything better now..." he said, pointing to his pilling shirt.

Lin Ziqing pressed the service bell: "I heard your daughter is interested in astronomy?" She pushed the tablet over, displaying a 3D model of a star projector. "Our group has a charity project..."

Three months later, Yang Hongbo stood in the laboratory of the Quantum Technology Group. Lin Ziqing was demonstrating a quantum entanglement experiment to the children, and Xiaoyu's exclamations were as clear as silver bells. The list of donors scrolled on the large screen, and in the "Anonymous Philanthropist" column, Yang Hongbo saw his own handwriting from twenty years ago—a formula written in chalk in the corner of the blackboard, which Lin Ziqing had carefully copied with transparent tape.

"Daddy!" Xiaoyu tugged at his clothes, "Aunt Lin said she's taking us to the planetarium tonight!"

Yang Hongbo picked up his daughter and looked out at the dazzling night view through the glass wall. The city was still like a steel behemoth, but at this moment the neon lights seemed gentle in his eyes, just like that summer night twenty years ago when he held up his homemade kerosene lamp and accompanied Lin Ziqing on a country road to find a lost goat.

"Teacher Yang," Lin Ziqing's voice came from behind, "our group is developing an education poverty alleviation system..."

Yang Hongbo turned around and saw her holding a brand-new teacher's certificate. Moonlight streamed in through the French windows, gilding the certificate with a silvery edge. He suddenly recalled his wife's eyes on her deathbed, which, besides worry, clearly held a spark of expectation.

"Okay." He took the letter of appointment, his fingertips touching the gold-embossed lettering. "This time, I will stick to it to the end."

The city outside the window is still bustling, but in some corner, the laughter of two children is riding on the wings of quantum communication, flying towards the vast galaxy.

Suddenly, Yang Hongbo's consciousness sank again, and a voice echoed in his mind: "Third Incarnation Golden Body!"