From a county princess to a lone girl in the desert.
The imperial edict her mother bought with her life kept her from being sent to the entertainment bureau, but it could not save her three young brothers from being sold into slavery.
On the day she was exiled to the northern deserts, Ji Yunhua knelt amid the barren sands and bit her finger to write a blood oath:
“In this life, I will bring my third brother home, and I will turn this place into a world fit to live in.”
People laughed at her madness.
A disgraced minister’s daughter, with neither money nor influence, how could she ever rise again?
She brought out her first jar of sea buckthorn jam and secured the army’s first order;
she laid down her first straw checkerboard to hold back the raging sands that had swept through for a thousand years;
she raised sand rabbits to till the soil, used camel dung to fertilize fields, fired glassware to trade, and built relay stations to connect the roads...
In the barren desert, golden potatoes, snowy-white cotton, and intoxicating wine began to grow.
But when she held the secret methods for turning desert into farmland and founded the Yunhua Records trading house to do business across the north and south,
the people who had once trampled on her family could no longer sit still.
The Li clan of the northern frontier cut off her water supply, the Liu clan of Jiangnan squeezed her canal trade, and Prince Duan at court sought to seize her enterprise.
Worse still, the Di-Rong cavalry watched like predators, eager to swallow her and her land whole.
Ji Yunhua stood atop the city wall, vast stretches of new green behind her and a pack of wolves closing in before her.
She smiled faintly. “The sandstorms couldn’t bury me. What chance do you have?”
The county princess had returned, with glass for a blade and provisions for an army.
She would save not only her loved ones, but all the people of the realm.
