Three hundred years ago, Zhang Xianzhong sank silver at Jiangkou. Li Dingguo made a solemn pact, ordering the Zhang, Yang, Yuan, and Li families to engage in commerce for generations, using the treasure as their foundation and sending funds every ten years to secretly carry on the cause of restoring the Ming and overthrowing the Qing.
In 1900, when the ten-year pact came due again, the head of the Yang family discovered that the Li family had secretly colluded with the Qing court and was murdered to silence him. His daughter, Yang Huaiyin, took charge of the family in its hour of crisis. She ran the money house and weathered the turmoil while investigating her father's murder, but ancestral rules kept her apart from the man she loved, Yuan Shi'an of the Yuan family. Zhang Jingxing, a young man from the Zhang family, protected her in silence. Li Yanzong, the Li family's eldest son, took an alias to suppress the others and burned their homes, driving the Yuan family into exile after they were disfigured, the Zhang family far away, and the Yang family into bankruptcy and hiding.
After eight years of preparation, Yang Huaiyin returns with Yuan Shi'an, who has changed his name, and launches a fierce campaign of revenge, using finance as her weapon to set a deadly trap. From secret struggles in the late Qing to the upheavals of the Republic of China and then the Japanese invasion, the three-hundred-year pact has long since lost its meaning. The Li family has become a band of traitors chasing profit, and the second son even colludes with the Japanese to wage financial war.
Amid the chaos, family vendettas intertwine with the nation's suffering. After three generations endure bloodshed and fire, they finally return the sunken-silver treasure and all their assets to the nation. A century of grievances at last fades away with the mist over the silver sea.
