A terrible drought ruins every crop in the fields. The wilderness is littered with the dead, and refugees flee in every direction.
To save her family, Tian Fen leads her elderly and young relatives into the perilous mountains to find shelter.
By a stroke of luck, she discovers a mysterious place containing fertile farmland and grain seeds, a glimmer of hope in their desperate situation.
Though she has always lived off the mountains, she refuses to sit back and enjoy what they provide.
She leads her family in hard work, building stone houses, clearing land and storing grain, growing vegetables and raising livestock. They struggle to stockpile supplies for winter and withstand the coming snow that will seal off the mountains, overcoming the dangers there one step at a time.
The taciturn, dependable Zhao Qingya appears by chance, helping the family chop firewood and repair their home. He silently keeps watch through the snowy nights, and together he and Tian Fen see the family through every hardship.
There are no grand adventures or miraculous comebacks, only ordinary people doing their best to survive, one step at a time.
In the mountains of a chaotic age, the family pulls together to endure a bitter winter of hunger and cold, turning their precarious, hard-lived days into a warm and lively home.
