In 2026, 26-year-old office drone Lin Xiaohe dies suddenly after working overtime for 72 hours straight. When she wakes up, she's in a northeastern forest camp in 1974, inhabiting the body of a 17-year-old educated youth whose father died early, whose mother remarried, and who is raising her five-year-old sister alone.
Just as she's on the verge of tears at the sight of a leaky mud-brick house and half a sack of coarse grain, the [Rural Life Livestream System] binds to her.
The System connects to the interstellar age of the year 3000. Humanity there has long since abandoned agriculture. People eat nutrient paste and live in full-dive pods, while “soil” and “nature” have become words from legend. Every time she farms, cooks, hunts, or fishes, her actions are livestreamed to interstellar viewers curious about rural life.
The “energy points” viewers give her can be exchanged for anything in the System shop, from basic seeds, fertilizer, and farm tools to medicine, household appliances, and even future technology.
And so, amid the scarcity of the 1970s, Lin Xiaohe begins a country life that feels like a technological mismatch of epic proportions.
While others gnaw on cornbread, she bakes bread. While others wear rough homespun, she knits wool sweaters. While others tough it out when they get sick, she has an interstellar medical kit.
Her livestream sets the interstellar internet ablaze, as people of the future go wild tipping her for the primitive charm of “Earth's rural age.”
And what Lin Xiaohe enjoys most isn't making money or stockpiling supplies. It's finally being able to stop competing so relentlessly.
