Once a Soldier

Once a Soldier is an urban-life web novel written by "One Man Drunk," serialized on Qidian Chinese Network. The book has 521 chapters and about 5.15 million characters, and updates were completed around December 2016. The work opens with an overseas decapitation operation: Li Bin, a sniper in a shadow unit, goes deep into a neighboring country to kill a bandit leader, is seriously wounded, and not long after returning home dies accidentally in an operation. Through the arrangement of "Big Brother Ox-Head" in the underworld, his soul is sent back to be revived in the body of a young man who has fallen into brain death. When he opens his eyes again, Li Bin finds himself a member of a family with a prominent background: he has a respectable identity, a complicated family business, and a nominal wife. The convictions of a soldier from his previous life and his old blood-soaked comrades inevitably intersect and collide with the wealthy-family relationships and real-world circumstances brought by this new identity. The novel shifts from a military special-operations opening to urban life, unfolding around workplace transformation, emotional entanglements, and sudden incidents, involving demolition, snow-disaster rescue, corporate restructuring, and other plotlines, and converging along multiple threads of international affairs, military operations, and business strategy. The protagonist always takes "once a soldier" as the foundation of his conduct, continuing a soldier's way of doing things in his new identity and life, striving to change his own fate and that of those around him on another battlefield.