[Exile and farming + portable space + powerful minister falls hard for his wife]
After transmigrating, Gu Taozhi finds herself the illegitimate daughter of the Gu family, whose estate has been confiscated and who have been exiled. She's frail and sickly, and saddled with the reputation of being a jinx.
From the start, she's given a drafty, half-collapsed shack and a barren, saline patch of land that everyone despises. She can't even get a decent hot meal.
Luckily, she has a battered wooden chest.
To everyone else, it's junk. In her hands, though, it's a little paradise where she can farm, stockpile goods, and keep food fresh:
She irrigates the fields with spirit spring water, and vegetables grow in the wasteland;
She cooks porridge in a little pot, keeping half the exile party fed;
With one hand in the fields and the other in the kitchen, she turns the “burden of the Gu family” into the mistress of the first great manor in Huangzhou.
What she never expected was that the aloof neighbor she'd casually lent a hand to
was Xiao Yanxing, the heir of the Marquis of Zhenbei, once a powerful minister who had now been demoted and exiled.
At their first meeting, he thinks she's spoiled and a burden;
The next time, he watches her turn a ruined courtyard into a paradise and saline wasteland into fertile fields;
As they spend more time together, he discovers that this gentle, easygoing young woman
can farm, practice medicine, cook, and read people's intentions with uncanny precision.
Before he knows it, he's gone from looking after her when it's convenient to scrambling to join her venture.
She farms in Huangzhou, builds infrastructure and opens shops, takes in little beggars, and brings relief to disaster victims while standing up to the powerful.
All she wants is to keep her family fed and warm, and make their life a paradise.
But as she gradually uncovers old cases and searches for the truth,
she stumbles upon a treasure from the previous dynasty and the mystery of the missing daughter of the marquis's household.
He regains his standing as a powerful minister, and she becomes renowned at court.
The world knows the Marquis of Zhenbei for his iron-fisted methods, but no one knows that
the greatest weakness of his life is the lamplight in the stove that burns all night for him in Huangzhou.
