There's a saying in Lingnan, in the Great Jing dynasty: one liang of pepper is worth half a liang of silver.
At banquets for the powerful, it is counted out peppercorn by peppercorn. Ordinary families may go their whole lives without tasting it. This is genuine overseas black gold.
Lin Zonghuai transmigrates into the body of a farm girl saddled with debt. She plans to turn her life around with her family's traditional pepper pork tripe chicken, but after asking about prices, she falls silent. If she follows the recipe and fills the whole pot, she'll lose half her family's assets on opening day.
Just as all hope seems lost, the [Hundred-Spice Spirit Field System] drops from the sky. She is overjoyed, until she sees a single pepper seed sitting all alone in the reward slot.
Lin Zonghuai: So you're even stingier than the spice merchants?
Since raising seedlings takes a long time, she first sets up a little stall selling Cantonese congee, rice rolls, and beef offal. Her spirit-field vegetables soon fill the streets with their fragrance, and she quickly pays off her debts and saves some capital.
The wandering scholar Xie Lingzhou passes through and recognizes the rare pepper vine from the Central Plains at a glance. He had planned to stay and study it for his Illustrated Gazetteer of Fragrant Plants and Trees. The aloof, reserved scholar of herbal medicine soon volunteers to handle the soil and raise seedlings, then shows up in the kitchen every day right on time to sample her food, leaving none of his wandering-scholar airs intact.
The first harvest yields just twelve peppercorns. While everyone else treats them like treasures to hoard and pass down, Lin Zonghuai holds a "A Banquet Worth Ten Thousand Gold" tasting event, tossing them all into the soup. The gentry of the entire county are bowled over by the fragrance, and reservations are booked three months in advance.
Someone grows jealous and frames her for smuggling, so the authorities come to investigate. She leads them to her half-mu pepper garden and takes the opportunity to apply to register it as an experimental agricultural plot. With official approval for cultivating a rare plant, everything is aboveboard.
The System unlocks new levels, and galangal, cinnamon, and cloves take root one after another. Half a mu of barren hillside becomes a garden of a hundred spices. From the county to the prefecture, the fragrance of her soup is destined to travel even farther.
As Xie Lingzhou flips through his manuscript, he thinks to himself: The illustrated gazetteer will be complete, and I can keep the person who grows pepper here too. This trip to Lingnan has been a bargain.
