Today, Past

Today, Past is a long web novel written by Landi Meichen after he left Qidian. It began serializing on the Impossible World platform on July 18, 2016, and was completed on December 17, 2020, running about 1.14 million characters across 361 chapters. The story is set in an era of world government led by the Yanhuang Nation after the Ninth World War, chiefly at Youhua Academy in Yanhuang City. The protagonist, Li Jie, is a student with good grades and a good reputation, yet he clings to an old promise because of the departure of his lover, "Yu": she need not wait until graduation—he will take first place in the graduation internship assessment to prove his feelings. To that end he must deal directly with Jiang Xinshu, a classmate equally determined to win, from a prominent family and ruthless in her methods. The two are both friends and rivals, their friendship, their families' expectations, and the weight of promises all tangled together. The novel's core concept is the "Adjudicator": people with this identity repeatedly intervene in others' lives, bringing those trapped in memories of the past back into the present. Li Jie is one such Adjudicator; he helps various targets face their own obsessions with the past, and in each intervention is forced to examine himself. Through Yanhuang City's postwar class divisions, the spread of genetic evolution technology, and the power struggles among organizations such as the Adjudicators and the Calamity Eradicators, the novel unfolds a social landscape both science-fictional and power-striving, while repeatedly asking the same question: acknowledge the causes and effects of the past, acknowledge the evil and the simple hopes you once had, acknowledge that harm sometimes comes from well-meaning motives—and then live today well and with focus. The book's tone is cool and highly reflective, its plot threaded with constant questioning of the self and the true heart. [Reference](https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E8%BF%87%E5%8E%BB%E7%9A%84%E4%BB%8A/19841282)