The Interstellar Court sentences Lin Jingzhe for "the crime of civilizational regression." Her offense: insisting on putting Spring Festival couplets on mechs and improving nutritional supplements with the Essential Techniques for the Welfare of the People. On the day she is exiled to a trash planet, she awakens the power of the Minor Fullness solar term. A livestream showing wheat stalks piercing her titanium crystal prison becomes the greatest piece of performance art in the universe.
When the Federation points its planet-destroying ships at her pickle jar, the insect queen begs her for the Major Heat recipe for "boiling the sea," and the space pirate syndicate launches a Valentine's Day raid to seize her Jingzhe Kui-pattern drum, people finally realize that this exiled cook is rewriting the laws of the universe with the Twenty-Four Solar Terms.
"Antimatter fuel needs to be aged in an old-fashioned cellar." "A Dyson sphere has to bake in the sun for 180 days during Major Heat." Wielding a quantum hoe, Lin Jingzhe grows mythical crops on the interstellar tombs of Qin Shi Huang. Then the bionic prince Ying Shuhuan reveals the Hetu Luoshu markings on his chest, and she realizes with a shock that her supposed solar-term superpowers are actually god-slaying weapons sealed in the genes by an ancient civilization.
Now the Reaper fleet is crossing dimensions, while a line of seal-script warning floats to the surface of her pickled cabbage jar: [Do not awaken the Dragon Vein AI]
The whole universe laughs at her for being old-fashioned, until she shapes a Dyson sphere with her bare hands and slaps The Exploitation of the Works of Nature onto the Federation's central AI. "Five thousand years of farming genes are the cure for any high civilization that refuses to behave."
