When Ruan Qingru was four, she and her mother were hunted by enemies. With her dying breath, her mother entrusted her to a passerby, begging them to care for her daughter. Unfortunately, the passerby was a human trafficker. To keep the girl from finding her family, they renamed her Qingru, meaning “as poor as can be,” in the hope she would earn money as a pickpocket. Qin Jinsen and his sister were kidnapped while searching for their father and forced to pickpocket. The three relied on one another until they escaped. The leader of the Qing Gang, the head gang in Jiangcheng, adopted the heroine. Just after Qin Jinsen and his sister reunited with their father, enemies of the Qin family hunted them down, killing both their father and sister. The hero had to shoulder the Qin family alone. While taking his stepmother’s daughter to school, he met Ruan Qingru and adopted her. Ruan Qingru fell in love with Qin Jinsen. After he rejected her confession on her sixteenth birthday, she learned from Qin Jinsen’s lover the truth behind his father’s death, uncovering an even wider web of events. She also met Xiao Xinsi, an open-minded young man who had assumed the identity of the son of her birth mother’s close friend in Jiangcheng. In this turbulent age, she risks everything to expose the conspiracy behind the Qin family’s deaths and stop opium smuggling. While mobilizing the entire Qing Gang to help the hero crack down on the opium trade, she falls into Xiao Nan’s trap, is gravely injured, and disappears. After Ge Xing rescues her, she reunites with her birth father and crosses paths again with Qin Jinsen and Xiao Xinsi…
Ruan Qingru feels that after she turned sixteen, her life became like a tightly woven web. The farther she goes, the deeper she gets, with no way out. And because of the faith in her heart, she does not want to escape.
Qin Jinsen feels that ever since he began searching for his father, he has always known why he made each mistake. Every choice he made afterward seemed like the best one at the time. In the end, he was wrong, yet he could not see where he had gone wrong.
Ge Xing says that in this turbulent age, he and Qingru seek a path together: one that saves each other and those in need, and helps them bring out the best in one another…
