Return to 2006

Return to 2006 is an urban-life web novel by Mu Zixin, serialized on Qidian and completed on October 9, 2024, at about 2.4227 million characters and 817 chapters. Before his rebirth, the protagonist Sun Quan was a struggling web novelist who barely scraped by writing fiction; he finally produced a slightly promising work, only to have it banned for review reasons. He wakes up back in 2006 — when web literature was just taking off and industry rules were not yet strict — and everything starts over. In this life, Sun Quan does not choose to leave the field entirely but decides to write again. Drawing on his accumulated writing experience and knowledge of where the industry is heading, he reposts the work that was taken down back then and, with "unprecedented typing speed," seizes the new-book charts, repeatedly dueling with contemporary authors over rankings, monthly tickets and first-subscription figures, step by step escaping the fate of a "flop." But as the blurb says, he always feels that "writing novels is a dead end," so he reaches elsewhere too: he takes over a small shop and starts a braised chicken business, gradually expanding it into a chain brand, and ventures into variety-show planning, trying to bet on both web fiction and brick-and-mortar business at once. Beyond the career line, there is a romance with the aloof heroine Yuan Shuiqing, and daily interactions with Kuang Longfei, Tang Xin, Teacher Qin and others. The novel's core appeal is the ecology of the web-fiction world, interspersed with industry details such as publishers, chart competition and first-subscription figures after launch; the pace is slice-of-life and full of everyday atmosphere, a typical lighthearted rebirth story of "writing books until you become a winner in life."