The first few days passed like echoes.
Ren Bai sat alone at the small kitchen table, a bowl of cereal untouched in front of him, the milk slowly warming. Morning light dripped through slanted blinds, casting striped shadows over old wallpaper. He listened—not to the world, but to the silence within it.
It wasn't the world he had left.
He was ten. Again. But his mind pulsed with thirty-five years of experience—some sharp, some dim, like photographs left in the rain. Names of algorithms. Machine learning models. Binary exploits. SQL injection. Java. Python. Rust. The echo of a better world — or perhaps, a more broken one — rang in every line of code etched into his memory.
He had always been better with machines than people.
By the end of the second week, Ren had mapped out his first target.
A forgotten domain registration company. Cheap. Barely staffed. Its backend was an open grave of vulnerabilities. Using a second-hand laptop his father had received from a coworker, Ren hand-typed the scripts — no IDEs, no automation — like threading a needle in a sandstorm. The terminal blinked back at him like a dare.
A click. A pause.
Root access.
He didn't smile. He just breathed a little deeper.
Within two months, he'd crafted ten digital identities.
Some were "white hats" offering consulting advice to clueless businesses. Others operated reselling routes through vintage computing forums. He even faked the persona of a Russian grad student pitching early data compression techniques. None of it was illegal—yet. But it danced on the edge of law like a violin string pulled tight.
He tracked every penny. Watched the markets. Read newspapers in the library like they were gospel. Predicted when Amazon stock would surge. When Apple would announce a new product. He slipped into these waves like he had never drowned in them before.
This time, he wasn't chasing survival.
He was building a future.
His family remained unaware.
His mother, Lian Bai, worked evenings at the local bakery, her hair pulled back with the same cloth band she'd worn for years. She smelled of cinnamon and flour and exhaustion. His father, Jian, ran odd jobs—carpentry, seasonal repairs, even substitute teaching when the district needed a calm voice.
They were simple people. Kind people. And Ren had never known that kind of steady warmth in his past life.
They called him their miracle child. Smart beyond his years. Polite. Strange sometimes, yes—but always quiet and thoughtful.
He watched his mother rub her wrists when she didn't think anyone was looking. Watched his father hum while reading the evening paper, even if the headlines were bleak.
This wasn't a house of wealth. But it was a home.
And Ren found himself… changing.
He began cooking small meals. Nothing fancy — just something warm for when his mother came home late. Cleaned his father's tools without being asked. Sat in silence beside them during old movies, eyes never leaving the flickering screen, even though he remembered how they ended.
He didn't know when the shift happened.
Maybe it was the time his mother kissed the top of his head, murmuring a thank you with tears in her voice.
Maybe it was the time his father clumsily hugged him for fixing the broken radiator before the first snow.
Or maybe it was the night he caught himself smiling, just watching them sleep on the couch together, heads touching.
He wrote in his journal that night:
"I don't deserve this. But I want to protect it."
He bought his first server rig under the name of a synthetic LLC routed through shell corporations. Stored it in a rented storage unit thirty minutes out of town. He used it to mine early cryptocurrencies, to track financial fluctuations, to store data scraped from neglected tech forums across the globe.
The numbers started to rise. First thousands. Then tens of thousands. Then six digits.
But he kept it secret.
The money wasn't the point. It was a shield. A sword. A future with sharp teeth to guard the quiet people he now called family.
He spent hours reading engineering manuals again. Not because he needed to—but because they brought peace. Something about the cold logic of a well-machined engine felt like prayer.
He started sketching designs for a home garage. Even drew a blueprint for a dream car he would one day build with his own hands — a Dodge Challenger, reborn through custom muscle and bleeding-edge electronics.
He began calling it "Project Tiger."
It wasn't all peace.
Sometimes he lay awake wondering: Did I take this life from someone? Is the real Ren Bai gone, erased, overwritten by me?
He tried not to let the guilt rot him. Tried to believe that the soul of this boy, wherever it went, would understand.
All he could do now was live well enough for the both of them.
It was December of 2001 when he finally told them.
He brought them to the small living room after dinner. No fireplace. Just the hum of the radiator and the clink of teacups. He opened his laptop. Slowly, methodically, he laid out what he'd done—without revealing his origin, but without lies either.
The accounts. The holdings. The projections. The new house he had arranged to purchase in their name. The car titles. The new life, built from silence.
His mother cried. His father stared in stunned silence.
And Ren waited for rejection.
But they didn't question him.
His mother just held his hand. His father said: "I don't understand how. But I see why. Thank you, son."
And for the first time in either life, Ren Bai felt the weight in his chest soften.