Endless rush-hour commutes and all-night shifts: Zhang Jiu’er, a low-level employee at a foreign company in a first-tier city, has become the textbook corporate drone in everyone else’s eyes. The price of pushing herself for too long is that she collapses right at her desk, surrounded by stacks of reports.
After visits to several top-tier hospitals, the cold diagnosis of lung cancer shatters what remains of her numb, harried life. The hellish chemotherapy and radiation nearly kill her. Once she manages to survive, her doctor tells her, “You don’t have much time left. Live however you want.” The words jolt Zhang Jiu’er out of the rat race that has held her captive.
She hands in her resignation, packs all her belongings, and escapes to the old family home in the countryside, where she has not been for years. She plans to tend the tiny patch of barren land behind the house, growing vegetables and raising chickens, living self-sufficiently and quietly seeing out her remaining days. She wants to reclaim all the time she denied herself in the first half of her life.
But the day she bends down to loosen the soil and sow her seeds, a faint light suddenly rises from the earth beneath her feet.
The meager plot of land, barely more than thirty square meters, turns out to be a passage through time spanning a thousand years. One end leads to the weary, stifling modern city; the other opens onto an ancient countryside with simple customs and acres of fertile fields.
On one side are steel towers and a short life burdened by illness. On the other are fertile fields and the long, cozy rhythms of country life in ancient times.
With a spiritual field linking the past and present in her hands, Zhang Jiu’er refuses to wait for death.
Goods can pass freely between the two eras, and farming brings profits on both sides. She clears land, grows crops, and trades at the market, healing her ailing body as she builds a peaceful life of her own in both worlds.
Modern worker with terminal cancer * a field that links eras * farming across past and present * healing a life trapped in the rat race * half a mu of land in hand * plenty to eat and drink in both eras
