Episode Summary
In the present day, Gu Xuejiao is a frustrated employee who, after being sabotaged and fired, confronts her boss, Lin Zhihua. A sudden accident sends her back in time to her high school senior year. Given a second chance, she immediately tries to alter her family's financial future and commits to becoming a top student. Her plans are complicated when she discovers that her new tutor is the teenage version of her former boss, Lin Zhihua, who is also the school's star pupil.
Spoiler Alert
Gu Xuejiao’s life has been a series of disappointments. Dreaming of academic success, she finds herself stuck in a dead-end job. After five years of hard work, she finally has a chance to become a permanent employee in the core technology department, a position new graduates often get immediately.However, on the very day she's meant to sign the contract, her world comes crashing down.
She is informed that her program has a critical bug. Her boss, Lin Zhihua, suggests she redo it, but feeling wronged, Xuejiao impulsively quits her job.To make matters worse, her unambitious ex-boyfriend, Yi Tianyu, shows up begging for a second chance, which she flatly refuses. Her day takes a darker turn when she overhears a conversation revealing the truth: her program was intentionally sabotaged by a colleague, Zhou Shiyun, with their boss Lin Zhihua's approval, all to give Zhou Shiyun the permanent position.
Furious, Xuejiao confronts Lin Zhihua in an elevator. As she demands an explanation, the elevator malfunctions and plummets. In the ensuing chaos, Xuejiao blacks out, only to awaken in a high school classroom. She has traveled back in time to her senior year.
Seeing her ex-boyfriend, Yi Tianyu, sleeping at a nearby desk, she realizes this is her chance to undo the regrets of her past. Now eighteen again, she is determined not to make the same mistakes. Her first idea is to buy a lottery ticket, but she can't recall the winning numbers. She then remembers a more significant event from that day: her father signing a contract to continue working at a factory for Yano Phones, a decision that led to financial strain for her family. She rushes home, finds her father has just signed the papers, and secretly alters the contract late at night to save her family from future hardship.
That same night, she stops her brother, Gu Mingze, from sneaking out to an internet cafe by locking his door. The next morning, her parents, rushing to work, tell her that a tutor named Gao Rui is coming to help her brother study and that she should join them to improve her own grades. This fuels her new resolve to achieve the academic success she always dreamed of.
However, the tutor who arrives is not Gao Rui, but a teenage Lin Zhihua, her former boss and current top student at her school.He explains he is temporarily covering for Gao Rui. When Xuejiao tries to give him a hard time, he simply turns and leaves. Back at school, she is reassigned to a new class with Sun Tiantian, who becomes her new friend. Sun Tiantian reveals that Lin Zhihua is known as the "God of Studying" at their school. Later, Xuejiao finds Lin Zhihua at his part-time job in a coffee shop to apologize, but he coldly dismisses her.
The episode concludes as Zhou Shiyun, after sneaking out to an arcade, runs into Xuejiao's brother, Gu Mingze. She spitefully tells him that Xuejiao finished last on the recent monthly exam. Armed with this information, Mingze tries to blackmail his sister for snacks, only for their mother to walk in on their argument.
