Rebirth: At the Crest of the Tide

Rebirth: At the Crest of the Tide is a long urban rebirth novel by the author Fo Ji Xin Xi, serialized on Qidian Chinese Network starting December 2018. It belongs to the urban life genre and runs to roughly five million characters. The story opens with the protagonist Fang Chen waking up to find himself back in 1990—still a high school freshman, his family's savings drained by medical bills after he broke his arm, his father a rather unreliable "literary type," his mother hot-tempered, and his only security the New Year money his grandfather gave him. Armed with memories of how the era will unfold, Fang Chen starts with small-scale ventures like street stalls, saves up his first capital, then plunges into the 1990s wave of industrial entrepreneurship: building factories, making products, recruiting talent, and expanding his business empire, turning a small operation into a major enterprise step by step, and in the later arc pushing onto the international stage to compete with global corporate giants. The work follows a single-female-lead, career-focused path, with the romance line concentrated between the protagonist and his childhood sweetheart and few side branches; the author's greatest effort goes into meticulously recreating 1990s prices, streets, family relations, and market conditions, giving the book a strong period atmosphere. The book is large in scale with fast-moving plot, a "grassroots rise + business warfare" style power-fantasy web novel, suited to readers who enjoy era rebirth and watching a protagonist build an industrial empire.