[Modern Fiction, Farming, Agricultural Technology, Folk Traditions]
[Self-Reliant Heroine, Guiding Hero, Equally Matched]
Shen Yi was being slowly ground down by life in the city.
She made her decision in less than half an hour: break up, quit her job, and return to her village.
She wasn’t coming back just to farm. More than anything, she wanted to bury herself in the soil and see if she could grow again.
Before returning, she feared that once she crouched down, she might never be able to stand back up. She feared the land would swallow her whole, and that she would end up following her mother’s path, never living life on her own terms.
But she didn’t know that every inch of soil she turned was answering her. By the time she had finished tilling the whole field, she had finally recognized who she was.
And every day she worked the land, someone waited at the far end of the field ridge, quietly guiding her toward the work she was meant to do and walking the road she needed to take by her side.
Two people who had returned from “somewhere else” crouched down on this land, stood back up, and crouched down again.
Until the land came alive once more, neither of them ever left.
Five-star recommendation 👍🏻👍🏻, a modern and imaginative work that breaks away from the traditional farming writing routine. The vast majority of farming novels on the market follow the paradigm of a cool novel in which the female protagonist activates the golden finger alone, upgrades and fights monsters along the way, and the male protagonist is responsible for providing resources. This book takes a different approach and constructs an extremely restrained "guiding lover" relationship: Chen Qingshan never made any decisions for Shen Yi from beginning to end. He just squatted where she was about to arrive, drew a line on the soil with his fingers, and when she arrived, he was no longer there. While she was plowing the ground, he scratched the soil with his hands in the distance. She didn't see it, but the next day the blade fell exactly on the line he drew. The crease that he saved for her until she was ready to reopen it herself. The core of a guiding lover is not "he did it for her", but "he left enough room for her so that she could do it herself." He was not helping her walk, but checking the temperature of her footing point in advance on the road she was about to pass. The most touching thing is that Shen Yi later began to forget many things, but her body still remembered those locations. When she plowed the ground, the shovel blade would land at the correct depth on its own; when she squatted on the field edge to hide her hands, her movements were synchronized with his. The guidance eventually became a memory in her body, and she didn't even know where it came from. The pace of this book is slow, but it has the patience to wait for you to hunker down. [Learned] Suitable for: Readers who like slow-burn farming, high-quality current stories, are interested in the "guiding lover" setting, and don't mind taking a long time to read a certain distance.