Modern desertification-control expert Shen Zhiwei opens her eyes to find herself the daughter of a disgraced official whose family has been seized and exiled.
The western frontier is suffering a severe drought, Liangzhou has run out of food, and she must choose a man to marry from among a group of military households.
The marriage-allocation ceremony descends into chaos, but she goes after Huo Changfeng, who is preparing to leave alone. Once a celebrated name on the western frontier, he is now a down-on-his-luck company commander with a bad leg and fewer than two hundred crippled soldiers left.
The man refuses coldly. “I can’t support you.”
Shen Zhiwei stops him. “I can find water, grow crops, and calculate how much grain two hundred mouths need. Do you dare stake your life on this with me?”
Huo Changfeng looks at her for a long time. “All I have is barren land and starving soldiers.”
She nods. “That’s enough. Barren land can be farmed, and starving soldiers can be fed.”
Only after marrying him does she learn that he wasn’t lying.
A drafty earthen house, three days’ worth of food, a half-dried-up well, and an endless, barren desert beyond the city walls.
Fortunately, she has the skills to fight desertification, as well as a “Desert Oasis System.”
Finding water, digging wells, carving underground canals, building waterwheels, reclaiming fields, and constructing granaries…
When everyone says nothing can grow on this land, she coaxes the first patch of green out of the yellow sand. When the court cuts off their pay and enemy cavalry approaches, she has already turned the deserted city into a granary and raised the starving soldiers into an iron cavalry.
She makes ten thousand acres of fertile farmland bloom in the desert.
He guards the lands and people behind her.
Later, Huo Changfeng dons his armor once more, and his iron cavalry sweeps across the western frontier. Everyone says he was the one who saved Liangzhou.
Only he knows the truth: the first one Shen Zhiwei rescued from the brink of death was not the city, but him.
