Fang Wanning had a dream.
In the dream, she was the hapless foil in a period novel, while her cousin Fang Xuerou was the heavens’ favorite daughter. Reborn with a spiritual spring dimension, Fang Xuerou knew the course of history for decades to come, and the first thing she did after returning to the city was set her sights on Fang Wanning’s ancestral home. According to the script, Fang Xuerou would climb to success over Fang Wanning’s downfall, leaving her family ruined and dead.
When Fang Wanning woke, she discovered that the dream was real.
The spiritual spring bracelet on her cousin’s wrist was real. So was the greedy look in her eyes as she eyed the ancestral home, and the velvet-gloved threat of “staying for a few days to recover from an illness.”
Other heroines would already have started buying and selling goods, taking the college entrance exam, and pushing for reform. But Fang Wanning was socially anxious. Her greatest talent was watching people from a corner, and her biggest dream was to lie low and live in peace.
But even a lazy fish has its day to flip over.
She rented the ancestral home to a group of recently discharged veterans to open a repair shop. The moment she sat down at the entrance, the whole alley’s atmosphere changed. She dragged her academically obsessed father out of his piles of old books and got him into the National Academy of Sciences. The first thing he did after coming out of retirement was analyze her cousin’s “miracle medicine from the spiritual spring” and reduce it to a collection of plant-ash data. She also dug out the blueprints her betrothed had hidden at the bottom of a toolbox. The designs drawn by that seemingly unassuming factory worker had ministry experts sending telegrams through the night, demanding to hire him.
Her cousin grew more frantic with every failed move: spreading rumors, hiring a Feng Shui master, reporting imported instruments. Each time, she relied on knowledge she thought put her decades ahead, only to crash into the iron wall Fang Wanning had built with her father, her husband, and her connections.
Her cousin never understood one thing: the future you foresaw has already...
