By the time the story begins, Lin Fan has already made peace with the fact that life is not going according to plan.
Shanghai was supposed to be the place where everything started. Instead, it became the city where almost every plan fell apart. The degree he worked for proved less useful than expected, employers found creative ways to delay salaries, investments disappeared faster than they grew, and the dream of building a successful career slowly shrank into the much less glamorous reality of running a small scallion pancake stall. It pays the bills, most days at least, but not much more than that.
Lin Fan is not a hidden genius waiting for recognition, nor is he carrying some grand ambition capable of changing the world. Most of his energy goes toward dealing with everyday problems, finding enough customers, avoiding trouble, and figuring out how to survive another month without falling deeper into debt. If somebody had told him that his future would begin with a strange magazine buried among a pile of unwanted belongings, he probably would have laughed and thrown it away.
The problem is that the magazine refuses to behave like an ordinary magazine.
What follows introduces one of the novel’s most entertaining ideas. Instead of handing Lin Fan overwhelming combat power or instant wealth, the mysterious Encyclopedia connected to the magazine offers something far more unusual, knowledge. Not the kind found in libraries or online tutorials, but knowledge capable of pushing ordinary skills into territory that starts making other people question their common sense.
That simple premise changes the direction of the story. A street vendor suddenly finds doors opening in places he never expected. Professions that seem completely unrelated become opportunities. Experts become confused. Onlookers become suspicious. Friends become convinced he is hiding something. Lin Fan himself is often just trying to keep up with whatever ridiculous situation he accidentally created this time.
What keeps the novel enjoyable is that success rarely arrives in a neat, predictable way. Many of the funniest moments happen because Lin Fan’s growing abilities create problems almost as quickly as they solve them. A skill learned for one purpose somehow causes chaos somewhere else, a casual decision attracts attention he never wanted, and a quiet day has a habit of becoming complicated before it ends.
Beneath all the comedy is the story of an ordinary guy who keeps stumbling into extraordinary opportunities. The more pages you read, the less it feels like watching someone become powerful and the more it feels like watching a legend form around a man who insists he is just trying to make a living, even when nobody believes him anymore.
