Returning wealthy individuals develop their hometowns and become rich in the 1980s

Blue Star, China

On the highway to Tuocheng, the once clear sky suddenly became overcast, followed by a torrential downpour.

Large raindrops pounded against the Maybach's windshield. Even with the wipers on full blast, the view ahead remained blurry. Chen Dong had to slow down again, flash his hazard lights, and slowly pull over to the emergency lane on the highway.

"Daddy, when will we get there?"

From the back seat came the impatient voice of Chen Hui, the son. He was sitting in a child safety seat, his iPad playing SpongeBob SquarePants, creating an eerie contrast with the violent scene of thunder and lightning outside the car window.

"It'll be soon, Jimmy. We'll leave when the rain lets up a bit," Zhang Yi, his wife in the passenger seat, turned around and gently comforted him in fluent English, a hint of weariness in her light brown eyes.

She reached out and gently stroked the square wooden box wrapped in red cloth on the back seat; it contained the ashes of Master Chen Shengyu.

This trip is to send the elderly back to their roots.

Chen Dong glanced at his grandfather's ashes through the rearview mirror, his heart heavy. He had grown up in America and had no concept of his hometown, which was called "Lianzhai, Nanshan County". But this was both his grandfather's last wish and a responsibility that he, as a descendant, had to bear.

Having inherited billions of dollars, he could have chosen a more comfortable way, but he decided to personally drive there with his wife and children, perhaps to more truly touch the land where his grandfather once lived.

"This awful weather!"

Chen Dong cursed under his breath, his American-accented Chinese echoing in the cramped carriage. A blinding flash of lightning tore through the gray sky, followed by a thunderclap that seemed to explode right on the roof, making the windows buzz.

In an instant, Chen Dong felt a strong dizziness, and his vision turned white. Zhang Yi next to him also let out a short scream, and Chen Hui in the back seat was so frightened that he dropped his iPad and screamed and cried.

This strange feeling came quickly and went quickly.

A few seconds later, the dizziness subsided. Chen Dong shook his head, forcing himself to clear his mind and refocus his vision. Outside the car, the torrential rain stopped without warning.

It didn't gradually shrink, but stopped abruptly, as if someone had turned off the tap, and the sky even let in a little orange sunlight.

"Thank God, it's finally stopped," Zhang Yi breathed a sigh of relief.

The Maybach had stalled at some point. Chen Dong was about to restart the car, but his hand froze as soon as he put it on the start button.

wrong.

That's very wrong.

Outside the car, the straight, wide, and clearly marked highway was gone; in its place was a bumpy, muddy country road.

On both sides of the road are endless, overly green farmlands, and in the distance you can see a few low, crooked mud houses.

Chen Dong lowered the car window and looked at the scene outside in disbelief. However, the air was filled with the smell of soil and animal manure, which was completely different from the smell of rubber and gasoline on the highway earlier.

Everything was telling Chen Dong that what he was seeing was not an illusion, but reality.

"Tony, where...where are we?" Zhang Yi also noticed the anomaly, her voice trembling with disbelief. "Shouldn't we be on the highway?"

Chen Dong didn't answer. He suddenly pushed open the door of the Maybach and got out.

The mud under his feet immediately stained his expensive handmade leather shoes with a layer of mud. He looked around and saw no trace of modern highways, only endless fields, dirt roads, and the vague outlines of villages in the distance.

A chilling coldness crept up his spine, almost causing his brain to shut down.

He quickly returned to his car and grabbed the satellite phone, but it showed no signal.

He then took out his smartphone, which, too, had no signal bars.

"Impossible! There was still a 4G signal just now!" Chen Dong felt a sudden panic.

"My phone is also...without any network connection," Zhang Yi said, checking her devices, her face pale.

She seemed to realize something and hurriedly rummaged through her bag to find her spare phone, but accidentally knocked three dark blue American passports to the ground, revealing her husband Chen Dong's page.

She glanced at it out of the corner of her eye, then suddenly stopped what she was doing, and with trembling hands, turned to the page with the issuance date.

Immediately afterwards, as if burned, she threw her passport on the car seat, her voice trembling with tears, "Tony...look..."

Chen Dong picked up the passport and looked closely. The issue date printed on it was clearly 1978.

He looked at his passport in disbelief, then picked up his son Chen Hui's, and still stubbornly looked at his wife Zhang Yi's passport.

They are all the same.

Issued in 1978!

When Chen Dong flipped to the most recent entry stamp, the date displayed made him gasp: "Entered the country on April 15, 1980!"

"Oh my god!"

"1980? Daddy, when is that?" Chen Hui asked curiously, clinging to the seat. At only five years old, he didn't yet understand the terrifying meaning behind that number.

Chen Dong and Zhang Yi exchanged a glance, both seeing immense shock and bewilderment in each other's eyes. The absurdity of the distorted time and space felt like a cold hand gripping their throats.

The highway had vanished, and they found themselves in a completely unfamiliar place, with all the evidence pointing to a fact they couldn't comprehend.

They arrived at a completely different point in time.

Chen Dong took a deep breath, forcibly suppressing his inner panic. He was the pillar of this family, and he couldn't panic. He held his wife Zhang Yi's cold hand tightly and said in as calm a tone as possible, "Don't be afraid. No matter what happens, I'm here."

"Tony, what should we do?" Zhang Yi's tone was panicked, but she forced herself to remain calm so as not to frighten her son Chen Hui, who was still unaware of the situation, in the back seat.

He restarted the car, the engine's low growl sounding particularly jarring on the overly quiet country road.

"We'll keep driving forward, find people, find out exactly where we are, and then... go find our hometown, and find our relatives in the villages."

"After burying Grandpa, we'll go back to America immediately, okay?"

Zhang Yi nodded without saying anything more. Instead, she bent down and stuffed her scattered passport and some paper documents back into her handbag. She repeatedly turned her phone on and off, trying to get even a single bar of signal so she could call America's overseas embassy.

The Maybach rolled slowly along the muddy dirt road. Outside the window was a strange and primitive scene of rural China in 1980. When this steel behemoth, painted all over and with a design far ahead of its time, drove past a drab village, three men dressed in gray short-sleeved shirts suddenly jumped out of an adobe house by the roadside. Chen Dong reacted quickly and immediately stepped on the brakes, preventing the three men from being hit.