Lin Yan, a modern-day overworked office drone who lived by the 996 grind, dies suddenly after staying up all night. When he opens his eyes, he has landed in the chaotic Eastern Jin dynasty, where the Five Barbarians surround the land and the Central Plains have fallen. From the start, he faces a choice between life and death: become a nobleman's male favorite and struggle to survive, or marry Su Lingyue, the “demon heiress” of Huaiyuan City, and wager his life amid the blades of a beautiful madwoman.
He chooses the latter, never imagining that this absurd marriage will drag him into the heart of a vortex of canal transport rivalries, family plots, and deadly martial-arts feuds. His father is an ambitious schemer who plays the pig to eat the tiger. The identity of his guard, Xier, is a mystery, and she has come for nothing but a jade pendant. His “mad” fiancée, Su Lingyue, is an even more ruthless mastermind, holding the whole game in her hands.
From disrupting the chaos aboard a boat on the Puji River to deadly battles between Black Wind Stronghold and the Zhang family, and then to the cutthroat struggle for profit among several great clans, Lin Yan hopes to sit back and reap the rewards, only to become a pawn in the hands of every faction. In an age when human lives are worth no more than weeds, he sheds the weakness of a modern office drone. He learns martial arts from Xier and begins to understand the schemes of the human heart, determined to go from a son-in-law at everyone else's mercy to a player who controls his own fate.
The fight for canal transport routes, the secret of the mysterious jade pendant, the interference of a third-party faction, the true feelings hidden beneath Su Lingyue's ruthlessness, and the blood feud Xier carries... Amid blades and political scheming, Lin Yan advances one careful step at a time. He must protect the Lin family and carve out a path to imperial power for himself in this chaotic age.
When modern thinking collides with the laws of a chaotic age, and a pawn awakens and seeks to control the game, what kind of upheaval will this struggle to survive, which began with an absurd marriage, bring about?
