Siheyuan: Starting Out in the 1942 Famine

In 2025, Li Ping’an woke up to find that he had become Yi Rui-dong, a dying boy caught in the great famine of 1942 in Henan Province. Corpses littered the land, Japanese invaders ran rampant, and Beiping gasped for breath beneath their rising-sun flag. Fortunately, Yi Zhonghai, the “Celestial Worthy of the Dao,” rescued him and took him in at Courtyard No. 95, Nanluoguxiang.

He thought he had merely transmigrated into the opening of Love in the Courtyard, but then he unexpectedly bound himself to a mysterious System. It cleansed and reforged his body, gave him immense strength, and granted him a ten-cubic-meter storage space!

But staying fed was only the beginning. He soon discovered that the courtyard was hiding far more than he had imagined:

The deaf old lady, with her poor hearing and eyesight, was secretly exchanging medicine with a mysterious person late at night.

Silly Zhu, a straightforward, reckless boy, carried a deep, bitter hatred of the Japanese invaders.

Yan Bugui, a shrewd schemer, was left with nothing but helplessness when survival was at stake...

At the factory, the Japanese foremen’s rifle stocks could come crashing down at any moment. In the alleyways, the secret police’s black cells silently swallowed their victims.

Yi Rui-dong watched in silence. The memory of hunger seared his soul, while his knowledge of the future tormented his conscience. Should he rely on his foreknowledge to keep his head down and build a quiet life in the courtyard? Or use his strength and storage space to become a faint light in the darkness?

A richly drawn tale of the joys and sorrows, and the battles of human nature, among the courtyard’s residents, infused with tense espionage, counterintelligence, and crime-solving. It tells the epic story of how a man from another time navigates the cracks of history, protecting the warmth of his little courtyard while burning with passion for his country and its people.