After Graduation, I Picked Up a Luoyang Shovel

Li Chang'an majored in archaeology at university. He left campus with passionate hopes of building a career in cultural heritage, but repeatedly failed the civil service exams. The gulf between his ideals and reality drove him to a dusty construction site. During his most troubled and uncertain days, Wang Yuzhong, a generous and loyal construction foreman, reached out to him. The two called each other brothers, supporting one another through the hardships of life at the bottom and becoming each other's most steadfast allies.

Drawing on his expertise in identifying geological strata, recognizing the forms of ancient buildings, and tracing the origins of artifacts, Li Chang'an unexpectedly became entangled in disputes over historical sites and folk treasures. Step by step, he was drawn into a treacherous world where no one could be trusted. Along the way, he and Wang Yuzhong weathered life and death together, sharing both fortune and misfortune. Yet trials of tangled interests, opposing loyalties, love, and resentment took them from sworn brothers to wary rivals, from partners to bitter enemies. Their once-burning brotherhood faced its cruelest rupture as fate wore them down.

When the dust finally settled and old grudges and obsessions faded away, the two men, repeatedly toyed with by fate, at last rediscovered their original sincerity and ideals through perseverance and redemption. This is a long journey through life, one of fallen ideals and rebirth, brothers parting and reconciling, and the struggle for redemption. It tells of ordinary people at the bottom, swept along by the tides of their times, powerless to choose their lot yet fighting with all their might through lives of hardship and change.