Opening a Vegetable Market on the Road to Refuge

Zhao Guixiang dies in a hut along the famine road. When she opens her eyes, she's back on the eve of their escape.

In her last life, her three daughters-in-law drained her savings, and she starved to death in the wilderness. In this life, she only wants to survive.

The copper thimble she brought as part of her dowry suddenly grows hot. That old thing she's worn for forty years has somehow taken her into a brightly lit "ghost market." There's rice, meat, and medicine there, but she can only bring back a handful each time.

From trembling and dropping to her knees to beg for mercy, to daring to trade a strip of rag for a piece of ginger; from secretly saving her sick granddaughter to publicly tearing into the family and reclaiming control of the household, Zhao Guixiang doesn't want to be a pushover anymore.

On the road fleeing famine, some people are so hungry they resort to cannibalism, and she quietly pulls pills from her clothes. When someone sets their sights on her "connections," she turns around and sends them into a bandit camp. An old scholar calls her a "living bodhisattva." She shakes her head. "I'm not kindhearted. I've got the means to stand my ground now."

But when refugees raid the camp at night, when plague spreads, and when elderly people who can no longer walk volunteer to stay behind and die, she touches the thimble and thinks: In this life, I can't just watch people die again.

But the woman selling vegetables who helps her in that "ghost market," those colorful bags, and those words she can't understand... where do they come from?

She doesn't know. She only knows that if she can save one person, she'll save one.