The Road to Shore

Lu Zhixiao was once the model of success in everyone's eyes: in his early thirties, a core engineer at a big tech company, earning half a million a year, with a gentle and cultured wife, a house and a car in the city center. But one bull-market stock speculation let him taste the sweetness of 'money making money,' and from then on he embarked on the road of no return, taking out loans to repay loans. Credit cards, online loans, and consumer loans coiled around his carefully constructed middle-class life like venomous snakes. The moment the debt collection calls blew up his contact list, his wife, parents, colleagues, and boss all learned the truth in the same second. The house was gone, the marriage shattered, and his mother was hospitalized from rage and anxiety. He fell from an elite earning half a million a year to a state where he had to borrow even a hundred yuan from others. At his most desperate, he walked into the office of a debt restructuring agency, and the other party smiled and said, 'Pay a service fee of eighty thousand, and we'll help you settle the rest.' This is a story about greed, shame, and redemption. It tells how an ordinary person, in an era of credit expansion, was pushed along by desire and chased by debt, and ultimately relearned the weight of the words 'keeping one's feet on the ground' amid the ruins. This book is dedicated to those urbanites struggling between credit card bills and online loan text messages, those ordinary people awakened in the middle of the night by debt collectors, and every one of you who feels vaguely uneasy in the era of 'enjoy first, pay later' yet cannot stop. — Description from novelcodex.org