Past-Life Period

The Past-Life Period is not merely backstory in Shen Tang’s narrative. It is the painful reference point that makes the present recognizable as a second chance: ordinary comforts become astonishing, old relationships acquire the weight of guilt and redemption, and the apparent security of her new life is repeatedly tested against what happened before. The past is therefore both a lost life and an active force, returning through memories, comparisons, and revelations to reshape the choices of Shen Tang and those around her.

A Life of Scarcity and Social Exposure

The contrast between the Past-Life Period and Shen Tang’s new circumstances first appears through material experience. In the earlier life, breakfast could consist only of a sandwich or one or two steamed buns. Against that memory, Tao Sister’s home-cooked breakfast becomes almost overwhelming in its warmth, and Shen Tang even sheds tears for herself while eating. The food is not just a pleasant luxury; it embodies a kind of domestic belonging that the earlier life denied her. Her grateful thought that she might bring Tao Sister with her after the two-year marriage agreement ends shows how deeply this deprivation has shaped her sense of home and attachment.

The earlier life also placed Shen Tang within the precarious lower reaches of the entertainment industry. She was an orphanage child and a low-status actress, without the resources or connections that could protect a minor celebrity from institutional pressure. In the present, she remains a Z-list celebrity, but the comparison is deliberately double-edged: the earlier life was materially harsh, whereas the current version of her public identity has been damaged by relentless rumors and manufactured pairings with male celebrities. The Past-Life Period thus establishes the vulnerability beneath her public image, while the new life gives her an opportunity to refuse the role that had previously consumed her.

Xu Jiaojiao’s Recovered Testimony

The Past-Life Period becomes more explicit when Xu Jiaojiao tells Shen Tang that she remembers a previous life. Shen Tang accepts the possibility because she herself has crossed into a book, and she immediately recognizes that Xu Jiaojiao’s recollections might reveal what lies ahead. Xu Jiaojiao describes herself as a minor celebrity who briefly gained popularity after appearing in a drama, only to be exposed to the entertainment company’s predatory system when an investor took an interest in her. The company brought her out to drink and entertain clients; although she tried to maintain her principles, she was still subjected to unwanted touching.

That account explains why Xu Jiaojiao’s gratitude toward Shen Tang is so intense. In the earlier life, Shen Tang’s intervention prevented consequences Xu Jiaojiao could scarcely bear to imagine. What Shen Tang regarded as a small matter was, for Xu Jiaojiao, life-changing protection. Xu Jiaojiao says that the two later became best friends: she learned Shen Tang’s preferences, while Shen Tang helped clear a path for her career. Their relationship in the present therefore carries the emotional force of a friendship remembered before it has fully happened.

The testimony also exposes Xu Jiaojiao’s moral failure. In the Past-Life Period, she was blinded by her circumstances and joined Shen Tang’s enemies in plotting against her. She remembers Shen Tang gripping a wineglass and sincerely asking whether Xu Jiaojiao truly wanted her to drink it. After Xu Jiaojiao indicated that she did, Shen Tang drank the entire glass despite a tear falling from the corner of her eye. Nothing happened to Shen Tang, but Xu Jiaojiao could not forgive herself, and the friendship ended. Her embrace in the present contains both relief and remorse: she is relieved that the betrayal has not yet occurred and believes she still has the chance to begin again. The Past-Life Period consequently functions as an ethical ledger, preserving not only suffering but also responsibility.

Orphanhood, Belonging, and Fear of Inheritance

Shen Tang’s orphanhood links the Past-Life Period to her deepest uncertainty about identity. When she returns to the orphanage in the present, the children’s greeting feels like the sound of home because she had also grown up there in her previous life. The scene reverses the usual meaning of an orphanage: it is not merely the place where she was deprived of parents, but the community that supplied her earliest durable sense of belonging.

Her origins remain unclear. Dean Mum apparently recalled that Shen Tang had been found with a bag embroidered with the character associated with the Shen family, which may explain her name, but no one knows whether she was deliberately abandoned or simply lost. No one came searching for her over the years, and no missing-person notice appeared. Shen Tang claims that she is already past the age of needing parents, yet the later revelation of Shen Lan’s family tragedy makes her fear that biological parents might bring danger rather than refuge. The Past-Life Period therefore complicates the fantasy of reunion: blood ties are not automatically safer than chosen family, and the absence of parents can seem preferable to inheriting cruelty.

The Past as a Measure of the Present

Shen Tang repeatedly uses the Past-Life Period to measure how radically her current life has changed. The new marriage agreement offers five million per month, expenses charged to her husband’s card, and a two-hundred-million settlement after two years. Those terms are astonishing precisely because they stand against the earlier life’s scarcity. Likewise, the dresses bought rather than rented by Gu Huaian make her feel, for the first time, what a wealthy person’s life is like; she reflects that her previous life now resembles child’s play by comparison. These moments do not erase the past. They make its deprivation visible in sharper detail.

The comparison also alters her response to relationships. Shen Tang approaches gaming, public appearances, family dinners, and domestic care with the awareness that these ordinary activities were unavailable or unsafe before. Her reunion with an orphanage community feels like coming home, while the possibility of parents produces anxiety. Even her guilt when Gu Huaian is hospitalized with gastritis is filtered through a newly intimate life in which care is reciprocal and concrete. The Past-Life Period supplies the emotional scale by which comfort, danger, loyalty, and betrayal are recognized.

Gu Huaian’s own previous-life history gives the temporal layer a parallel dimension. His death in the earlier life is connected to the danger threatening his company in the present, and that remembered threat pushes him to leave the hospital after receiving an intravenous drip rather than remain under Shen Tang’s care. His past is therefore not passive memory either: it produces vigilance and accelerates present action. Together, the two characters’ former lives turn time into a field of unfinished causes, where survival in the present depends on recognizing patterns that once ended in catastrophe.

Narrative Function and Significance

The Past-Life Period is presented through several forms of temporal return: Shen Tang’s involuntary memories, her sensory comparisons between old poverty and present abundance, Gu Huaian’s recollection of the person responsible for his death, and Xu Jiaojiao’s direct account of a prior cycle. This mixture makes the past both intimate and investigative. A memory may explain a feeling, while another person’s testimony may reveal a future betrayal before it happens.

Its decisive narrative function is to make change measurable without making it simple. Shen Tang is not reborn into a blank future; she carries the bodily and emotional knowledge of hunger, exploitation, abandonment, and betrayal. Xu Jiaojiao carries the memory of having failed her, while Gu Huaian carries the threat of a death that may repeat. The present consequently becomes a contest between repetition and correction. The Past-Life Period preserves the wounds that threaten to recur, but it also supplies the knowledge needed to interrupt them, allowing old guilt to become responsibility and old deprivation to become a demand for chosen safety and belonging.